Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

by Suki Kim

  It occurred to me then that none of my students had ever written about being raised in the mountains or chasing dragonflies. Most of them were from Pyongyang, with powerful parents. Then I realized that Sarah taught sophomores and I taught freshmen. The sophomores were the first class at PUST and had enrolled a year ago, whereas my students had arrived only three months before, in April. From the beginning, I had been puzzled over how the counterparts decided who taught which class. It seemed that more care was being taken with the new students. Those of us teaching freshmen seemed to be more qualified to teach writing than the others, and we were assigned teaching assistants. Were the freshmen from an even higher social stratum than the sophomores, and if so, why had this fledgling university run by foreigners suddenly attracted these elitest of elite students?

  Then that creeping knowledge of the whole setup came back to me. I realized that the decision to close the universities must have been made this past spring; otherwise, the sophomores would be of the same social class as the freshmen. Something had happened earlier in the year that made the regime close all the universities, and that made those who wielded power rush to pull their sons out of the schools they attended and enroll them at PUST. Something big was in the works.

  10

  I WOKE UP ONE MORNING IN MY THIRD WEEK THERE AND was no longer overwhelmed by my surroundings. I was now used to wrapping a sweatshirt around my waist to go jogging in case my shorts would be judged indecent. The Forever Tower and the white block of letters on red panels hailing Kim Jong-il as “the Sun of the 21st Century!” had become running markers for me. I ran the same path over and over, with the smoke stack always in view, and I knew the city of Pyongyang lay in that direction, even on a cloudy day. The inexplicably loud music booming from the outdoor speakers at 7 a.m. no longer bothered me, and the sight of the students marching now seemed oddly comforting. After dinner, when the students came out for gardening duty, dressed in sweats and sneakers, each one holding a bucket, it dawned on me that watching them dutifully pull up weeds, which had seemed alien just a few weeks ago, was now my evening ritual.

  I must admit that during the time I spent with my students, I was happy at moments. Our life was simple, every day the same ritual, with little time for superfluous reflection. The fact that I could never step outside the campus on my own, that I could never freely ask anyone a question, that I had no phone to call anybody, that I was not allowed even one unfiltered glimpse of the rest of the country—these things receded. With each day, I thought about the outside world less. It was not that I ceased missing it; rather, I began to accept that there was no point in thinking about it, since it was utterly inaccessible. Home lay far beyond this campus and country. Home was now an absurdly abstract thing, and that included my lover, although my longing for him did remain in some corner of my heart that still occasionally throbbed. But I learned to quiet even that, so I could be exactly what they wanted me to be: an English teacher in Pyongyang.

  For the first time in my life, thinking was dangerous to my survival.

  NOW BACK IN NEW YORK, I sometimes find myself yearning for that time when my old life was no longer relevant and I knew exactly what each day would bring. Those moments of nostalgia are fleeting, though. When I say my life in Pyongyang was simple, that was only true on the surface. By the third week, something had changed within me regarding my students. In those first few weeks, they seemed too good to be true. They were eager, polite, and hard working. “Teacher’s paradise” (as some teachers called it) was not an exaggeration. No American students were ever this obedient. As a group, they rose in unison the minute I entered the classroom, not sitting down until I told them to do so. They shouted out each answer together, hung on my every word, and demanded more homework. I almost felt like a military sergeant rather than an English teacher. I had never been revered so absolutely. Sarah even said that she wanted to stay there permanently. Another Korean-American teacher exclaimed that if it were not for the portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il in the classroom, you could almost believe that these were South Korean students, although even they were not as well behaved.

  He was deeply mistaken. I still adored them, and the sight of their faces warmed me instantly, and during the meals we shared, the conversation flew so effortlessly that we were often scolded by the Korean Chinese woman in charge of the cafeteria for being the last ones there. But I was growing increasingly disturbed by the ease with which they lied.

  Once, a student asked me whether I liked flowers. “Yes,” I answered, “but I don’t have a garden back in New York, so I usually buy flowers from shops.” The student immediately said, “Me too, until I came to PUST, I never planted flowers. I always bought them at supermarkets.” I had never seen fresh flowers at any Pyongyang stores. Another time, a student got up from the table at lunch and said, “Oh well, off to a shop. We have to get ready for a birthday party, so we need to go buy some things.” There was no shop on campus yet (PUST would open one later that semester), and Katie asked if he was allowed to go shopping outside the campus, at which point he pretended not to understand English and walked away.

  On several occasions, I had to mark a student absent from a class or a meal. Each time, the whole class told me that the missing student had a stomachache, as though no other illness existed. After I began to pre-assign the students who would eat with me at each meal, I would sometimes find one replaced by another. One time, when I inquired about the whereabouts of the missing student, his two classmates answered immediately, in unison.

  “Oh, he has a stomachache,” one said, just as the other said, “Oh, he went to get a haircut.”

  “Which is it, is he getting a haircut or is he sick?” I asked.

  “Oh, he went to get a haircut but got a stomachache,” both answered, with no hesitation.

  A few minutes later, I saw the allegedly sick student playing basketball, seemingly unaware that his classmates had covered for him so fervently. It dawned on me that it was entirely possible he had no idea. I realized that the whole group had noticed he was missing and immediately filled his place at my table and made up an excuse for his absence. There was something touching about such fraternity, but at the same time, the speed with which they lied was unnerving. It came too naturally to them—such as the moment when a student told me that he had cloned a rabbit as a fifth grader, or when another said that a scientist in his country had discovered a way to change blood type A to blood type B, or when the whole class insisted that playing basketball caused a person to grow taller. I was not sure if, having been told such lies as children, they could not differentiate between truth and lies, or whether it was a survival method they had mastered.

  One student, whose English was nearly fluent and who handed in homework with nearly perfect grammar, claimed that he had never learned a word of English until just a few months before, when he arrived at PUST. Unlike his classmates, most of whom had had at least four years of English at middle school, he had studied Chinese as a second language and had to start from scratch. This sounded remarkable. Having learned English as a second language, I knew that it was virtually impossible for a twenty-year-old to become fluent in a foreign language in just three months’ time.

  On some mornings, the entire class looked unusually tired, but when I asked them what they had done the night before, they answered, “Nothing special.” I wondered whether they had gotten in trouble during their Juche lessons. Sometimes they would announce as a group that they would not be attending the office hour that day, saying that there was a meeting.

  The textbook theme for the third week was “honesty,” so we decided to play Truth or Lie again. Among other things, we hoped it would encourage them to be more open. When we wrote a sentence on the board about a woman dating a man four years her junior, all the students immediately shouted out “Lie!” They said, “Impossible. Women don’t date men who are younger.” From this we concluded that it must be a taboo, at least among their peers. The idea of a bea
uty pageant was also completely new to them. For example, they had never heard of the Miss Korea pageant. I found this ironic, considering that until then I had seen only women employed as guides and traffic controllers, or servers at restaurants and hotels, and they were uniformly young and attractive. Also, the government itself reportedly maintained a group of beautiful young women known as gippumjo (Pleasure Brigade), whose sole responsibility was to pleasure and entertain Kim Jong-il and the party leaders. Required to be virgins, the women were said to be groomed for this role from a young age.

  On the other hand, concepts such as “protest” and “student newspaper” did not seem to surprise them. From the way they responded, you would have thought that it was perfectly ordinary for them to gather for political protests, publish student newspapers, and say anything they wanted.

  Then Katie wrote on the board “I love to visit the mountains in New York and ski.”

  “What is ski?” some of the students whispered to one another in Korean.

  When Katie asked them how many of them knew what skiing was and whether people skied in North Korea, most of them nodded. A student, whom I later learned was the class secretary, raised his hand and said that he had gone skiing, but when I asked him where, he fell silent. Once Katie explained what skiing was, however, a few students shouted, “Lie!” It was not possible for Katie to be a skier, they said, since there was no snow in New York. They knew nothing about New York’s climate, or even where New York was, but most noteworthy was the fact that they did not know about fake snow, so I doubted they knew what skiing was at all. And all of that would have been fine had they not so fervently pretended to know what they didn’t.

  But this is not to suggest that all of them lied at all times. Had they always been devious, I would have found it hard to love them. But they were not always devious, and our daily lives were almost merged together. From morning until sundown, I ate three meals with them, read their letters about their lives, watched them play Pictionary or basketball or soccer. Even though I was becoming disillusioned with their behavior, it was still very easy to love them, not only because we shared so much but also because I came from a world where we trusted more easily.

  ONE EVENING I saw Lydia, a teacher from Mississippi in her fifties, in the corridor of the dormitory taking a photo from a third-floor window. As if making an excuse for taking the photo, she told me that she had barely any photos of her time in North Korea and wanted to be able to remember it. There were so few spots we were allowed to photograph, and the campus was one of them. The view from this window wasn’t much: two main dormitory buildings adjacent to a courtyard, which was really just a patch of dry land with spotty grass. In the middle of it was a big rock, on which two students were perched doing homework. Lydia said that she often saw kids sitting on this rock studying, and that she wanted to remember this view.

  She seemed quieter than usual that evening, so I asked her how she was finding her students. She seemed at a loss for words, but after thinking for a little while, she said that these students seemed so different from the South Korean students in her ESL classes back home. She had spent fourteen years as a missionary in Japan and a year and a half in South Korea, and had even adopted a Korean daughter, so she was no stranger to this part of the world, and yet she was puzzled by our boys.

  Then she told me something that had happened the day before. She had touched the arm of a student to demonstrate the meaning of the phrase “He twisted my arm,” and he had literally flinched. This mystified her, especially since the students were so physical with one another; we often saw them walking with arms linked or around each other’s waists, or hand in hand. So she asked them why it was that they found the slightest physical affection from her so distasteful. When they would not answer, she posed it as a multiple-choice question. Was it because she was older, a woman, or a teacher? They told her it was all of the above and asked her not to do it again. I noticed that she had not offered them the option to say that it was because she was a foreigner. The students generally preferred Korean teachers. Many told me that they simply felt more comfortable with us. When I brought up that possibility, she said hesitantly, “I know … but I didn’t ask that.” She spoke with a Southern drawl that felt oddly familiar to me—more familiar even than the Korean accents of my students when they spoke English. Then she shook her head and said, “What bothers me is that … I just don’t know who they are.”

  I had begun to feel the same way. When a student from Class 1 said, openly and unashamedly, that the unfortunate thing about losing the trivia game was that they had been caught cheating and should have cheated better, I wondered if it was possible that they had never been taught that lying was a bad thing. Perhaps they felt free to continue doing it as long as they could get away with it. Was it possible that they just did not know right from wrong?

  When I thought of these things, I felt a tinge of dislike for my students, and I knew that if it kept growing, I would have no choice but to leave. This dislike was almost instinctive. In the same way that Lydia’s students flinched at her touch, I began flinching internally at those who were more deceptive than others. Park Jun-ho, for example, would tell me elaborate stories about a student’s absence, about how Jun Su-young was so sick that a car took him to a big hospital in Pyongyang, and he would shake his head and put his hand to his chest and say, “Teacher, today is just a bad day for our class. I just really hope he is okay.” I tried my best not to show my feelings at those moments. These students were so quick at reading other people’s expressions. They seemed almost trained at it. They could sense when tides turned because perhaps tides always turned, and no one spoke his mind, and so the only way to survive was to try to outdo one another at mind games.

  There were clumsy lies too. The day I assigned the outline for a composition about honesty, about a quarter of them told me they had accidentally left their homework in the dormitory. When I asked them to go get it, they paused and said nothing before admitting that they had not done the assignment. One student said he had it in his notebook, but when I asked him to show it to me, he paused and finally admitted to not having done it.

  Paranoia bred more paranoia. Without trust, relationships cannot grow, and my relationship with the students began to stagnate. Their lies kept me at a distance. I could not go further with them. On weekends I might see the whole class working the field or exercising in groups at 6 a.m., but if I asked them how their morning was, they would answer that they slept late, as late as 11 a.m., and felt very rested. Every single student said that he was anxiously awaiting the vacation so that he could see his parents and hang out with his friends. Although some of them had no idea where their friends were, they seemed to expect them to be back from whichever construction site they had been taken to.

  Of course, they had been lied to themselves, all their lives. I thought about this the evening that Rachel pulled me aside and whispered: “Have you heard of Dangun?”

  Dangun is the mythical founder of Korea, whose first kingdom is traced back to 2333 B.C. He was said to have been fathered when Hawnung, the son of the Lord of Heaven, breathed on a bear that turned into a woman. It appeared that Rachel’s students had been taught that Dangun’s remains had been excavated by Kim Il-sung in 1993, the year before his own death. (This was clearly meant to plant in people’s minds the idea that he was predestined to rule Korea, and to legitimize his son, Kim Jong-il, who would come to power in 1994.) The students talked about their desire to visit the Dangun gravesite in a suburb of Pyongyang. Rachel found the students strangely gullible, yet it was she who roamed the ditch beside the teachers’ dormitory, searching for the spot where the sacred bell from the first church of Pyongyang had “accidentally” been found on the PUST campus. We believe what we want to believe. If these sad people wanted so desperately to hold on to the myth of their Great Leader as the rightful heir to Dangun, who could blame them? The blame really lay with those who perpetuated these stories to control the masses.r />
  And so I went from love to pity to repulsion and distrust, then back to empathy and love again, and these switches of feeling were confusing. I reminded myself that I did not come from a place where mind games were a prerequisite for survival to such an extreme degree, a place where the slightest act of rebellion could have unimaginable consequences.

  Slowly, I became used to the expressions on their faces as they lied or said things they regretted, and I began to be able to tell which statements were true and which were not, which students never ever faltered, and which sometimes made slips. But there were some evenings when I did not want to play this guessing game, when my disappointment was so profound that I chose to sit with the students whose English was the poorest so that they would be less likely to lie to me.

  This feeling was akin to heartbreak, and it took me a while to make sense of it—until one evening after dinner, looking at the students dotted across the schoolyard with their buckets, on gardening duty, which seemed to happen more frequently as we neared Victory Day, July 27, it occurred to me that it was all futile, the fantasy of Korean unity, the five thousand years of Korean identity, because the unified nation was broken, irreparably, in 1945 when a group of politicians drew a random line across the map, separating families who would die without ever meeting again, with all their sorrow and anger and regret unrequited, their bodies turning to earth, becoming part of this land. On that evening, as a sun the color of mournful pomegranate fell behind the Forever Tower, behind the smoke stack, behind this city, this school, behind the children of the elite who were now my children for a brief time, these lovely, lying children, I saw very clearly that there was no redemption here.