by Suki Kim
Sometimes he would talk about the difficulties of being in New York, which I knew, or used to know, but those “difficulties” now seemed unreal. One time he wrote that he was hung over and couldn’t concentrate, and that he was going to miss his deadline. Those were the woes of the free world, the angst of an artist, and he had no idea how luxurious it sounded from where I was sitting. Another time, he sent me the draft of an article he had written, with a title and his full name, even though I had told him never to say anything that might reveal him to be a writer. But I knew there was no way for him to feel the paranoia of the world I was occupying. And so I longed to hear from him, and yet I was relieved when he did not write for a stretch of time.
Besides, writing emails was a long and laborious process. I did not know exactly how they monitored our emails, but I was worried that being online made it easier for those in charge to sift through my other emails, or even access my hard drive. So I always composed emails off-line, in a Word document, which I read over and over to detect anything that might get me in trouble. Then I would go online, copy and paste the text into an email, and press “Send,” only to find that the electricity was out. Often, this was how my weekend passed, writing and rewriting short emails, then waiting for a connection to send them. But there wasn’t much to write about anyway. Every day was more or less the mirror of the day before.
With each day, my concerns became smaller. I looked up the amount of protein in canned fish, since that was my main source of nutrition some days. The cafeteria food consisted mostly of marinated vegetables, and I hardly touched the meat, which was served very rarely. I was not much of a meat eater and was also suspicious that it might be dog meat, which had been served once during the summer. I snacked on nuts and dried fruits that I had brought with me from New York, and I bought extra eggs during my grocery outings and boiled them in my electric kettle. I had never been a health freak, but there I was acutely aware that I could not afford to get sick. Luckily, Pyongyang Shop in the diplomatic compound carried several kinds of canned sprats from Latvia, and the price dropped as the expiration dates drew near.
This semester, in addition to the stores at the diplomatic compound and Potonggang Department Store, we were allowed to shop at Tongil (Unification) Market, a block-long cement building full of tiny stalls selling vegetables, meat, fruit, clothing, household equipment, and electrical appliances. The exchange rate fluctuated from week to week (in the summer it had been 2,500 won to a dollar, but now it was 3,500 won to a dollar), as did the food prices. For example, the price of eggs, which were sold in tens, in a makeshift straw carton, kept changing, from three dollars to two dollars, then back to three. Fresh fruits were so expensive that I did not see how people there could afford them. Plastic hangers that might cost ninetynine cents for ten at a discount store in the U.S. were priced at a dollar each. An ancient-looking Chinese-made flip phone cost eighty dollars. Virtually every product that was not fresh was made in China.
At the market, the sellers were all women, dressed in turquoise uniforms. The customers wore bulky coats and looked like peasants. No one appeared to notice the presence of foreigners, since this place seemed to have become a mandatory tour stop. Once, a couple of the saleswomen asked me where I was from, and when I told them that I had grown up in the South, they said that they had assumed as much from my Seoul accent, which they found beautiful. That was the first time I realized that some ordinary North Koreans liked South Koreans, or maybe even found us glamorous. It was the same with the students. Although we weren’t allowed to speak Korean with them, some of them had heard me speak the language with the minders, and had remarked that they found my accent very attractive. This surprised me, since their government spoke of South Korea with such venom; and yet there was warmth on a personal level.
THE ONLY OTHER time we got to see the city during the week was on an outing to the Seventh Pyongyang Autumn International Trade Fair. Inside a big building called Three Revolution Exhibition, booths were set up on two levels, with an enormous poster of Kim Il-sung and red banners with quotations by Kim Jong-il. The booths had a seemingly random selection of products for sale, including laptops, sewing machines, solar panels, pantyhose, body lotion, straw containers, and vitamins. Although it was billed as an international fair to show the “flourishing trade” between the DPRK and seventeen other countries, including Italy, Germany, and Switzerland, almost all the booths I saw belonged to Chinese companies, with only a handful representing local concerns, such as Chosun Computer Center.
After a look around each booth, which took less than thirty minutes, Ruth and I got bored and walked out of the exhibition hall. We had one hour before we had to meet everyone at the bus. Our minders were still inside with the group, and they were not watching us because they knew that there was nowhere for us to go except for the blocked-off area outside, manned by guards. So we walked to an area at the side of the building where about fifty or sixty people were sitting on plastic chairs around plastic tables, and a couple of food trucks were selling lamb kabobs, naengmyun, instant ramen, and other food. We splurged and treated ourselves to a bag of Singaporean potato chips and cans of instant coffee.
“To suddenly make our own choices … I don’t know what to choose!” exclaimed Ruth, settling on lamb.
I ordered a cup of instant ramen, which turned out to be Chinese and tasted of some foreign spice. We South Koreans grow up on packaged ramen the way American children grow up eating peanut butter sandwiches, and even a child is able to tell the flavorful ones from the bad. Ours were usually spicier and heartier, but here, any ramen available out in the open was Chinese. I never came across North Korean ramen.
It was a chilly but sunny afternoon, and there were many people eating outside. About half of them looked Chinese or Korean Chinese, groups that seemed to account for the majority of foreigners in Pyongyang, but the rest were local. The only thing that distinguished the Pyongyang citizens from the Chinese were the Great Leader pins on their chests. Many of them were eating naengmyun with beer, a combination that was popular mainly during hot summers in South Korea, not in the late fall. None of them were as well kept as our students, but then no one ever looked like our students. Still, these people had ruddy cheeks and did not look as famished as most people I saw outside the bus windows or even in the market.
The more I saw North Korea, the more I realized how similar it looked to the parts of China that I had seen. On my way home from the summer semester, I had stopped in Seoul and given a North Korean cookbook to my sister’s Korean Chinese housekeeper. As she looked through the photographs of dishes, she exclaimed, “Oh, this is our food! It’s Chinese! I feel homesick just looking at these pictures.” For South Koreans, however, many of the dishes in the book were foreign. On the streets of Pyongyang, the people looked Chinese to me. They wore clothes imported from China. Women’s hair was inevitably permed and pinned with sparkling barrettes the way I had seen women style their hair in China. Kim Il-sung lay embalmed in Kumsusan Palace much the way Mao lay in the Mausoleum of Mao Zedong. The scene before me could have been a small Chinese colony.
Perhaps the similarities were not all that surprising. For more than sixty years, North Korea’s closest ally, apart from the Soviet Union, had been China. While South Koreans became consumed by American influences to the point that its youth adopted American names and mannerisms and looks, and its young women dyed their hair blond or red and turned to plastic surgery to Westernize their features, North Koreans took up the aesthetics of China. Culturally and visually, the nation seemed to have grown to resemble China. And this made me wonder: If North Koreans were to see Seoul today, would it look American to their eyes? Sixty-some years ago, the superpowers had artificially divided Korea, and this Chinese Korea was the legacy of that division.
Sitting there, I felt increasingly uncomfortable. When I visited either of the two Koreas I always imagined that I was traveling back to my roots and would discover new truths about my past. Now it
occurred to me that the past I was seeking had for many years been buried under and overtaken by American and Chinese influences. The Korea of my imagination existed only in paintings, history books, the memories of older generations, and in the remnants that I glimpsed, every now and then, like shards of glass poking out from the buried past.
“WE ARE GOING outside tomorrow!” Ryu Jung-min blurted out during lunch. It appeared that he could not control his excitement, since the students rarely volunteered information. I asked him where they were going, and he answered, “We don’t know. But we are going outside!” Another student added, “Yes, maybe for one hour, we don’t know. But it is our first time since we came to PUST.” They said that they had been told it was part of their studies, and that maybe they would be taken to a construction site in Pyongyang. Not to work, just to have a look, they insisted.
At dinner, Choi Min-jun confirmed that it was true. He had no idea where they were going either. When I said that perhaps his parents might walk by and see him while he was in Pyongyang, his eyes widened. “But Professor, our parents don’t know we go!”
At breakfast the next morning the students were dressed in their usual dark jackets and ties. They were leaving at nine o’clock, they said, yet they still did not know where they were going, or even how they would get there. On my way back to the dormitory, I saw two of the senior teachers talking quietly. They were discussing how afraid the graduate students were of being drafted to do construction work, so I asked about that day’s trip and my students’ mention of going to a construction site to watch, not work.
“What is there to watch at a construction site?” one of the teachers asked. “If you are called to those places, you do the labor, you don’t watch. In any case, the kitchen was ordered to pack two hundred lunches.”
All day long, I worried about my students. I imagined them being driven to a construction site and told to do manual labor, and I was afraid that it would become a regular occurrence. Maybe they would be required to work the field every weekend instead of playing basketball or pacing the walkway, memorizing the English vocabulary on their MP3 players. Would these days of studying English and writing letters in English soon become the stuff of fantasy?
I went for a run later than usual that day, and I was circling the campus at about five p.m. when I saw two double-decker buses coming toward the IT building. I had never seen the buses before, so perhaps the school had borrowed them. The students were back! The sense of relief I felt was enormous. Even if they had spent the day lifting heavy objects, at least they had been allowed to come back to school before sundown, with enough time to shower before dinner. I turned down the volume on my iPod and scrutinized the faces in the bus windows. From far away, it was impossible to see much, but they were still wearing their suits, which suggested that they had not been doing manual labor. What had they done for the past eight hours?
The answer, when it came, was strange. At dinner, they told me that they had gone to Pyongyang Central Zoo and Mangyongdae, the birthplace of Kim Il-sung. I looked for signs of contradiction in their faces but found none. It had been a sunny day, but their faces were not sunbaked, and they did not look nearly as exhausted as they would have if they had spent the day in a construction field. The odd thing, of course, was the fact that they had suddenly been given this trip. This was midterm time, and all other university students across the country were doing labor. But these students were taken to a zoo and the birthplace of their Eternal President. Not only that, the guide at Mangyongdae had explained things to them in English, they told me, and they understood everything since they had been there many times in the past.
I wondered if there was some reason why two hundred North Korean students who looked better than any of their peers needed to be present at Mangyongdae on this particular day. Perhaps there were important foreign visitors, and the regime, famous for positioning people in the right place at the right time, needed these students as a backdrop. The students said that people had stared at them as they were being given the guide’s explanation in English, but they did not know who these “people” were.
For the next couple of days, the students could not stop talking about the animals and about how spectacular and big the zoo was. One student told me about a dog climbing on the back of a goat and how funny that was. They seemed greatly impressed by the “animal tricks.” Another said that nearby was the Daesung Amusement Park where he had gone as a child and would certainly return someday with his children. They talked about the lions and tigers and asked if I had ever been to a zoo myself.
The last time I had been anywhere near wild animals had been on safari in South Africa. I had gone there in 2010 to cover the World Cup, when North Korea’s Chollima team had qualified for the first time in forty-four years. But I did not tell my students that, or how their team faced Portugal, the opposing team, all alone in a stadium packed with more than sixty thousand Portuguese fans and just seventy North Korean laborers shipped in from Namibia. Seeing the World Cup in person would have sounded unreal to them, and besides, they did not like the topic. North Koreans still seemed to feel great shame over their team’s loss, despite the fact that in the world’s eyes it had been an admirable effort. But for them failure of any degree was not tolerated.
Instead, I told them that I did not much care for zoos. This was true. As a little girl, when my parents took me to the Changgyeongwon Zoo in Seoul, I would look at tigers, giraffes, and penguins and think how claustrophobic they must feel, stuck in small cages and tanks all day; how humiliating it must be to be peered at, objectified.
“Why don’t you like zoos?” the students asked, wide-eyed.
“I don’t like to see things trapped.”
We had just learned the word trapped. They all nodded with apparent understanding.
“You mean, like in a prison?”
“Yes, I want things to be free. I would like to set those animals free if I could.”
As I said the words, I realized that I was becoming more passionate on this point than I should have allowed myself to be. Yet I knew that the very reason they kept talking about their day at the zoo was the same reason we teachers jumped at the chance to go to the grocery store in Pyongyang once a week, even if there was nothing we needed to buy. I could not imagine a group of American college students enjoying a zoo as much as they had.
Whenever the conversation got awkward, there was always a student who broke the ice. “You know Bae Young-taek?” Park Jun-ho asked. “Well, our bus passed right by his apartment! Young-taek was so sad. He kept staring at the window to see if anyone might be there by chance. His family had no idea we were passing it!”
Another student said that they had taken a group photo at Mangyongdae, and this photo would be given to every parent individually. Copies would first be handed to the parents of each class monitor, and those parents would in turn send the photos to each household. All this seemed so strange. There must have been a reason why this trip had suddenly been arranged, and why the evidence of it was being delivered to each student’s family.
After dinner I took the enclosed walkway back to my room. I no longer walked outside in the dark alone since there had been reports of rabid dogs on the loose, biting workers. The walkway was like an unlit tunnel, and I had to use a flashlight to find my way. I thought about emailing my lover about the dogs, since almost every other topic was taboo, but then I imagined him in Brooklyn, where the tree-lined streets had “curb your dog” signs everywhere and people hired walkers and daycare services for their dogs, and it seemed absurd. Instead, I buried myself under blankets, and for a moment, it felt as though I were inside a zoo and had become one of the animals in cages, while the wild dogs roamed freely.
17
RUTH, MEANWHILE, BEGAN INTRODUCING THE USE OF forks and knives, which she had brought with her from China. We all used spoons and chopsticks there, and no one thought twice about it. However, she explained to the students that it was time they became “inte
rnational men.” At the beginning of each meal, she would politely say to those students at her table, “Welcome to our restaurant. I’m sorry but I have to confiscate your spoons and chopsticks and give you these instead.”
Most of them had never used forks and knives, and they were at a loss as to what to do with them. There was rarely any meat to cut with a knife, and they were accustomed to using spoons to scoop up rice. Watching Ruth with the students was a bit like watching Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle from Pygmalion. Some could not stop giggling; others were confused and embarrassed. One later joked, “A meal with Professor Ruth is not a meal but a class. We must use these forks and knives while focusing on speaking and listening in English. Too many things to do at once. It makes our heads ache!”
THE TOPIC OF the current reading from the textbook was love. I had to teach a short story on love titled “Love Under the Nazis,” about impossible love during wartime. As I reviewed vocabulary such as “Nazi” and “concentration camp,” I wondered whether they had any inkling that their Great Leader was considered one of the worst dictators of the modern era, almost on par with Hitler or Stalin. In the morning, Martha handed me a sheet that read, “Love _ kind. Love _ patient …” with blanks to fill in for the verbs—a grammar exercise that had been approved by the counterparts. I glanced at it quickly.
“Isn’t this some cheesy song from the eighties?” I asked. There were moments like these when I let my guard down and forgot where I was.
“This is straight from the Bible!” Martha said, dumbfounded.
I immediately covered with “I know, but it’s also from a song!” I was lucky that she was too young to remember the eighties, because she looked at me earnestly and asked, “Which song?” I suspected the counterparts had not realized the quotes were from the Bible when they approved them; this was a risky move on the part of Martha, who had come up with the idea of doing this exercise. We all had an agenda.
