by Suki Kim
Martha then told me that she had tried to make her students write about love but it wasn’t really possible. “All my students kill off everyone in their stories. They’re obsessed with death. I don’t know if it’s their culture or if they’re just being boys.” Theirs was a culture where any place of work was referred to as juntoojang, or “battlefield.” Everywhere around the city I saw this word, even on the back door of a big restaurant, and when I asked a student about it later, he explained, “That would mean an area where the restaurant workers prepare meals.” Even the word monitor, which in South Korea was banjang, was translated there as suhdaejang, which means “platoon leader.” A classroom was not a classroom but a platoon. They marched in groups, singing songs about war. Their culture was saturated with messages about killing South Koreans and Americans and references to horrifically gruesome acts, and it seemed as though they spewed those messages back out unthinkingly, perhaps in the same way that young Americans mimic behavior they see in violent movies and video games. There was really no point in holding a discussion about different kinds of love, since they all agreed that the only real love was the love of the motherland.
“Can you love someone from an enemy country?” I asked.
“No!” they shouted out.
“Can you be friends with someone from an enemy country?”
“No!” they shouted out again.
“What about me?” I asked them later, during a meal. It was not fair to put them on the spot, but I was curious. One answered, “You are different because you are our teacher.”
THE INTRODUCTION OF forks and knives was not working out. “Some days here I feel really cranky,” said Ruth while we were in line for teachers and graduate students at the cafeteria. At breakfast, she told me, a student from Class 2 had refused to use a fork and knife. Then another refused as well. She explained to them that she was preparing them for the day when they would have to have a meal with a foreigner in a foreign place where there would be no chopsticks. But they responded that they did not care about becoming international men. It was just not important to them. They would not budge. Finally she told them, “If you don’t respect others, they won’t respect you.” Now she was afraid that her next group at lunch would also refuse.
I had just heard U.S. defense secretary Leon Panetta on CNN Asia, expressing pretty much the same sentiment about North Korea. In anticipation of the impending talks in Geneva between officials from the United States and North Korea, Panetta had given a press conference where he said that North Korea’s nuclear proliferation was “reckless and provocative,” and that its actions could “only lead to the possibility of escalation and confrontation.” In a small way, the same drama was being played out here in this corner of the Rang Rang district of Pyongyang, where the future leaders of North Korea felt bossed around by foreign teachers and refused to play along. Martha shook her head and said, “This just tells me how deep the divide is between them and us.”
The Class 3 students also refused to use forks and knives. Ruth came to my office afterward and said that she felt discouraged. The refusal was clearly made as a group, so she thought perhaps the boys had brought up the matter with the counterparts during the more recent Daily Life Unity critique.
“It’s the divide,” Martha said again.
WITH THE MIDTERMS approaching, I went in search of chocolate during one grocery outing. We were allowed to give the students such treats if there was a specific occasion for it, and if we gave the same thing to everyone. Unfortunately, there were not many options when it came to one hundred individually wrapped small pieces of chocolate, given that I could not shop around. Many products on the shelves were of dubious quality—either expired, almost expired, or from countries I had never associated with the product, like Latvian cookies. I did see Swiss chocolates, but they were preposterously expensive, and another teacher pointed out that it would be like giving fine wine to a nondrinker, since these students did not know good chocolate from bad. I had never missed Hershey’s Kisses or miniature Snickers bars as badly as I did then.
While looking for chocolate, I was reminded of my father. His family had lived in Seoul during the war, and they fled when the bombs fell, just as my mother’s family had. They weren’t lucky enough to make it onto a vehicle, according to my father, although this use of the word lucky would make my mother unusually quiet. If only they had walked instead, she probably thought, then her brother would have been spared. My father instead would become lost in memory. He often talked about a certain American soldier who gave him chocolate. “Chocolate was like gold, better than gold, diamonds. I’ll never forget what it tasted like.” He remembered the smiling soldier throwing him a tiny piece, which he caught. He was six years old. The memory was dear to him, so lucid against the vague panorama of three years of dire war. What he recalled was kindness, but I cringed at the description. I had grown up seeing too many movies with heroic Americans saving poor Asian children, and I did not like the thought of my father on the receiving end.
Yet here I was, decades later, an American buying chocolate for North Korean boys. The only suitable ones were bite-sized Malaysian milk chocolates, and they tasted like watered-down, artificially sweetened caramels—I could not finish even one. Mary said, “They’re all like that, less cocoa content, but I’m from China, we’re used to it.” The students seemed to like them, though, and this eased the tension of exam day.
Two classes, fifty students in total, took the exam together, and between first and second period, when the next set of two classes came to take it, the teachers had to make sure that the groups did not speak to one another, since cheating was not uncommon. Afterward, I asked the students how they thought they had done. Several said they found the reading comprehension section difficult but the texts fun, especially the one about blue jeans. They were referring to a short article about Levi Strauss and how he had begun producing jeans to serve miners during the Gold Rush. This was the exact reading that had worried Mary, although the exam had been approved by the counterparts.
One student said, “I had no idea that blue jeans were originally made for miners, but one thing I never could understand … why are torn jeans fashionable?” There had been no mention of torn jeans in the text, and I doubted any foreign visitor to Pyongyang would wear them. He had to have seen them somewhere, most likely on a forbidden DVD. To some degree, I had the same question he did: why do we tear perfectly good fabric to look stylish? However, analyzing trends in Western fashion would have required a lot of other information, which I was not allowed to give. So instead, I tried to explain the idea of casual dress in Western culture through the example of baseball caps, which many Americans wore but which they never did (except on Sports Day, when the teachers lent them caps). He answered, “That is different from us. We do not wear those caps because we think they are not elegant.”
GIVEN HOW FIERCELY competitive the students were, the day after an exam was a hard day for the teachers. We were bombarded with questions about the exam. If students discovered they had made mistakes, they became utterly dejected. To accommodate their incessant questions, Ruth decided to hold an extra afternoon session where she brought a projector and gave a PowerPoint presentation explaining exactly how she had graded the oral exam. After the special session, Ruth showed up in my office, outraged. She had tried hard to explain her methods, but the students got so angry about their low marks, they walked out as a group before she had even finished.
“It’s just so rude,” she said. “I can teach English all I want to them, but how is it supposed to work if they totally lack any social skills, and won’t learn any?”
She leaned back further in the chair, upset. I offered her dried apricots, which were precious to me in this land where fruit, even dried, was a novelty. She popped one in her mouth and said, looking seriously troubled, “They say that they want to learn English, but they don’t like us. Their attitude is like ‘Just give us the English we need but don’t step over
this way.’ But you can’t expect everything when you give nothing.”
That was the inherent contradiction. This was a nation backed into a corner. They did not want to open up, and yet they had no choice but to move toward engagement if they wanted to survive. They had built the entire foundation of their country on isolationism and wanting to kill Americans and South Koreans, yet they needed to learn English and feed their children with foreign money.
PANICKED ABOUT GRADES, the students came to see me in pairs, and soon my office was packed. They said they found it hard to improve their reading grades because the textbook was not only confusing but very dull. Their textbooks were outdated—PUST had such profound faith in Chinese education that they only allowed tests and textbooks that had been approved in China, and those were often old. For example, one of the readings from the textbook was a piece called “Judge by Appearance,” which described a woman trying to pay for something with a two-dollar check, and a cashier who did not bother to ask for her ID because she was dressed like a beggar but instead kicked her out. Such texts required a footnote from me. I told the students that most people no longer purchased things with a personal check but with a credit card. Back in the summer, Katie had shown them her credit card and told them that she paid for things with it, and they claimed to have understood, but then they said that she must be using her IP address.
Also, their North Korean dictionary was so unreliable that they thought the word guy meant “bastard.” One student told me that they had been very upset with an American professor who taught them over the summer and started nearly every sentence with “you guys.” Often students used words or expressions that were British or obsolete. They would say, “I was watching TV, and it was fun and I shouted hip hip hurrah!” or “Professor, it is raining like cats and dogs outside,” or they would toss out a word like portage. I had to look some of these words up in the dictionary on my Kindle, which I still used as often as possible, hoping they would ask about it. No one had said anything yet, but they looked at it with curiosity. One afternoon, two students showed up in my office with a question about the word blockbuster. Their dictionary defined it as a type of bomb. Does the phrase blockbuster movie mean a film about a bomb or just a war film? they asked. When I explained that the most common definition of the word was “a commercial success,” their faces brightened. “Like The Lion King?” Along with March of the Penguins, it was the only other American film they admitted having seen. I wanted to tell them that there were a massive number of blockbuster films, some of which I was certain that they would prefer.
Another time, a student came to me to ask about some phrases in their textbook having to do with air travel. “What is economy class?” he asked. “Do they give classes on an airplane about the economy?” I tried to explain the concept of class, which existed there as well under the unofficial caste system of songbun, though North Koreans pretended it did not. Still, the idea of paying for different levels of comfort was difficult to explain.
Once a student asked me the meaning of biological parent. My students found the idea of adoption bizarre. They did not understand why anyone would take on a child who was a stranger and claim him as theirs. When I explained that some people could not have children or felt that adoption was preferable to having a biological child since the world had so many orphans who needed parents, the student immediately responded, “How sad it is then for a baby! Just because the parent is too poor and give the baby to the orphanage, a rich American would buy the baby.” I suspected that perhaps they had been taught negative propaganda about Americans adopting babies from China.
Many students were confused by the idea of women’s studies. Some guessed that it was a major where girls were taught how to cook and put on makeup. After they learned that it had to do with women’s rights, they said that in their country such a major was not necessary. According to them, equal rights for women had been formalized in 1946, when Kim Il-sung announced that women made up “one wheel of a wagon in socialist revolution and construction.” This referred to DPRK propaganda about women as one of the driving forces of its nation building.
Another time, they told me that only women wore jewelry, and only after graduating from university. “Why only women? What about men?” I asked. “Don’t they wear wedding rings?” They said no. They seemed aghast at the idea that any decent man would be seen wearing rings.
“Do American men wear jewelry?” they asked. “Even earrings?”
“Some, I guess, mostly young men though.”
Their eyes widened. One student said, “There are some strange things about America that I would never understand, like this adoption of buying a baby and men wearing jewelry!”
Then they asked, “What about hip-hop and techno?” There was a mention of it in their conversation textbook, which was not as outdated as the others, and they could not make sense of it. I was not sure how to explain hip-hop to young men who had heard only—or at least professed to have heard only—songs about their Great Leader. I said that it was a sort of music that young people liked, but also more than that—an attitude that expressed itself in many aspects of youth culture, including fashion and language. But even I was dissatisfied with that explanation, and finally I said maybe it was the sort of thing you just had to experience. Then one of them nodded and said, “Yes, we never really understand until we see it.”
But no phrase puzzled them more than Social Security deduction. They understood the meaning of the word deduction, but the rest was a mystery. They were also confused by taxes, which I felt safer discussing now that it was related to a lesson. So I explained that Americans’ taxes are deducted from their pay and used to fund programs that benefit the disadvantaged, including those who are poor, disabled, or retired. Since their argument for the superiority of their society was that everything in North Korea was free, my explanation confused them. Yet they now trusted me enough to know that I would not lie to them. I explained that Social Security was exactly what it sounded like: guaranteeing security for members of society, and that you could almost think of it as a socialist aspect of capitalism. Everyone in the nation contributed to it, but each person’s contribution was based on his income. They nodded, but I was not sure how much they understood. And it was nearly impossible to make them understand words like passport and insurance, which also popped up in the textbook.
How was I to explain the entire world to them, this unfathomably diverse world brimming with possibilities, where Arab youths were turning their rotten regimes inside out using the power of social media, where everyone except them was connected through the Internet, where the death of Steve Jobs could move a nation as stoic as China? From there, this world seemed completely inaccessible, and yet vague hints of it were everywhere, even in the pages of this outdated English textbook once approved in China.
Then one of them said, “All this is interesting, all about being international. But some of us don’t want to be international. Like what happened with Professor Ruth.”
He was referring to the incident with Ruth and Classes 2 and 3. He said that he had asked some of his friends in Class 4, who had also refused, “Why did you make Professor Ruth nervous and upset?” But he confessed that he too found using forks and knives cumbersome. “With Korean food, it is very difficult,” he said. I asked him if being asked to try it once seemed disrespectful to his Korean identity, and he replied no. Two of my former students who now belonged to Class 2 brought it up over a meal as well, saying that they felt embarrassed at the way a few classmates had reacted. Some of them had felt offended, and some had not, and before they knew it, the matter had gotten out of control. Class 2, as a group, decided against using forks and knives, and the other classes followed. “Professor Ruth just gave up!” another one who had been offended shouted. It was one of the very rare times when I had seen individual students protest anything, and it was a relief to hear individual voices, to see them disagree with one another, as well as with an authority figure.
Still, they all had refused to use forks and knives, because they did everything as a group.
A FEW DAYS later, Ruth told me that she had not just given up. A counterpart had stopped by her office and suggested that she stop pushing her students to use forks and knives. “The thing is, I had their permission from the beginning,” Ruth insisted indignantly. “They okayed it. I had to submit the plan to them, and they approved. I never would’ve done such a thing without getting permission first. The school is lenient. It’s the students who are more conservative.” She seemed hurt, and for a while, the forks and knives incident continued to be the talk of the campus.
18
THE DÉJÀ VU OF EVERY DAY EXTENDED TO OUR RARE OUTINGS. The teachers were taken on the same organized trips in the fall as in the summer—to a mountain, a church, and a couple of major national sites. The trip I was most looking forward to was the one to Kaesung, the capital of ancient Korea. It was located only five miles from the DMZ and the JSA (Joint Security Area), which I had never seen from this side. For the teachers who served as our liaison with the counterparts, getting a trip approved was a complicated process that involved applying for travel passes for not only the visitors but also the vehicles, and it usually took several weeks. The trip had caused much contention between the minders and the missionaries. On Saturdays, the minders had Daily Life Unity critiques, and besides, the DMZ was under the control of South Korea, and not open to tours from the North Korean side. However, Sundays were also out, since the teachers had religious services. Ultimately, the trip was rescheduled for a Friday when most of us had classes to teach and could not go.
