by Suki Kim
Instead of Kaesung, we were taken on our only overnight trip, this time to the Kumgang-san (Mount Kumgang) Tourist Region, an inter-Korean project that, since 1998, had been developed and operated with South Korean money for South Korean tourists, though they had not had access to it since 2008, when a South Korean housewife was randomly shot dead by a North Korean soldier.
Due to poor road conditions, the trip took eight hours each way. Along the way, we saw a number of trucks and buses stopped at the side of the road, gray fumes rising from their engines. This sight was so frequent that I began counting the breakdowns, stopping at ten. When our bus also broke down about an hour outside Pyongyang, someone whispered that it must be the bad fuel sold there.
A replacement bus was dispatched, and after about an hour we were on our way. The view along the highway was the same as on our other trips. After five or ten minutes of driving with nothing but farmland on either side, I would see, far in the distance, a group of identical houses, a bigger building with a Great Leader portrait that looked like a school, and a tall tower with the slogan OUR GREAT LEADER KIM IL-SUNG IS ETERNALLY WITH US. This same grouping of buildings appeared over and over, as though identically copied. At one point, I saw a building with the same sign as the Kimilsungism Study Hall on campus. PUST, I realized, was just another version of these villages.
Suddenly, as we passed the city of Wonsan, the sea appeared and my heart leapt. Here it was, the Eastern Sea of Korea, looking utterly unspoiled, so different from the crowded and overdeveloped South Korean side, which was so close, only a couple of hours south of us by car. This coastline had no hotels, no condos, no beach bars, no commercial logos, nothing but itself, and we all sighed in unison. It was beautiful, yet eerie, since it seemed no one was allowed on it, either on the beach or in the water. I did not know how else to interpret the absolute emptiness.
We drove another two hours to the Mount Kumgang Tourist Region, which was like a ghost town since South Korean tourists no longer visited. There were some Chinese and Korean Chinese tourists but not many. That evening, the electricity was out everywhere, and we were told that the only place serving dinner was the restaurant next to the hotel. On each table were small plates full of tiny pink and white pieces of raw meat for barbecue. It turned out to be black pig, but it looked like something at a market that was about to be thrown out. The soup was lukewarm and smelled strongly of fish.
I was seated with President Kim’s secretary, a Korean Chinese woman from Beijing. Her family originally hailed from North Korea, and she still had relatives here. “People here used to be wealthier than us in China,” she said, remembering the seventies and eighties, when the Soviet Union still existed and the North Korean economy was much better. “When we were little, my mother would visit her parents and bring back so many things from here—clothing and appliances, anything at all. Now it’s the opposite. We find it hard to keep in touch with our relatives here because they always ask for money.” I had heard similar complaints from other Korean Chinese people with relatives in the North. All of them inevitably said the same thing: they had no choice but to give their relatives whatever they needed because they were family.
After the meal, some of the teachers grew lively and stood up to sing. First there was a rendition of “Amazing Grace.” Then a Korean-American teacher got up and said, “I don’t usually sing songs like this, but today I’ll sing Choi Jin-hui’s song. Mr. Ri, you must know this song, everyone knows Choi Jin-hui here, no?” Choi Jin-hui is a South Korean singer popular among the older generation. Mr. Ri gave no reply and walked out, which mystified most of us. Then another teacher got up and sang “Woorinun,” a folksy South Korean song. The other minder, Mr. Han, and the two North Korean drivers walked out. Then one of the older teachers explained that North Koreans could be punished for listening to South Korean songs. “Now we know what we must do if we need to get rid of them!” another teacher said.
The next morning, we all started hiking up Manmulsang Hill, but I had an attack of vertigo and turned around, and then waited for the others in the outdoor parking lot. Our two drivers waited with me, along with two other drivers whose Chinese groups had also gone hiking with guides. When I pulled out my laptop, which I carried with me everywhere, they gathered around me to look at it but quickly lost interest and sat down on the pavement, where the other drivers played poker while listening to what must have been a black-market CD of Simon & Garfunkel at top volume. It struck me as strange that they chose such iconic 1960s American music, especially since they could be punished for playing it. For a little while, as I sat on a bench with my laptop with “Bridge Over Troubled Water” blasting in the background, it seemed an autumn day like any other. But the bench, I noticed, had a sign that read “A long bench our Great Leader Kim Il-sung personally used. 1973.8.19,” so I immediately stood up and looked around for a rock to sit on. Then I noticed that all the rocks were inscribed with Great Leader quotations (there are reportedly about four thousand such inscriptions in this mountain range). Just then, we saw people descending the hill. The drivers immediately switched to North Korean music, and just as quickly the spell was broken.
On the way back, once we passed Wonsan, the landscape was again barren. Again, I saw people squatting on the highway, moving only when the bus got close. Sometimes two or three sat talking, and sometimes it was a larger group, sitting in a circle and eating. These scenes did not make sense to me as they were sitting either on the shoulder or on the road in the middle of nowhere, until it dawned on me: This was their café, their public square. The stretch of empty highway closest to where they lived was the only place where they saw evidence of the outside world. They sat on the pavement to feel connected.
THE OTHER TRIP we took was to the tombs belonging to Dangun, the mythical founder of Korea, and King Dongmyeong, the founder of Koguryo, the ancient kingdom that existed in what is now North Korea. It was a bit odd to be taken to the burial places of these ancient kings when we were ceaselessly told that the Great Leaders were their kings. Once Martha had devised a lesson using a news item about the British royal wedding. (In the DPRK, according to my students, a wedding was usually just a dinner at home with neighbors; there was no wedding dress or exchange of rings.) The students had never heard of either William or Kate, so I explained that Britain had a queen and asked which countries still had a king. They answered, “Japan!” and “Cambodia!” and “Korea!” I asked where their king was, since the Korean monarchy had ended in 1910, and they all shouted out “Kumsusan Palace!,” where Kim Il-sung lay embalmed, looking eerily alive.
But it turned out that Kumsusan Palace was not the only resting place of a king in North Korea, and now we were on our way to the other one. Once out of the city limits, we were stopped twice at checkpoints. I recognized the empty road as the same one we took to the apple farm.
“I used to live near here, and when I was fifteen I was rounded up for the construction of Kim Il-sung University,” said an old Korean man who sat next to me on the bus. Those who were originally from the North often broke into such confessions to whoever would listen. When the Korean War began, this man had been seventeen, the very age my uncle was when he disappeared. He was the only son among four children, and the family decided that he should head south first, and that they would follow soon after. So he fled alone, but before his family could join him, the border closed. In the 1980s he found a way to visit Pyongyang and was able to meet with his parents twice; each time, he was allowed to spend just one night at their home. Now everyone in his family was dead except for one brother, and their visits were restricted to a few hours at a restaurant at the Koryo Hotel. But those visits cost too much. He had to pay money to the North Korean officials who approved and arranged the meeting, to the minder and the driver, and then to his family members since everyone here was needy.
I asked if he felt at home here, especially since some neighborhoods had probably not changed at all. “No, not at all,” he said, shaking his head
. “This is all foreign to me. PUST is so near where my family lives, but I can’t keep in touch with them. I’m not allowed to even call them. I can’t go visit any of my old places since we can’t move around freely. And I’ve given so much to this land, and I can’t help but feel resentful.” The whispers became heated, and I glanced at the front of the bus in case the minders could hear us. We were arriving at the tombs, and I did not speak with him again.
The remains of both Dangun and King Dongmyeong had been excavated, and the tombs had been built by Kim Il-sung in 1993. The Dangun tomb was a large pile of cement bricks shaped vaguely like a flat-topped pyramid. There were no visitors, only the guide and a guard at the tomb. The focus of the tour guide’s speech was, as always, the Great Leader. Surrounded by bare hills, this tomb of the son of a bear from thousands of years ago seemed unreal, like a mirage.
King Dongmyeong’s tomb looked remarkably similar. Another immaculate grave with no one about. Inside a nearby stone structure, which served as a small museum, there were rather modern, manga-like paintings on the wall, which were said to have been excavated, though they bore no resemblance to Koguryo-era art.
Next to the tomb was a small Buddhist temple, also rebuilt in 1993. A lone monk greeted us at the gate as though he had been expecting us all afternoon. Unlike the gray ones often seen in South Korea, his thin red robe looked Tibetan. The Worship Hall had a golden Buddha in it, and the monk went inside to light candles. Like the church we had been taken to in Pyongyang, the temple had the feeling of a stage set, except here there were no worshippers. Most of the missionaries refused to enter.
A border existed here too. Perhaps here was our greatest fear, the fear of the other.
19
WITH THE ARRIVAL OF NOVEMBER, THE WIND AT NIGHT turned thorny, with ice in it. At PUST, they did not turn on the heat in the dormitories until well into winter, so I covered myself with layers of thermal underwear, fleece tops, and a down coat to stay warm. In the evenings, I would bury myself under a double layer of blankets and force myself to go to sleep early because it was too cold to be awake. The rabid dogs that had bitten four workers had been put down with rat poison and, according to Ruth, the North Korean staff had eaten them. Now that the dogs were gone, I wanted to walk alone outside again, but the evenings were so cold that we all took the enclosed walkway. On some nights, when the footsteps of the students echoed down the long, dark corridors, I felt almost as though I were in a Harry Potter movie, in some gloomy passage of Hogwarts castle.
But when I looked across the courtyard at the six students on guard duty each night, I felt like a spoiled American. In this weather, guard duty meant standing for hours in below-freezing temperatures. In their khaki uniforms and parkas, the students on duty would come to dinner a bit earlier than the others. They were unwaveringly somber and rarely met my eyes. It was as if they were about to go to battle. Sometimes I tried to talk to them, but often they looked too serious and ate silently. I could not decide if they were simply depressed about having to stand outside all night in the Siberian cold, or if they saw this as a holy mission and felt unable to converse with me because they suddenly viewed me as an American imperialist. When they did speak to me, it was just to say that yes, it was cold outside, just a little bit, but it did not bother them. Then they would hurry off together.
Of course the female guards must have suffered too, but these were my students, and I did not want them to freeze in front of an empty building. At times, I wanted to shake them and say, “The man is dead! He died in 1994, and you don’t have to stand outside all night for him!”
Although they probably did not know it, we shared a Confucian heritage, and I wondered if this was their version of an ancestor worship ritual. If it was, it had become so single-mindedly devoted to their Great Leader that it was no longer recognizable as a remnant of Confucianism. Besides, they were raised to believe that they could be attacked at any moment and must be ready to defend themselves against invasion. There I was, a spy of sorts, hoping not to plant bombs but to plant ideas. They had their mission, guarding a shrine to their only ancestor, and I had mine.
AS THE CHILL deepened, the electricity went out nearly every day. I would get ready to put the kettle on for my morning coffee only to find that there was no power. Or just as I was brushing my teeth before bed, the bathroom would turn pitch dark. I had brought three flashlights with me, a miniature one that I attached to my key ring so that I could find my way back to my room at night, and two bigger ones that I kept by my bed and in my office.
When the lights went out, darkness fell so abruptly and completely that I could almost touch it. Sitting with a group of students in my office, I would be going over the differences between a past participle and a past perfect participle, and suddenly the room would go dark. Immediately I would reach for my flashlight, and we would continue, using the flashlight like a candle, because this was the way of things. There were many evenings when I would stand in the corridor with a flashlight so that the students could find their way to the cafeteria for dinner. The unpredictability of the outages made lesson planning difficult. We all shared one printer and one photocopier. When the power went out, we could not use either one, and sometimes we had to change the lesson at the last minute. Yet there were moments when the blackouts felt like an adventure, because I was a visitor and I knew such inconvenience was only temporary.
One evening, while we were walking back from dinner, a student shouted, “The light’s come back on!” in Korean, and we all felt pleased that we would be returning to brightly lit rooms. Then he asked me how to say it in English, so I did an impromptu lesson on different phrases: “The light’s back on,” “The light’s gone out again,” and “The light’s come back.” They liked learning practical phrases they could use every day.
“Do the lights go out like this in New York, too?” one of them asked.
“No, never like this,” I responded, shaking my head.
A few of them laughed awkwardly, and I wondered if my answer had sounded callous. I tried to recall in which year the last big blackout had been, and I thought maybe I should tell them about it. But then I realized that it might strike them as even stranger that my entire city had made such a big fuss over a blackout when such outages were a daily occurrence for them. So I kept quiet, and one of them asked, “But since you pay rent in your country, do you also have to pay for electricity?” I expected this. Whenever the teachers pointed out anything that made life outside sound better than in North Korea, they inevitably brought up the solicitude of the Great Leader, under whose reign everything was free. So I just answered, “Yes, true, we have to pay for electricity, but I know that it’s free in your country.” I did not point out that this free electricity did not flow equally in all parts of the country. They seemed relieved and looked at me with something akin to pity, and said proudly, “Yes, it is free for us.” In that moment, I felt relieved that they took comfort in their superiority, no matter how illusory.
Many of them asked me often if it was as cold in New York as it was there, and I would answer, “Yes, about the same. But it feels a bit colder here.” They seemed puzzled that I found it so excruciatingly cold when I came from a place that also had harsh winters, but I could not tell them that it did not feel as cold in New York because heat, for the most part, was plentiful there.
When the electricity was working, I would turn on the TV to ward off loneliness. Ruth had attached a metal hanger to my TV to serve as an antenna, so on some nights I was able to tune in the local channels: Chosun Central TV, Korean Educational and Cultural Network (KECN), and Mansudae TV. But KECN was said to be on for just a couple of hours each day and was never available when I tried it, and neither was Mansudae TV, a weekend-only network that was only for Pyongyang citizens. So in reality there was just one functioning channel, which came on at around 5 p.m., shutting down at 11 p.m.
At seven o’clock, there was a news program for twenty-five minutes, almost exclusively about
Kim Jong-il. There was no live film, just old photographs of him visiting factories, and the newscaster would read, verbatim, whatever he had supposedly said on those occasions. Next there was a thirty-minute music program, in which the lyrics scrolled across the screen karaoke style. The songs had titles like “Defend the Headquarters of Revolution,” which described the North Korean people as “bombs and bullets.” Then there was a slot for a drama or film, followed by another news program on the more recent movements of Kim Jong-il. This was the news that my students had mentioned watching each night. There were, of course, no commercials, but the news was sometimes interrupted by Kim Jong-il quotations that filled the screen. Another music program followed; one night it featured a group of men playing the accordion to a song about Kim Jong-il. After that came a peculiar segment called “The Report by the Unification and Peace Committee.” Every night the broadcaster delivered a soliloquy berating South Korea and the United States, using oddly colloquial expressions like “freaking out” and “cut the crap.”
In some ways, watching their news felt more like listening to a radio drama or an audiobook. There was not much live action; instead the anchor would speak in a melodramatic tone, like a stage actor overplaying his role, describing the movements of the Great Leader in such intricate detail that Kim Jong-il became extremely vivid in listeners’ minds. This singular obsession with his every movement, from the way he laughed to the exact angle of his gaze, was because only one topic existed. There was only so much you could say about one man who was probably sick in bed, so they filled the time by dissecting every last aspect of his life.
The only international news item not involving the Great Leader that I recall was a mention of the flood in Thailand, which featured photos of the devastated areas and of people being swept up by water. The rest of the time, the commentators exhausted every glorifying adjective to describe Kim Jongil, who was “so great” and “very great” and “the greatest.” The message was, of course, the same in their newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, as well as in the students’ Juche class. I once saw a student’s notebook in which one page was entitled “The Great Achievement of Our Great General.”
