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

by Suki Kim

  At one point, the students’ favorite topic of conversation was a Chinese drama based on a 1936 Russian novel by Nikolai Ostrovsky called How the Steel Was Tempered. It aired from 8:30 to 9:30 on some nights. There was one television on each floor of their dormitory, and at least sixty of the hundred freshmen gathered in front of one of them. It was like a party, they said. Steel was a metaphor for the character of the hero, and the show had very good morals, they told me. Since Russia and China were their allies, they said, they understood their culture better and vice versa. For example, when the North Korean film The Flower Girl was shown in China, they had heard that all the streets were empty because every Chinese was home watching it. I did not have the heart to tell them that what was currently popular in China was no longer an old North Korean film but glitzy South Korean soap operas featuring stunning plastic-surgery-enhanced actors. Released in 1972, The Flower Girl was about the persecution of poor peasants under the Japanese occupation. It was based on an opera supposedly written by their Eternal President Kim Il-sung, and starred then seventeen-year-old Hong Yung-hui, who became known as one of Kim Jong-il’s mistresses. I had once tried watching the film and had found it too slow and dated.

  I promised to try watching their favorite drama so that we could discuss it over meals. But I had already tried the last one, The Age of Steel, and found it dull, so I asked if this one was better. Most said yes, but one told me, “Well, we do not have anything else.” This was the first time any of them had admitted such a lack.

  I HAD NOW been back for more than a month, and the sense of being watched at all times was draining. I felt as though I was being buried alive, like sand was being poured into my face. I began to feel a nausea, almost like seasickness, from the sameness of each day. To fight it off, I took up basketball on those rare afternoons when there was some sun despite the cold. I had brought a soccer ball and a basketball from New York to give to my students, since I had noticed in the summer that the ones they were using were tattered and getting flat. We were supposed to hand such gifts over to the counterparts, who would distribute them to the students at the right time. But I was afraid that the counterparts might keep them. Back home, I had printed out fifty copies of a set of the best photos of my students from the summer and, upon returning, I had submitted them to the counterparts to be given to the students. Although a few students thanked me for them, they mostly avoided the topic, so I was not convinced that they had been allowed to keep the photos. Because of that, I had been looking for weeks for an opportunity to give them the balls directly. One afternoon, when I saw both classes on the court, I ran to my room, grabbed the new balls, and came back out. Then I casually handed them to the monitors and said, “Hey, do you want these? I bought them for me, but I don’t have much time to play.” It was as simple as that, and they used those balls for the rest of the semester.

  Sometimes I played with them, but most times I took a ball from the teachers’ supplies and dribbled alone during their nap time or on weekends. The court was right beneath their dormitory, and often I saw smiling faces pressed to the windows when I played. They loved to count the rare occasions when I made a shot. It soon became a favorite topic at meals. One would say, “Professor, you are getting better. Before it was one out of fifty, now it is more like one out of ten. Yesterday I saw you got thirty-two in out of a hundred and sixty-four tries!” Another would say, playfully, “You are improving, Professor. But you could be better. You teach me English, I teach you basketball!”

  On some days, though, it was simply too cold, or the court was too wet to play, since the drainage system at school was almost as bad as the one in downtown Pyongyang, and there were pools of water everywhere. Those empty, bleak days felt longer. It was now dark by 4:30 p.m., and the concrete campus, already so dreary, became even more so. The early winter light was relentlessly gray, and I dreaded the weekends. Although I saw the students at meals, I had no classes to teach, and the only things to look forward to were the trips to the stores on Saturdays and the Sunday services.

  “Even inside the market, everyone’s watching us,” Mary warned me. “You don’t know who will report you, so don’t do anything that will get us in trouble.”

  Despite her warnings, Mary herself had been buying small rice cakes and passing them out to homeless kids who roamed the market and picked pockets. She would walk fast and slip food into their hands and keep on walking so that no one would notice. I worried about her getting reported.

  On weekend nights, I felt even more helpless. I longed for phone calls, an outing to a movie, a restaurant, the little things I took for granted in the outside world. I moped about the campus, and sometimes peeked into Ruth’s room. The fat Bible usually sat on her table, along with an open notebook in which she had copied out passages and underlined phrases. That was how most of the missionaries passed the time: rereading the Bible, gathering together in the evenings to share their thoughts about scripture. Not all teachers attended these Bible studies, since there were factions among the missionaries, so my absence was tolerated. Looking at Ruth, I thought that she seemed comforted.

  One night, while we were walking back from dinner, a student asked, “Do you live alone in New York?” I was not sure whether anyone lived alone in the DPRK, but I said yes. Then another asked, “So what happens to your apartment while you are here?” I told them that my friend was living in it. “What about the rent?” he asked. “How do you pay it while you are here?” I replied that I had arranged to make the payments through the Internet, and they nodded, as usual. They presumably thought that our Internet was their intranet, but perhaps some were now beginning to realize that there was a real difference between the two.

  Another student asked me what part of New York I came from and if I had encountered many gangs there. He was the third student who had asked about gangs in New York that week. I asked him where he had heard about such gangs, and he said that his conversation textbook mentioned the film Gangs of New York. Another random phrase they liked to repeat was “The Big Apple.” Then another asked, “How about Brooklyn?” To him it was just a strange word he had picked up from his textbook, but Brooklyn was where my lover lived and I was suddenly overwhelmed by missing him. I paused. I was midway between the cafeteria and the dormitory. In the distance was the smoke stack and the fumes rising from its tower. I could see the glimmer of the Pyongyang cityscape. I was very far from Brooklyn.

  20

  “DO YOU HAVE A BUDDY?” MRS. DAVIS ASKED ME. SHE WAS married to the doctor at the clinic, and both were Korean-American missionaries in their early fifties. I had stopped by to visit Ri Sang-woo, who had been sick with flu for a few days.

  “Here, you need a buddy,” she said. For a married couple, it was easy to keep each other in check, she said, but for single people, one false step could be hazardous. “Watch everything you do or say because they are watching your every step like a hawk,” she continued. “They are afraid there might be a spy among us.” I knew I was a spy of sorts, but could there be someone else?

  Then she told me that for the past year, no matter where she and her husband were in the evening, the minders tracked them down instantly if there was a medical emergency. They might be sitting in a teachers’ room, and the intercampus phone would ring, revealing it to be a minder. In China, during the nineties, when they worked for YUST, even their friends’ email accounts had been hacked, and North Korea often resorted to the same tricks as the Chinese, so before this posting, they had asked all their friends back home to set up new email addresses meant only for correspondence with them.

  Mrs. Johnson told me something similar. Back in the spring, she had asked one of the minders to get her a box of Shin ramen from Tongil Market. Because Shin ramen was a South Korean product, officially banned, this was something of an under-the-table transaction. (At the PUST shop, the teachers who helped out had to cut out the labels on clothing donated by South Korean churches before giving them to students.) But minders sometimes off
ered to get you things that were hard to find, and it was understood that there would be a markup, a fee for the minder. The fact is, you could buy Shin ramen on the black market, with Chinese packaging, about as easily as you can buy marijuana in downtown New York. Samyang ramen, another South Korean brand, was also easy to find because it was often included in packages from humanitarian groups and found its way onto the market. Shin ramen, however, was the favored brand. One of my students proudly said that his favorite food was ramen, but not just any ramen, only Shin ramen. It seemed that there was some sort of cachet associated with Shin ramen because it was South Korea’s most popular kind.

  In any case, when the minder came back with a box for Mrs. Johnson, he shortchanged her, either by mistake or on purpose, and Mrs. Johnson discussed it with Mrs. Davis on the phone, and within minutes there was a knock on her door, and there stood the minder, upset at being accused of dishonesty. He had overheard their entire phone conversation.

  Mrs. Davis and Mrs. Johnson were kind women who often offered me helpful advice, partly because they were afraid that I might get sick of PUST and not return. There was a shortage of teachers. For some of them, the constant surveillance made it impossible to be there. A teacher from Hong Kong, a retired businessman who taught economics to graduate students, said that he would not be returning in the spring. He had met President Kim by chance at his church and had been recruited, but he had not been told much ahead of time, and had had no idea that he would not be able to move about freely. He asked when my return flight was, and when I told him December 20, he exclaimed, “Lucky you. Mine is December 21.” He said he was counting the days until he could go home. He had been to villages in China where as many as ten people slept in one room, where three brothers only owned two pairs of pants and took turns wearing them, yet this was the worst place he had ever experienced. I asked him why.

  “There’s no freedom,” he sighed. “They are watching us constantly. I know they are recording everything we say and keeping files on us, and I feel really bad all the time. I just don’t feel comfortable here. It’s not about the terrible food and the material lack of everything. It’s the basic humanity. It’s missing here.”

  All of us had become paranoid, for good reason. But human beings are resilient, and also forgetful. I wonder if at times I willed myself to forget so that I could keep going, and whether my students did the same. On several occasions, I left one of my USB sticks lying on my desk in the dormitory and only later remembered and panicked. I was becoming careless. I had been there more than a month, and after a month even a prison feels like home at times.

  INSIDE THE CLINIC, I saw Kim Yong-suk sitting by Ri Sang-woo, who was hooked up to an IV bag, with an English textbook open at his side. The buddy system among the students was remarkably tight. Buddies seemed to spend all their time together. They sat together, ate together, and, at times, held hands, either while walking or sitting in a class. When one student sprained his ankle, he limped a little and did not need a crutch, yet his buddy was always by his side to support him, wherever he went. So it was Yong-suk who brought every meal from the cafeteria to the clinic for Sang-woo and spent all but his class time at his bedside, helping him with the schoolwork he was missing. He even spent nights on an air mattress next to Sang-woo.

  I was both impressed and disturbed by the buddy system. I noticed that with the shuffling of classes from summer to fall, most of the pairings changed as well, and students were never seen with their former buddies again. Yong-suk had been Hwang Jae-mun’s buddy during the summer, but now, despite the fact that they were in the same class, Yong-suk was devoted only to Sang-woo. There was perhaps nothing unusual about friendships shifting at the beginning of a new semester, but in this case buddies were paired by the school, through designated seats and room assignments. Their loyalty to each other seemed boundless, and that made their ability to shift alliances overnight seem oddly heartless. Also, the ease with which they followed orders to immediately become someone’s best friend struck me as unnatural.

  Yet, not all buddies were so enamored with each other. For some, it seemed just a duty, and they did the minimum. They were there for each other when one got sick or needed help with a menial task, and they sat together in class and at meals. But otherwise, they did not hang on to each other all the time. Not all held hands or laughed together constantly. And a few of my students who had been switched to a new class made an effort to sit with their former classmates, even though it was technically against the rules. Even here, there was such a thing as chemistry.

  Perhaps their communal life staved off loneliness, but it had its downside. There was no privacy, and the constant togetherness made it easier for illnesses to spread. Since there was never enough heat, many of them came down with colds or the flu, and that often meant that their buddies got sick too. But they were young, and they seemed to recover quickly.

  Ri Sang-woo sat up and smiled with delight when he saw me. Under the fluorescent light, the room looked big and empty, with several air mattresses on the floor and a single table against the wall. It was a bleak place, and I was glad that he had his buddy with him. Next to his bed was a big container of Imperial Powdered Milk from South Korea, which I knew was either prohibited or expensive. I also noticed a carton of bottles of apple-flavored seltzer water, sold in the campus shop.

  “What’s all that?” I asked, and Sang-woo blushed.

  “My classmates brought them. They have been so nice.”

  Judging from the number of seltzer bottles, it seemed that almost every classmate had bought him one. This was unusual. The students were given a modest amount of credit by PUST, with which they bought school supplies and snacks from the campus shop. This credit system was similar to the food ration ticket system. When they ran out of credit, their parents apparently sent them extra money. It seemed extravagant for every student to give Sang-woo a bottle of seltzer; they had not done the same when another student was ill a few weeks earlier. It was possible that Sang-woo was just more popular. His spoken English was better than that of almost everyone else in the class. At about five foot eleven, he was tall, which was greatly envied there, and he excelled in his studies as well as in basketball. Perhaps most important, he was from a very powerful family. I knew as much from details in his letters, from our conversations, and from the fact that his father had been abroad.

  He was the crème de la crème among students, but when I saw him lying there in his nylon sweats, most likely imported from China, I wished I could scoop him up and take him shopping at a gigantic American mall. It was absurd to think that material goods would fix anything, but at that moment, I hated seeing him wearing those pathetic sweats, clinging to a can of powdered milk. My wishes were quite simple. I wanted nice warm clothes and fresh milk for my students, and I wanted the lights to come back on when it went dark, or at least enough flashlights and batteries for all of them. I wanted enough heat to ward off the cold, better food for these boys who were still growing. There were times when satisfying their basic needs—light, heat, nutritious food—seemed as important as giving them freedom.

  AS I WAS coming back from shooting baskets one afternoon, Ruth’s door opened a crack and she waved me into her room. I should have just said hello and kept walking, but I think I wanted company. I kept forgetting that I was not one of them.

  “It’s about Sunday!” she said, so brightly that for a moment I thought there must be a trip coming up, but in fact she meant the previous one. “I saw you taking communion, and I don’t think you should.”

  She asked me if I took communion at my church back home. This made me nervous. I said no, preparing for the worst. She reflected a moment, and then said, “If you don’t believe in taking a part of Jesus’s body into you, you shouldn’t receive the bread. I’m only saying this out of a concern for you because harm will come to you if you take it and you’re not a believer. I know it sounds like a superstition, but it’s not.”

  Then she began telling me
that she knew I cared for my students, but maybe my reason for being there was different from hers, which was solely to bring the Lord to this land. The Lord has his ways and his designs for these people, she told me, and it was her job to wake them up to be ready for his grace.

  “Because, Suki, this life here is temporary. They will be received by Him in heaven.”

  I knew that I should keep quiet and leave before she went any further, but in that moment I felt an incredible wave of anger. I felt she was delegitimizing the suffering of the people of North Korea. Weeks of keeping silent had finally become too much for me, and I lost control.

  “So are you saying that it’s okay for North Koreans to rot in gulags because in your estimation it isn’t real?” Ruth seemed taken aback, but I continued. “I think this ‘temporary’ life of yours being a schoolteacher in a nice dormitory for a semester before you get back home to New Zealand is a different kind of ‘temporary’ life than the lives of these people, who are basically slaves to their regime. If the eternal life waiting for them in heaven is so amazing, should the millions who are suffering here just commit mass suicide? Why don’t you go check out a gulag and then dare to tell me that it’s temporary?”

  Almost as soon as I spoke the words, I regretted them. I knew that I had been unnecessarily harsh, but the chasm between us felt like an abyss.

  Ruth looked at me with pity and shook her head. She started to say something, but I told her I was tired and walked away. I felt such deep rage that I needed to be alone to calm down. The exchange depressed me so much that I could not sleep all night.