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

by Suki Kim

  The following Sunday, I skipped the service and spent the time crying in my room. Then I tried to compose an email to my lover, but there was nothing I could freely write about that would interest him. Our lives were drifting apart. He wrote that he was missing me, but that he was also busy. There were gallery openings, movie screenings, and dinner parties. I thought again of telling him about the rabid dogs, about how the staff had killed and eaten them, but I worried that he would only be upset by that, and that whoever was monitoring my email would not like it. I was not especially worried that they would disapprove of the part about eating dogs, since that was normal there, but I was afraid it would sound like I was complaining about my working conditions.

  I wanted to tell him that Ruth had confronted me about my faith, that my cover was blown, that it was possible the missionaries rather than the North Koreans would kick me out. I wanted to tell him about my immense fear and loneliness, but I did not see how I could explain it all. I thought of comparing myself to the Little Mermaid in Hans Christian Andersen’s story. She had traded her voice for a pair of legs; I had traded my voice to be there. But I doubted he would be able to decipher what I meant. Finally it dawned on me that my longing for him and missing him simply did not matter. So long as I was there, he was no longer relevant. Love could not save me.

  21

  IN THE SECOND WEEK OF NOVEMBER, SACKS AND SACKS OF garlic and cabbages were delivered on a truck at lunchtime, and several classes were called outside to unload them. They brought the garlic into the cafeteria, and for two consecutive days students and faculty spent more than an hour peeling them. That was how I learned that this was the week of kimjang.

  In both North and South Korea, in the late fall, most families make enough kimchi to last through the winter. This tradition originated more than a thousand years ago, when vegetables were not readily available year round. When I was a child, the kimjang season was always festive. The women in my neighborhood got busy suddenly, buying the ingredients—cabbage, radishes, chili peppers, scallions, garlic, ginger, marinated baby shrimps, and anchovies. Then they gathered together to wash the cabbages and radishes, salt them, and make barrels and barrels of kimchi. It was a time of laughter, gossip, and good feelings all around. I would hover around my mother, waiting for a bite of freshly made kimchi dripping chili liquid. That piercing taste of crispy cabbage and raw seasoning was etched in my memory as the first sign of winter. The finished kimchi would be stored in earthenware pots and kept outside to ferment slowly. The increasingly pungent-tasting kimchi kept us strong through the snowy nights of the long, hard Korean winter.

  I had not thought about kimjang in a long time. When we moved to America, my mother worked seven days a week and made kimchi less and less, so we got by on the store-bought kind. Besides, with most vegetables available fresh year round, there was no reason to make so much kimchi at once, never mind the fact that we had no garden or balcony to put out the pots. Yet, there I was in Pyongyang, peeling garlic for kimjang with hundreds of young North Korean men who rolled up their sleeves and obliged without hesitation, cheerfully sharing their memories of kimjang at their own houses.

  One said he always helped his mother by carrying buckets of water up the stairs: “It takes a lot of water to wash one hundred fifty kilos of cabbage.” That suggested there was no fresh water at his house, despite the fact that his family was part of the elite. Another chimed in that his family was small, just he and his parents, so they only needed eighty kilos.

  Then they asked me how many kilos my government delivered to my house for kimjang. I could not bring myself to tell them that kimjang was a disappearing tradition for the modern generation, and that the city of New York did not distribute a ration of cabbages to each household, so I just said that my mother no longer did kimjang. They seemed confused and asked how my family then obtained kimchi during the winter. I explained that America was big and the weather varied from region to region, and that all kinds of foods were available during the winter because we traded with many other countries. I used their country’s trade with China as an example, which helped them to understand.

  I confessed that I too was confused, about their way of doing kimjang. What about peppers and radishes and scallions, since each family, presumably, had its own unique recipe, with slightly different ingredients? A student explained that the rations varied. This year, for example, the harvest had been bad and there was not enough cabbage for families, so some people bought whatever extra was necessary. This was the second time a student had admitted to a lack of anything.

  I was also surprised to learn of the connection between kimjang and auto accidents. According to the students, there were so many trucks transporting cabbages in November that their government considered it a dangerous month, with a much greater risk of traffic accidents. (May was also considered a dangerous month, with a greatly increased risk of drowning.) I found the idea of collisions with cabbage-bearing trucks unlikely considering how few cars there were, even in the streets of Pyongyang.

  On the second day of garlic peeling, I woke up to the news of the Penn State riots. On CNN Asia, there was live coverage of American students toppling a media van to show their anger about the firing of a coach who had failed to investigate another coach accused of raping young boys. The scandal was the headline of the international segment, and the anchor repeatedly emphasized the importance of college football, and the money it generated, in American culture. “Almost a billion in profits!” he said, implicitly shaming a culture that cared more about money than stopping child abuse. The network’s finger-wagging seemed the real point of their excessive coverage of this particular, sensational story, since there was far more urgent news in the rest of the world. In Italy, Berlusconi was stepping down after seventeen years; the Greek prime minister had just resigned; and Libya was in disarray after Qaddafi’s death. Yet filling the screen were shots of drunken American college students wielding beer bottles and brandishing fists in solidarity with their football team.

  It seemed surreal to walk into the cafeteria later and face these North Korean college students about the same age, joyfully peeling garlic, talking of their guilt at not being able to help their mothers this year. A few got up and swept the garlic peels from the floor. Others sorted through the peels to see whether any garlic cloves had accidentally been tossed out. Even when the kitchen staff came out and told them to stop peeling and get ready for classes, many kept on working, politely insisting that it was easier and faster when everyone helped.

  MY COUNTERPART CLASS had been canceled that week, but at lunch I saw a few of them in track suits instead of the usual jackets and ties. I asked where they had been, and one answered that they had been working at a teachers’ cooperative farm so that they could get enough cabbages for their family’s kimjang. He seemed embarrassed, so I asked casually, “Was it fun to work with your colleagues?” He shook his head and said, “So so,” which was his way of saying “Not at all.” These were proud men and they seemed ashamed to admit to doing manual work. Among them were the former deans of Kim Chaek University and Kim Il-sung University, and a new addition who had been an English professor at the former, whose spoken English was so close to perfect that I wondered why he wasn’t teaching the students himself, and what he might be doing in my class. Another of the counterparts said, “Not fun. Too much work. I lifted and carried things. It is easier for women, but not good for men.”

  Theirs was a chauvinistic culture. One student told me that he had lived in a dormitory at his previous university, and the one difference from PUST was that there were girls. Then he admitted that there had been only two in his class since it had been a science college and girls weren’t good at science. However, he said he used to give them his shirts and they were very pleased. I imagined this to be either a joke or a gesture of flirtation, but he explained, “So they could wash them! It is difficult to be at PUST since here I have to wash not only my shirt, but jackets and pants too. At home, my
mother and my sister washed them.”

  Later that afternoon, I dropped by the library and looked in the window of the Internet room. Sitting in front of the computers were second-year graduate students, as well as a counterpart from my class who had previously been a dean. They seemed to be learning how to conduct a Google search. I went inside to say hello to the former dean. He had just looked up a computer term, which yielded more than 600,000 hits. A graduate student was explaining that that was the number of results. The former dean did not seem to understand what the number signified, so the student repeated it. “More than 600,000?” he said, amazed. I wondered if the counterpart was there to keep an eye on what the students were looking up.

  The graduate students were under strict orders not to reveal anything about the Internet, including their access to it. One senior professor said that one of her graduate students complained of a chronic headache, but she believed that it was ideological confusion and suggested that Mrs. Davis secretly pray for the student at the clinic while putting her hand on his temple and taking his temperature. However, we were not certain how much of the Internet the graduate students were actually allowed to access. Our dean of the computer department said that he thought their access must be quite limited since they kept coming to him with the simplest questions about their research papers.

  Outside the room, my undergraduate students were either at the reading desks or using the regular computer stations that had no Internet access. Several of them came up to me to say that the homework that I had just assigned, a paragraph detailing their family’s kimjang, was too difficult since kimchi making was for women, not men. There were many words they did not know, and they were stuck on descriptions. The assignment would have been easy if they could have done an Internet search, but that was not an option.

  There were only a few applications on the regular computers: the Longman Dictionary, the Cambridge Learner’s Dictionary, the Oxford Dictionary, an encyclopedia in Korean, and a document called Juche. I sat down in front of a computer, opened the most recent program, and saw the words “Kim Jong-il and Kim Il-sung Juche Study.” Mary, another Reading and Writing professor, had gotten approval to upload about sixty classic novels such as The Great Gatsby, Wuthering Heights, War and Peace, and Robinson Crusoe. But the students said that they did not read them because they were difficult and seemed too old. Other than these materials, there was not much else.

  Yet the students seemed to like computers. They did not use the computers to type their essays; they did not know how to touch type, and since there was no printer, typing was of no use anyway. Mostly, they just used dictionaries, although they found them difficult and preferred using their Korean dictionaries. The sight of the country’s best students of science and technology staring blankly at screens was so pathetic that I was seized by a pang of anger, mixed with sadness, and soon left the room.

  I HAD BEGUN to notice a pattern in my relationship with the students: The moment I felt that we had made progress and relaxed a little, they inevitably backtracked. This seemed similar to the behavior of the notoriously unpredictable (and ironically quite predictable) North Korean regime, which often lashed out against South Korea just when inter-Korean relations seemed to improve. So I was not surprised when suddenly our conversations mirrored previous ones, as though the students had been told what to say and when.

  “I could have gone to Singapore but I love our country and chose to stay here,” said one of the class monitors at dinner. This was the fifth consecutive meal at which a student had told me such a thing. Each time a student told me that he had passed tests that would have allowed him to study abroad but had turned down the opportunity because he preferred studying there. Two students cited Beijing’s Tsinghua University as the school to which they had been accepted and claimed that their government had offered to foot the bill for their tuition and their room and board, but they had declined and come to PUST. Two other students mentioned that they had the opportunity to go to Germany but chose not to.

  Often, the topics were contrived. Suddenly they would introduce a subject as though they had a list to cover during meals, with the phrase “How about we change the topic?” This helped them when conversations went in a direction that made them feel nervous, such as when the talk of exchange programs led a student to ask how many countries I had visited.

  During the summer, I had avoided this topic, and even in October I was careful to say very little. But by November I was becoming increasingly reckless, and truthful, so I told them roughly the number of countries I had visited and went further by saying how lovely some of the European cities were, and how I hoped they would have the chance to see the world. Then I got carried away and added, “Oh, of course Asian cities are beautiful too, like Kyoto.” I stopped myself, remembering Japan was their enemy.

  After a pause, one student asked me: “What about our city? Do you find our city beautiful?”

  The question made me pause in return. I did not find Pyongyang beautiful. It was a monotone, bleak city, filled with concrete buildings and people dressed in rags who looked starved. But it was not Pyongyang’s physical attributes that made it so ugly in my eyes. It was what it stood for. It was the most horrible city in the world to me, and every time I saw it in the distance, on the horizon, outside the van window, I felt disheartened. Pyongyang was the Xanadu of North Korea—the city the rest of the country slaved to feed. It was a greedy, bloodsucking monster, and sometimes I wished it would just go up in smoke. Yet it was also the city to which my uncle might have been taken at seventeen, alone, the city my grandmother dreamed of until her dying day. It was the home of my students, the city of hope for all North Koreans. All they ever wanted was to get here, where electricity came on, and cars and trams and buses ran, and civilization could be glimpsed. Sitting across from my young students, who looked at me with such expectant faces, waiting for me to declare that their Pyongyang was indeed the most beautiful, I felt I had no choice but to lie a little. So I said, “Well, some parts.” I knew that my answer was disappointing, and this was heartbreaking, but I saw no alternative, and as always a student at the table piped up, “So how about we change the topic?”

  I compensated for my unsatisfactory response by dropping the fact that I had recently spent a year at Ewha Womans University, an all-girl school in Seoul. Usually, when I mentioned Seoul, they did not ask anything about it, except possibly, “So you were born there?” It was clearly a taboo topic. But the allure of an all-girl university on the other side of the border seemed to pique their interest, though they shyly lowered their gazes. Ewha was something like Wellesley, but of course that comparison would have meant nothing to them, so I simply told them it was famous in South Korea, and that the students were fine girls from good families. They all looked at me as though they wanted me to continue. Finally one student asked, timidly, “Were they pretty?”

  I nodded and said, “Yes, the prettiest girls from Seoul, as handsome as my gentlemen from Pyongyang.”

  This did not make up for hurting their feelings earlier, but it made them all break into giggles. One asked, “Do they have a monitor too?” The idea was so preposterous that I had to stop myself from laughing. I could not tell them that at South Korean universities there were no monitors, and certainly no platoon leaders, and that students did not march to classes or the cafeteria. So I just answered, “Well, most of them don’t live on campus. Ehwa girls just come and go individually, so no monitor.”

  NOW THAT WE were heading straight into winter, gardening duty became harder because the ground was often muddy, and then frozen. When I expressed concern about them having to work despite the weather conditions, a student matter-of-factly said they had boots, so it was not a problem. He told me that all of them had grown up tending to trees and plants. All DPRK citizens planted trees in October, which was “tree planting” month, and all Pyongyang citizens were ordered to do gardening work throughout the winter. Gardening was just a fancy word for manual labor
that often included digging and hauling water. Now it made sense why, on our weekly grocery run through the city, I always saw people in scarves and gloves tending to the grass and bushes on the streets and riverbanks. My student recalled carrying buckets of water when he was as young as five. He said it so proudly that I realized he considered it a patriotic act. Besides, he added, gardening duty lasted only three or four hours, which allowed them to squeeze in some sports time, but cleaning floors or toilets took longer and left no extra time. So they preferred gardening duties.

  That week, the students spent three hours digging a hole in the freezing cold. The previous week, it had been four hours. The students continued to assure me that the work was good for them, but some now admitted how tired they were. One said he had never labored this hard before coming to PUST.

  On nights when the winds howled outside the window, I thought of the students out there on guard duty all night. None of them had the kind of heavy-duty coats that would have protected them properly. Their Great Leaders were always compared to the sun—Kim Il-sung’s birthday was Sun’s Day and Kim Jong-il was called “the Sun of the 21st century”—but there was no warmth from that sun. I finally brought up my concern about the cold at dinner one night, and they explained, reluctantly at first.

  “It is very difficult for us … yes … but we are so happy to do it because it is a great honor that will help our Party and build a powerful and prosperous nation.”

  Each student at the table nodded, so I asked if they had ever done this before getting to PUST.

  “Yes, we did this at our former universities too.”

  I then asked what about before university.

  “Yes, since we were thirteen or fourteen. Everyone in our country grew up doing it.”