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

by Suki Kim

  Although I was normally not allowed to let them do so, I told him he could. It was the first time any of my students had spoken to me in our shared first language.

  “When I met you in the summer, I was so impressed by you. You taught us paragraphs and promised to teach us essays, and I was so glad. Then when you said that you would return, I was afraid to even believe it in case you didn’t, and when you really came back for the fall semester, I was overjoyed. So I came to the office hour every day although I didn’t really need your help. I wanted to learn from you, and above all, I respected you. I guess I felt disappointed by the way you handled my request for help. You said it was okay, but you didn’t really mean okay if you were going to give me a low mark. If you didn’t think my paper was okay, why did you say it was okay?”

  It was a reasonable question. I apologized for upsetting him and explained that when he flashed his paper before my eyes and asked for my opinion, there were about five other students trying to get my attention. By the word okay, I told him, I meant only that his paper was good enough, but that did not mean it couldn’t be better, and it was his responsibility to work on it further to improve it. I was not his babysitter, nor was I offering office hours solely to help students raise their grades. Just because I said okay, I did not want him to take that as the definitive answer. I told him that he should have his own opinion. He was a twenty-year-old man who had been at the top of his class all his life. I respected his opinion, his estimation of himself, his ability to claim responsibility. I meant what I said, and as I was speaking, I realized I too was getting emotional. I wanted him to know that he should think for himself, the very quality that was never encouraged in this country.

  He nodded, and after a long pause, said exactly what I had wanted him—and all of them—to say all along: “I guess for so long, it has become a habit to just believe everything I hear.” Then he told me that this was the first time in his life he had had a conflict with a teacher, and added, “I think perhaps I expressed my feelings to you because I felt that I could and that I cared. I believe that you and I will be closer through this conflict.”

  I agreed, offering peace: “Yes, that was just a small conflict that came out of our cultural differences.”

  Then Dong-hyun, who had been quiet throughout, said, “But we never think of you as being different from us. Our circumstances are different. But you are the same as us. We want you to know that we truly think of you as being the same.”

  25

  AT DINNER ONE night, Jun Su-young came to me with a detailed drawing of an appendix. He had heard that another student had asked me a question about anatomical terms in English, and that I had answered that I was not very knowledgeable about human anatomy. So Su-young had spent hours at the library looking up all the relevant terminology in English and had drawn up a chart to show me. It was heartwarming to watch him talk about something that truly engaged him, and I put down my utensils and stopped pretending to eat my bean sprouts and cabbage soup, as proud as a mother watching her son give a talk about some new thing he had learned in school.

  Then Ri Dae-sung, next to him, snapped, “This is like a medicine class, not dinner. It is so boring, what he is talking about. He is a medicine major, but we are not. It is like a foreign language. Not even English, but some other foreign language. So we can say he is talking to himself.” We all cracked up.

  It was then that I saw a face I recognized across the room. It was an American colleague, a foreign correspondent whom I had met for the first time during the 2008 New York Philharmonic coverage. He had been trying to get back into Pyongyang since then and had been courting PUST’s President Kim for that purpose. I was suddenly filled with dread, as I knew I could not say hello to him. He saw me as well, but he knew that I was there in the guise of a missionary teacher and was enough of a veteran journalist to look away casually—although his gaze met mine for a moment. I was afraid that someone might notice, so I immediately lowered my eyes. But here, everything was noticed. The students at my table looked behind them to see what had caught my eye. Dae-sung asked, “Do you know that man? Who is he?” I just shrugged. “Maybe a new teacher?” With smiling eyes he replied, “Well, too late! The semester is almost over and we are going home!” The boys burst out laughing. I felt calmer, although my heart was beating rapidly, as though I had been discovered.

  Now the boys were talking about going home for the winter break, but Su-young said that he wished he could stay at PUST. He claimed that he was not homesick and preferred being here, to which Dae-sung rolled his eyes and snapped, “Nonsense.”

  I don’t know why that sounded so funny then, but we all found it hilarious. Perhaps it was the way he said it, or the expression on his face, or the fact that our days were so mundane that even the tiniest things amused us. Perhaps it was akin to what a student told me once: that it did not matter what TV drama they watched because it was inevitably funny when as many as sixty of them watched it together. Or perhaps, in that vulnerable moment, I sought refuge with my students. For a moment the outside world, the one to which I really belonged, where I was a writer, had entered that Pyongyang cafeteria, and it was jarring, and I felt disturbed, as though I did not want to be pulled out of this new world, in which I shared private jokes with young North Koreans, all of us together in our isolation.

  Then Dae-sung broke the spell and, pointing at Su-young, said, “All Koreans miss their mothers. All students are homesick. But this weird guy here says he is not homesick. So this is like a foreign language again. In this case we can say, he is again talking to himself!” Everyone cracked up again.

  Then Su-young looked at me and asked, “Professor, are you coming back to teach in the spring?”

  For the past week, they had been talking about this nonstop. We would talk about an eclipse, and they would say that the night before while looking at the moon they wished that Professor Kim Suki would return in the spring. I would ask them what they had done over the weekend, and they would answer that they dreamed Professor Kim Suki told them she was coming back in the spring, which made them so happy. All I could say over and over to the repeated question was that I would try my best, but I could not promise. I was not yet sure if I could stand to come back. So instead I asked what they would do during the winter break.

  On December 24, they would pay their respects to Kim Jong-suk since it was her birthday. That was also the day when, in 1991, Kim Jong-il had been given the title of Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army, so they celebrated that too. It was one of their most important holidays, the others being February 16, Kim Jong-il’s birthday, and April 15, Kim Il-sung’s birthday, known as the Sun’s Day. On all those days, children received gifts from the Party, such as book bags and toys. On January 1, everyone got up early and went to the statues of both Great Leaders to pay their respect.

  One student said that he had two parties a year at his house, one on Sun’s Day, and the other on New Year’s Eve. Last year, twenty of his friends came over, and they built a snowman together and stayed up all night talking and drinking beer. This was the first time any student had admitted consuming alcohol. Another student said that his family held reunions during winter. His extended family was scattered across the country, and on one day of the year, they came together; the location depended on which relative’s house was available.

  “But we never do it at the ones in Pyongyang, since then everyone needs a special permit to enter there,” he added. This was the first time I’d heard a student mention any restrictions on travel.

  BACK IN MY room, I felt agitated knowing that my journalist friend was at PUST, most likely housed in the teachers’ dormitory, where guests were always put up. But it did not matter. There was no way to communicate. I could not tell him anything that was going on with me, and he could not tell me any of his news. In this system, we simply were not allowed to know each other. He would most likely be here for a few days and leave. He would see what he was allowed to observe, and
get out when he was told to leave, and write about the designated sliver that the regime had permitted him to see. It would not be anything close to the truth of this place, and he would know that, but he would be helpless to find out more.

  None of that had any bearing on my daily life, and it was strange how quickly I could put the thought out of my mind. His presence was irrelevant because, for the moment, we belonged in different worlds. This realization was alarming. It felt like a taste of how my students viewed me, or of what might have been behind the vacant gazes of Pyongyang citizens. A foreign visitor could never penetrate their world, let alone appease their suffering. No one ever deviated from the script.

  The next day, the journalist “accidentally” passed by my office. The door was open, and he held out his notepad, which read: Is there a place where we could talk? He did not understand much about PUST, but he knew that anything we said aloud would be recorded. I shook my head and quickly wrote on the pad: Nowhere, I’m being watched by everyone. I could not invite him into my office since that would immediately have created suspicion.

  Instead, I stood nearer and whispered, “The other teachers are watching.”

  He mouthed the words, “Unbelievable.”

  “How long are you here?” I asked.

  “Thursday, just a five-day visa,” he answered. It was Tuesday.

  “Good, that sounds good,” I said, standing at my door, looking out into the corridor. No one seemed to be about, although anyone could walk by any second. I had to think quickly. He had already put his notepad back in his bag, but then I noticed that he was coughing. So I took a tissue from my pocket and wrote on it, Breakfast is 6:30 a.m., but if you get there early, maybe you could sit with some students without the minders looking and talk to them. I then handed it to him, saying, “You’re coughing, do you need tissue?” He took it and said, “Sure, thank you.”

  This was as far as the conversation could go, so I whispered, “I’m happy to see you.”

  He nodded and walked away, but seeing him again unsettled me. I suddenly felt anxious and homesick. I wanted to get out of here and return to my civilization. There he and I were, sleeping in the same building, eating in the same cafeteria, and our communication was limited to those few guarded words. Perhaps this was a glimpse of what the older teachers who were born in North Korea felt when they talked about the helplessness of returning and not being able to connect with parents and siblings whom they had not seen in decades. Everything was designed to subjugate you and seize your will. We were controlled by the regime. Even the seasoned foreign correspondent. Even I.

  Once he had walked down the corridor and disappeared, I regretted telling him to interview the students. What if he were to get them in trouble? I felt like a traitor to my students, and my mixed loyalties confused me. I wished that I had thought quickly enough to ask him for his room number. I wanted to plead with him to not trap them with any tricky questions, but I could not think of a way to relay a message.

  Then I noticed that Ruth’s door was open. She was next to me, both in the dormitory and the office. The walls were extremely thin, and she must have heard everything that was said. I spent the next few minutes in paranoid horror.

  What had I said? Was it obvious that we were friends?

  That sounds good, I had said.

  The other teachers are watching.

  I’m happy to see you.

  I was certain I had whispered, “The other teachers are watching.” But Ruth taught Speaking and Listening. Her listening was more acute than others’. Also, I was not sure if I had said, “I’m happy to see you” quietly, or if I had just blurted it out. I’m happy to see you. I had never realized that a phrase so little and innocent could haunt me so relentlessly.

  Finally I walked into her office. Her nose was buried in her work. I asked her some random question about classes, and she looked up, but from her expression, I could not detect anything at all.

  LATER, MUCH LATER, once we had both safely returned from North Korea, the journalist would email me this:

  I thought the place was horrible. It makes Gitmo look like a destination resort … Gitmo is a prison camp for Al Qaeda fighters and Islamic radicals, yet they have a soccer field and eat much better than those kids at PUST do. One is a university, the other is a prison camp. But good luck to any student trying to get off campus in the middle of the night … When I had a cold during that trip there and President Kim drove me to the campus clinic, we passed the basketball court, and I saw you and you were wearing headphones, watching the boys play basketball, and I couldn’t talk to you. And all I wanted to do was talk to you because I knew the pain you were in.

  26

  WITH BOTH FINAL exams and Christmas approaching, two things happened that felt like a blessing. First, Narnia, the selection for Movie Day, was rejected by the counterparts. My fellow teachers were puzzled by this, since the film had been approved and screened in the spring, but it appeared that the counterparts had become suspicious of their insistence on this particular film.

  Then the second thing happened. Surprisingly, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was approved for my English lesson. With hardly any time left to find another film and get it approved, the teachers felt that there was really no other option but to show Harry Potter to the entire freshman class, for Movie Day, which took place the same day as final exams. The news soon spread around campus.

  “Are we really going to see Harry Potter?”

  “Will we get to see them all, Harry and Hermione and Ron?”

  “Will we see Quidditch too?”

  One by one, they rushed up to me to ask the same things. The news consumed them. The story of the boy wizard had only been an abstraction for them, and they could not believe that they would actually get to see a movie based on it. For them, the lure was not so much the storyline, of which they knew virtually nothing, but the fact that the rest of the world had seen and loved it, that it was a true blockbuster. This unexpected chance to join the Harry Potter bandwagon made them feel included in a world that had always been denied to them. They wanted to know everything about it, and at each meal I had to explain the Harry Potter phenomenon, which was certainly belated since all seven films had been completed and the child actors were grown up and at college, the same age as my students.

  The teachers planned to make popcorn for the occasion. They had brought with them the microwavable kind from China. I told the students, rather prematurely it turned out, that I would bake a chocolate cake. During the summer, Beth had baked her class brownies, and ever since then the students talked about brownies with wonder; one student called it the best thing he had ever tasted. The problem was that not only had I never baked a chocolate cake—or anything—before, but that the cake would have to serve a hundred students.

  I looked up recipes on the Internet and quickly learned that the ingredients could not be found in Pyongyang. Some teachers had brought baking powder and vanilla extract; the real problems were butter and cocoa powder. All they sold at the shops was margarine, and the only cocoa available was the instant drink mix. I decided I would simply buy lots of chocolate and melt it down. This would not result in a real chocolate cake, but chocolate-flavored bread seemed better than nothing. There were no ovens except in the school kitchen, and I got permission to use one of them, but it looked nothing like any oven I had ever seen. The task of baking a chocolate cake for a hundred students in North Korea was way more complicated than I had imagined.

  The excitement over the upcoming Movie Day topped with a chocolate cake was short-lived. Mary stormed into my office, furious. “I’ll never show that to any of my students!” she shouted. “What’s your motive for wanting to show such filth to our students?” This usually mild-mannered woman was visibly shaking with anger. “What kind of a Christian are you? What would Christians around the world say about our decision to expose our students to such heresy?”

  I had not been told that all the other teachers, although no
t thrilled, had acquiesced to the movie selection, except Mary, the most fundamentalist in her beliefs. Unlike the rest of the missionaries, who had been born into devout Christian families, Korean Chinese Mary was a graduate of YUST and had been indoctrinated as a student. It made me wonder if any of my students would turn out like her if one day North Korea were to open up.

  I asked her if she had read any of the Harry Potter books or seen any of the films. It was a naive question. Even though I saw it as a typical story about a little boy who fights bad guys, with some magic thrown in to cater to kids’ fascination with the supernatural, for Mary, Harry Potter was the devil incarnate. She repeated that she would never watch such a thing or show it to our students even if she had to single-handedly demand to cancel Movie Day entirely. Then she ran off in search of substitute films.

  A few hours later, she called an emergency meeting in her office. She had managed to collect a few random DVDs from other teachers. Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull was deemed too violent. Madagascar was a cartoon, and the students had specifically expressed their wish to see something that was not a cartoon this time. She liked The Blind Side because it had good Christian values, but the other teachers felt that there might be love scenes in it that would be inappropriate. The same went for Titanic. Finally, Mary suggested Lord of the Rings. Martha pointed out that it also had wizards in it and that it was three hours and forty minutes long.

  All through the meeting, while the teachers looked at each DVD from Mary’s meager collection, my heart beat rapidly. I was afraid one of them would be selected to replace Harry Potter. My students were so anxiously anticipating seeing it that I did not have it in my heart to tell them that they would not, in fact, be watching it. Also, this being our final week together, the film seemed like my last chance to expose them to something from the outside world. So I told Mary, firmly, that as their teacher, I absolutely would not break my promise to my students. Mary replied, just as firmly, that she absolutely would not allow it to be shown. The others at the meeting seemed nervous as Mary and I began raising our voices. The tension escalated so much that we were both crying in the end. Finally Beth, the dean of the English department, stepped in, and we came to a compromise. She would immediately send out a group email to gather DVDs from all teachers in order to pick another film for Movie Day and have it approved by the counterparts, but after the final exam, as part of my final lesson on December 19, I would be allowed to show Harry Potter to just one of the two classes I taught.