by Suki Kim
It was Mrs. Gund who mentioned that an international university was being set up in Pyongyang, and that the faculty would all be foreigners. It seemed improbable, but when you follow North Korea, you become used to unlikely scenarios. I asked for more information, and she shrugged and told me to email a certain President Kim, the head of the entire operation.
President Kim turned out to be James Kim, an evangelical Christian Korean-American, and a quick Internet search brought up interviews with him about a similar college he had set up in the early 1990s in Yanji, China, called Yanbian University of Science and Technology (YUST). In one of the interviews, Kim said that he had raised $10 million from evangelical churches worldwide to construct the school in Pyongyang. When asked whether any of the money had made its way to the DPRK’s regime, he claimed to have brought all the building materials and equipment in from China. Running the school would be quite expensive, with heating costs alone estimated to be at least $1,500 per day. In response to a question about who would fund its operations, he demurred and referred to the “bank of heaven.”
Although the school was still under construction, I immediately submitted an application to teach there, and for the next couple of years, I exchanged emails about it with various people in China, South Korea, and the United States. I knew little except that they were spokespeople for President Kim, who, according to my principal contact, Joan, was very busy traveling. Joan, who was based at the YUST campus, wrote long, digressive emails about the Yanji flowers blooming in the spring and the busy schedule she was keeping in the grace of the Lord overseeing the “project.”
For the first year of our correspondence, the project seemed vague at best. Once, I was contacted by a Korean-American librarian from a university in Illinois, who invited me to a fundraising event for PUST at a church in Evanston. About fifty or so Asian students—mostly Korean-American or Korean—were there, and for about an hour they prayed and cried. Strange as it was, the event seemed to legitimize the existence of the school.
Finally, in December 2009, a call came from President Kim’s Seoul office, telling me to get ready to go to Pyongyang in a few months. No one ever questioned me about my faith, and I did not volunteer any information. I received almost no instructions. What should I bring? How would I be able to keep in touch with those at home? Such questions went unanswered.
Then came the boat incident. On March 26, 2010, the South Korean Navy ship Cheonan sank off the country’s west coast, and forty-six sailors died. An international investigation revealed that the ship had been blown up by a North Korean submarine torpedo. Inter-Korean relations chilled, and the door that seemed to have opened a crack shut. I doubted that the school would be operating anytime soon, or that anyone would be able to get a visa. The project was on pause again.
At the end of that year, however, PUST finally opened. Somehow my application had been lost, they said, and they had assembled the teaching staff for the first semester from those at their YUST branch. Be ready to come in the spring, Joan wrote.
Then silence again until April 2011, when an email with the subject line “Purchase List” appeared in my in-box. My visa, once approved for “entry,” had to be stamped by as many as thirty-five government agencies within North Korea to be approved for “release.” President Kim had asked that the process be expedited or waived altogether for the PUST teachers, and they were waiting for a new law to pass for this to happen. “A new law? That could take months, even years!” I said via Skype, but Joan assured me that in North Korea such a thing could happen in a matter of days and told me to start packing.
Joan said that I would need a refrigerator, as well as toilet paper and butter. Was there no way of getting those things there? I wondered. You bring everything to Pyongyang, I was told. I wired money to Joan so that she could purchase a refrigerator and have it shipped from China, but I was not sure whether a block of frozen butter would survive the long-haul flights from New York to Pyongyang. There were so many things, it turned out, that I could not do without. You would think that, being a writer, I would have put books at the top of my list, but in fact, books were the last things on my mind. The things I packed were more basic: an extra pair of glasses, disposable contact lenses, sanitary napkins, ibuprofen, vitamins and antibiotics of all kinds, plus as many protein bars as I could jam in my suitcases.
Visas to North Korea are almost always issued on the eve of the visitor’s entry date, and plane tickets from Beijing to Pyongyang can only be purchased with a visa in hand. This meant that I had to leave for Asia immediately and be on call—which is how I found myself stuck in Seoul for the next seven weeks waiting for my visa, which had been blocked at the last minute. The wait came with no excuse or explanation. In any negotiation, North Korea has absolute power regarding who does what, and at what price, because there is always a price.
THAT SUMMER, MONSOON came early. In that part of Asia, rain begins one day and does not stop for a month straight. This usually happens in July, but it had begun by mid-June that year, and I was miserable. I had already been waiting more than a month for North Korea to approve my visa when the rain began. I would be awoken at dawn by the pelting sound against the windowpane, my hair soaked from humidity. Despite air-conditioning, I was perpetually sweaty and sluggish, which only added to my feelings of helplessness. The year had started badly and was turning worse. I had recently been through a horrible breakup that came on the heels of nine blighting years.
Seoul was not easy either. My sister, who had always been my emotional rock, had moved back there from New York. She was not well, and my morning ritual consisted of cutting up organic Asian pears and melons for her after soaking them in organic vegetable wash. We were worried about bacteria because her immune system was compromised, and this state of worry was jarring to me since I was the perennial younger sister and had never taken care of her before. In the afternoon, I would accompany her to doctors for checkups, blood tests, or physical therapy. Or I would take her two girls, aged seven and eleven, to band practice and to get their chicken pox shots, the things that moms in all parts of the world do, although I did not fit in among the South Korean moms and was always reminded of the fact that I had never become a mother myself.
I should have been keeping tabs on the breaking news about North Korea, which inevitably concerned the heir apparent Kim Jong-un, whom the foreign media referred to as either “Precious Leader” or “Supreme Leader,” but instead I took solace in writing emails to an old lover in Brooklyn with whom I had just reconnected. I knew that I was not ready for another relationship, but I wanted to love him that summer. Nothing distracts a wounded soul during trying circumstances like new love, even the recycled kind, and every night as I willed myself to sleep in that thick, heavy Seoul monsoon, I would remind myself that I had this lover back home, and all I had to do was finish the trip safely so I could get back to him. He did not love me and was perpetually busy, so he wasn’t good about answering my needlessly beseeching emails. But he did respond when he felt like it. That summer, in the flooded city of Seoul, his emails were like glimpses of the sun.
Waiting for news of my visa, I often thought about those who had gone missing, my mother’s brother and my father’s cousins. How their mothers must have waited, and waited, not moving houses after the war for as long as possible so that their sons and daughters could be sure of finding their way back home. Every day, the mothers must have hoped that this would be the day. They must have looked up expectantly each time a doorbell rang. Perhaps that is my child. Please let it be my child. Yes, it has to be. Because it is nonsensical, the idea that you would never see your baby again. Because in our world nothing is ever lost without a trace.
That summer was also about many other kinds of waiting. I waited for the day when I would stop hurting over my failed engagement. I waited for the man in Brooklyn to email me back with some sign of affection because at that point in my life, I was especially susceptible to kindness. Most of all, I waited for m
y sister’s treatments to be over, so that she wouldn’t be in pain. In the midst of all this, I waited to hear about the visa to North Korea, which I believed in the depths of my heart was my way out of whatever I was feeling.
Then in late June, a phone call came. My visa had been cleared and I would be teaching in the summer semester. The orientation would take place in Beijing in three days’ time, and by the first of July we would leave for North Korea.
2
FOR A PLACE SHROUDED IN RUMORS OF VIOLENCE, PYONGYANG always appears surprisingly gentle, at least at first. This visit, my fourth, was no different. The horizon was empty except for a handful of old airplanes, perched on the tarmac like ancient flies. The surrounding farmland looked as though it belonged in a story about someplace where nothing bad ever happened and the villagers meant you no harm. Against the stark stillness stood a lone airport terminal topped with a giant portrait of Kim Il-sung. In the distance a group of huddled men waited to guide each delegation.
Whenever I come upon the tattered phrase “deafening silence,” I recall that initial impression, that quiet wonder upon finally beholding the object of so much fascination. Finding that this modern-day Atlantis, or anti-Atlantis, really exists after all, you want an explanation, an apology, some clarity. Yet there it is, just a tiny airport on the outskirts of a capital city, nothing more or less.
The silence is strange, since wherever else you are in Pyongyang, your senses are never left in peace. Inevitably music blasts from a speaker nearby. Sometimes it is a love song, sometimes a marching tune, but the topic is always the same. Virtually every building is adorned with a slogan, every TV screen with the same image, the way advertising billboards fill the horizon in Western societies, but in North Korea there is only one product: the Great Leader. Yet beneath such noise is terrifying silence. Everything has been so hushed for decades that if you press your ear to the stillness, you can almost hear the muted cries.
The customs official took my American passport, glanced at it, and asked if I spoke Korean. The North Koreans I had met in the past always seemed proud to be Korean. Despite the war between us that had loomed more than half a century, when Koreans find themselves around Westerners, it is always us against them. When I answered him in Korean, he smiled and let me pass. Immediately we had to give up our passports and cell phones to the minder who was waiting for us. The small airport looked a lot brighter than I remembered, and the baggage carousels were actually moving this time. (The first time I flew into Pyongyang in 2002, soon after the famine, bags had simply been thrown on the floor, and the bathroom was a pitch-dark hole with no toilet paper.)
My fellow teachers and I followed the minder to a bus that had been sent by PUST. About ten minutes beyond downtown Pyongyang, after crossing Chungsong (Loyalty) Bridge and the Taedong River, we took an exit onto a narrow road with farmland on either side. This led to a gate bearing the school’s name, with a tiny gatehouse on its left, beyond which the campus came into view. The place was so secluded that it might have been a sanitarium. There was a lot of concrete, and the dull heaviness of the buildings imbued the place with a sense of the forlorn. To the left was a slim, tall stone monument that reached higher than the nearby five-story building topped with massive letters spelling out LONG LIVE GENERAL KIM JONG-IL, THE SUN OF THE 21ST CENTURY! The building contained classrooms, and it was connected by an enclosed walkway to the cafeteria building, which was connected to a health clinic and bathhouse, which were in turn connected to the dormitories, so that the buildings and the walkway formed a sort of horseshoe. The walkways had windows on either side, and it struck me then that there was no privacy here, that anyone’s movements were visible. The only structure not connected to the rest was an austere gray building to our right, which stood on its own.
It would not be true to say that a sense of dread came over me the first time I beheld the set of buildings in that isolated compound that was soon to be my refuge and prison. I simply felt nothing, much the way I felt nothing the first time I saw New York at the age of thirteen. That first glimpse comes with no history, no warning. The school was just a school. The students whose faces would fill that 248-acre space with meaning for me were still nowhere to be seen. Instead, I was preoccupied with the logistics of the place. Who approved it and why, and who was here, both to teach and to be taught?
The next morning, my alarm clock went off at 5 a.m., and for a moment I was lost. This happens in any new city, but when that city is Pyongyang, it takes an extra moment to get your bearings. The teachers’ dormitories were made up of cookiecutter, modern two-bedroom apartments, each about five hundred square feet. From the entrance, there were two rooms to the right, both with queen-sized beds, an open kitchen with a dining table, a small living area with a leather couch, a TV, an intercampus phone, almost floor-to-ceiling windows, and a modern bathroom. I had mine all to myself, and it was nicer than almost any dorm room I had lived in.
The first thing I saw when I looked out my fifth-floor window was a plain green stretch of land and two buildings just beyond the campus. One of the buildings was a drab yellow, with a blue roof, and looked a bit like a New England–style barn; the other was a concrete building barricaded by a stone wall. During my entire stay I would never find out what they were, as I learned not to ask many questions.
Fighting off pangs of loneliness and fear, I got up and switched on the kettle, which I had bought in Beijing, and looked for coffee in my suitcase. Over there, coffee will feel like currency, someone had told me, and this was true. I am not loyal to any brand, but in my dormitory at PUST, my Breakfast Blend coffee from Trader Joe’s felt like a true luxury, the mark of capitalism, a reminder of the outside world. I added a few drops of the long-lasting milk I had brought with me, which had a pungent, synthetic taste I would never get used to. So I stood there, with my first morning coffee in Pyongyang, looking out at the bleak, unknowable buildings. I felt as far away from everything I knew as if I had been erased overnight.
I had been told that breakfast was between 6:30 and 7:30 in the cafeteria, and when I stepped outside, I could see the cylindrical stone monument towering into the sky in the distance. On either side of the path were tiny orange and pink flowers that looked as generic as the buildings. I saw no one and slowly walked toward the cafeteria, passing three identical-looking student dormitories on my right. The walk took about five minutes, and I would do this three times a day for a month for that summer semester, and more months in the fall, although I did not know then that I would be able to last that long. On my way I saw the Pyongyang skyline, so hazy that I could barely make it out. And on the horizon was a lone smoke stack belching thin, occasional smoke, the only sign of life in that still landscape.
IT WAS THE kind of a cafeteria you might see anywhere. Past the heavy glass door was a huge hall packed with tables. There was a self-service food station, where students and teachers lined up separately. Breakfast was porridge and boiled eggs. I took a metal tray and was beginning to help myself when I heard my name being shouted from one of the tables.
“Hello, how nice we meet again!” said a man brightly. From his accent, I could tell that he was North Korean. Who could I possibly bump into here? I took a deep breath and turned around, facing a round tanned face and smiling eyes. They all have smiling eyes, the minders, but Mr. Ri stood out. During the New York Philharmonic coverage in 2008, he had been assigned to the foreign journalists, although he shadowed me most of the time as I was the sole Korean-speaking journalist among them and was thus seen as more of a threat. He had been particularly friendly and had spoken to me in casual Korean, talking about his wife, for whom he was trying to quit smoking.
The men I had met there in the past liked cigarettes. American cigarettes, in particular, were a novelty. They would swear that the United States was their number one enemy, and yet carrying a pack of Marlboro Lights seemed to be a sign of privilege and class. Visitors to North Korea often bring cigarettes and whiskey for their minders as a kind
of hedge against their eternal watchfulness. I had brought a few cartons on that trip, too, and when I gave them out, whoever was on the receiving end inevitably asked if they were purchased in China or America. They said that there were many fake Marlboro Lights in China.
On the Philharmonic trip, Mr. Ri and I had chatted so effortlessly that at times it was confusing to make sense of our relationship, since his job was to report on me, and my job as a magazine correspondent, reporting on the event, was not all that different. It is remarkable how quickly camaraderie develops when tensions are high.
The thirty-six hours in Pyongyang on that trip were a whirlwind. It turned out that that was the whole point. It was a PR event carefully orchestrated by the DPRK regime, with the American orchestra providing the incidental music. There was nothing any of us could write about except what we were allowed to see, which was a concert like any other, a few staged welcome performances, and the usual tourist sites. It was a lesson in control and manipulation. The real audience was not those in the concert hall but the journalists whose role was to deliver a sanitized version of North Korea to the outside world, and what shocked me was how easily seduced they were. Both CNN and the New York Times reported that the performance drew tears from the audience, and soon the major newspapers around the world followed with stories about this successful experiment in cultural diplomacy. Lorin Maazel, then the conductor of the Philharmonic, declared that seventy million Koreans would thank him forever. I witnessed no crying in the audience—all handpicked members of the Party elite—nor did any of the correspondents I spoke to after the performance. The tears I recall from that trip were a different kind.