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

by Suki Kim

  We were always wary of one another. And this incessant circling around the boundary and our efforts not to breach it were exhausting. We wanted to discover things about one another, yet if we stumbled across such information, we both froze.

  It was a fine dance. I wanted to push them but not too much; to expose them to the outside world, but so subtly that no one would notice. The missionaries wanted to convert them, but not in any obvious way. (During a previous semester, one of the teachers had been expelled from the DPRK for leaving Christian texts in the men’s bathroom, and we had all been warned never to say anything about Jesus. As far as I could tell, the missionaries contented themselves with showing North Koreans the love of Christ simply by being kind to them. Theirs was a long-term project, so that when North Korea did one day open up, they would already have a foothold here.)

  Was this really conscionable? Awakening my students to what was not in the regime’s program could mean death for them and those they loved. If they were to wake up and realize that the outside world was in fact not crumbling, that it was their country that was in danger of collapse, and that everything they had been taught about the Great Leader was bogus, would that make them happier? How would they live from that point on? Awakening was a luxury available only to those in the free world.

  NOT ALL OF us knew it then, but it was a time of upheaval in North Korea. During my first week, at a staff meeting, President Kim told us that every university in the entire country had shut down, except PUST. The reason PUST had been spared, he said, was that the Great Leader “believed” in him personally. This bit of news was related to us with no further explanation, but it was consistent with outside reports that Kim Jong-un, the “Precious Leader,” was being positioned to take over for the sixty-nine-year-old Kim Jong-il, who had suffered a stroke in 2008, and that every university student had been taken out of school and sent to do construction work until April 2012, when the entire nation would celebrate Kim Il-sung’s one hundredth birthday.

  I was not sure what to think. Western news reports about the DPRK were often unreliable, and the closing of all universities other than PUST seemed an extreme measure, even for North Korea.

  It seemed strange that in a country where organized religion was not permitted, and where anyone who did not believe in the Great Leader was considered a heretic, only this school—the “embassy from the kingdom of heaven,” according to President Kim—would be permitted to operate. Perhaps the Great Leader believed not in Kim, but in the cash the Christians raised to fund this free, relatively posh school for the North Korean elite. Moreover, I knew of no science teachers at the school, despite the fact that it was called the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology. I wanted to know why my students had not been sent to do construction like the others, but there was no one I could ask.

  WITH EACH PASSING day, we, the teachers, wondered why we were so tired. Sarah, a teacher from New Zealand, said that she slept for hours in the middle of the day. Ruth, another New Zealander, but of Korean origin, said that she felt as though she were still jet-lagged although she had flown in from Yanji, China, which was only one hour behind. I would fall into such a heavy sleep that my body felt almost numb. Katie said that it was because we were all so cautious all the time. Every evening, I thought back to the conversations that had taken place earlier that day during each meal, trying to determine whether I had said something I should not have. It takes tremendous energy to censor yourself all the time, to have to, in a sense, continually lie.

  There were mornings when I looked out my window and stared at the wall that separated PUST from the outside. Some teachers whispered that this was a five-star prison. We knew that we could never pass through the gate except on trips to go grocery shopping at the diplomatic compound or on organized sightseeing tours at designated times, when minders planned our outings down to the minute and accompanied us.

  On weekends, there were trips outside when teachers could stock up on groceries. The school van took teachers to Pyongyang Shop, a Japanese-owned grocery, and an Argentinian grocery. All of them carried canned products, cheese, fruit, cereal, and long-lasting milk. The Japanese shop sold Japanese-made pancake mix for about five dollars, as well as wheat germ, which cost twice what it did in the United States. The Argentinian shop sold a variety of 100 percent fruit juice concentrates and some canned pasta from France. These stores took euros, Chinese renminbi, and U.S. dollars, but not North Korean won. As per the rules, we were only allowed to use the local currency in places where the locals shopped alongside us. The newly constructed Potonggang Department Store carried every kind of import, from refrigerators and cosmetics to groceries, laid out on two floors connected by an escalator, a rare sight in North Korea. The people who shopped there looked wealthier than those on the streets.

  On those outings, we were escorted out and brought back in as a unit. We never crossed the boundary on our own. Would I be shot if I were to run out the gate while jogging? Was there a watch post from which someone surveyed us at all times? Even in my room, I never felt free. This vigilance was so exhausting that I welcomed it when Sarah came over one night and said, “Let’s see if the students would invite us to play soccer with them!”

  Basketball and soccer, and sometimes volleyball, were the sports of choice among the students, for the obvious reason that the only equipment required was a ball. After dinner, they gathered and played either in the cement basketball court by their dormitory or in the grass field in the center of the campus. They did not have jerseys, so the teams were divided between those students with shirts and those without. On hot July evenings, they played with a zeal I had not seen them show anywhere else. They shouted at each other in jest, burst into laughter, sweated profusely, and moved with the unique grace and beauty of youth. I often sat on a rock nearby and watched them. The sun would be setting in the distance, so slowly that sometimes it appeared as though even the sun moved at a different speed there, like the slow smoke billowing from the distant tower. That smoke, on such evenings, looked as ethereal as those moving bodies, and in that moment, I forgot all of it, the taboo subjects we never spoke of and the secrets hidden all over campus. Instead all I saw was their heartbreaking youth and energy, and I wished then that they could have the whole world, all of it, that which had been denied to them for twenty years of their lives, because none of them had any idea that as their bodies bounced, their minds stood so very still within that field in that campus locked away from time.

  On that particular evening, Sarah and I walked past them and lingered, hoping for an invitation, until one of them asked, “Professor, would you like to play with us?” Sarah broke into a huge smile and said, “Yes!” and it was as easy as that. Surprisingly, the counterparts, who must have been informed, never intercepted her. Before we knew it, it became a ritual for Sarah to play with the students in the evenings. Sarah had played back in college, just a few years ago. At about five foot two, with bright blue eyes, sandy hair always in a ponytail, and freckles covering her childlike features, she looked like a quiet, churchgoing country girl, but on the field she was ferocious, with quick foot movements and remarkable stamina. The boys were impressed. They weren’t used to playing with girls. But this wasn’t just any girl. This was one of the first foreigners they had ever met. Their professor, no less. They loved the novelty of it, and Sarah became a mini-star on campus. A few other professors, including me, joined in at times, but never with her expertise.

  During a break in the game, Sarah came up to me and said, “Oh, I feel good being here now, really good, I could really imagine living here.” The boys must have felt just as relaxed because some who had been standing in front of the big gray building across the road walked over to watch as well. They were wearing the same uniform Choi Min-jun had been wearing a few nights ago at dinner. “So why are you wearing that?” I asked casually. “Oh, we guard our Kimilsungism Study Hall,” one said. I learned that six boys took turns guarding the large, austere building all
night long, from dinnertime until breakfast. I could not imagine what could be inside that needed guarding; it seemed that their demonstration of devotion was itself the point. The mystery of the uniform was not that mysterious after all, so why had some of them been so afraid to tell us?

  6

  THE WORLD WIDE WEB WAS NOT REALLY WORLDWIDE, IT turned out. None of us ever breathed a word about it. A few students who had transferred from Kim Chaek University said that what they most missed from their old school was how they had all been connected by an electronic network. I understood that they were talking about their intranet, a heavily censored network that allowed them access only to already downloaded information and state-sponsored websites.

  I was not allowed to tell them that their intranet was not the same as the Internet—that the rest of the world was connected while only they were left out. I would look for signs that one of them guessed the truth, but I saw none. Without having experienced the World Wide Web, could I have imagined it? Even if someone had described it to me, I would never have been able to fathom it.

  I asked innocently whether they could communicate with their parents over this electronic connection, and they answered, “No, just by phone, sometimes.” I asked whether their parents knew how to use a computer. Most said their fathers knew how, but not their mothers. One said that his father was a government official so he was good with computers, and another said that his father was a doctor so he also knew how to use them.

  They had all heard of Bill Gates from their former universities, but I wanted to tell them about Mark Zuckerberg, who at their age had revolutionized the way we communicate with one another. How very much they would have enjoyed learning about the boy wonder and his invention of Facebook, the magic of connecting with people all over the world! Sometimes I would fantasize about smuggling in The Social Network, writing subtitles, and secretly distributing it throughout the student dorms, but I was not a superhero, and all I could do was smile at their claims about their amazing intranet across our trays of dull-tasting kimchi and rice.

  By the second week, with the counterparts’ approval, the teachers had begun to introduce the students to various parlor games—trivia contests, spelling bees, Pictionary. Right away I was struck by their astounding lack of general knowledge about the world. These were North Korea’s brightest students, yet photos of the United Nations, the Taj Mahal, and the Great Pyramids of Giza elicited only blank expressions. A few guessed the names and locations of the Eiffel Tower and Stonehenge, but only after much hemming and hawing. Hardly anyone knew what country had first landed men on the moon, despite the fact that they were science and technology majors. Asked what year computers had been invented, most had no idea; it was only after much consultation that one team ventured a guess: 1870.

  At the same time, they all knew that Alaska had been sold to the United States for the absurdly low price of $7.2 million—a clear lesson in American imperialism. And though their English vocabulary levels were uneven, there was one phrase everyone knew: brain drain. Was the regime so afraid that members of the elite would defect that they had drilled them on that word? When we decided to make origami together, we learned that they knew how to make nothing except war planes.

  Of course, in response to any question about their own country—such as when their first satellite, Kwangmyongsong-1, was launched into space (an event much boasted about by the DPRK, although the rest of the world deemed it a failure)—they all shouted out the exact date and year.

  They enjoyed games that pitted one group against another, perhaps because they did everything in groups. They came to the cafeteria in groups and lived on assigned floors in groups. They played only group sports, and when I mentioned that I liked tennis, they barely responded. They knew what it was, but it was unfamiliar to them. Being divided into groups and ranked in hierarchies—that was what they knew. An individual action was unthinkable.

  Group spirit dominated everything. Even when they were competing, they looked out for one another. During the all-freshmen trivia game, which took place in one of the bigger classrooms, some of them whispered answers to others. And spelling bees were nearly impossible, since if one got stuck on a word, the whole class would help him along by mouthing the correct spelling.

  When Class 4 finally won the trivia game, their excitement was boundless because they had always been the underdogs. As Katie and I entered their classroom afterward to congratulate them, they all got up and applauded to express their gratitude, which brought us to tears. The class did not settle down from their high for some time. Those were fine moments. Sometimes I wonder whether they, too, will one day reflect on that summer afternoon when they were young and played a game and won and cheered with two teachers from America who cried with happiness.

  As I spent more time with them, I began to notice many peculiar habits. For example, they did not like to volunteer answers during class. These were excellent students. They prepared so thoroughly that it often seemed pointless to go over their homework. The margins of their textbooks were filled with scribbled notes. Yet they hesitated before raising their hands. When I would call on them, they would immediately get up to answer, but volunteering seemed foreign to them.

  Another thing that baffled the students was the pronoun “my.” When referring to Pyongyang, they never said “my” city, but rather “our” city. The DPRK was never “my” country but “our” country. In fact, the words Pyongyang and DPRK were always modified with “our,” as in “our Pyongyang” or “our DPRK.” Even when we gave them a special lesson on “my” versus “our,” and made clear that they could drop “our” altogether with proper nouns, they seemed confused.

  They also seemed to fear office hours. This came up because, even though it was only our second week, Class 4 was already falling behind, and we were told that the counterparts had instructed us to give them extra help. However, when Katie and I set up office hours for those who needed tutoring, we could not persuade anyone to show up, no matter how much we pleaded. The students did not understand what office hours were and viewed them as punishment. We also realized that they were frightened at the idea of being with us one on one, and so we told them they could come in pairs. Still, one student insisted, “Please, can you tell me in the classroom?” Finally we told them that it was mandatory for them to come, and they seemed pleased to obey.

  During that second week, some of the teachers were called to the office of Dr. Joseph, our liaison to the counterparts. On his desk were slips of paper that the counterparts had demanded to know the nature of. On the slips were messages such as “The place where dough rises.” These were clues from an afternoon activity all the teachers had planned—a treasure hunt in which clues and pictures were to be hidden in various locations across campus. The pictures were innocuous images of the sun, moon, and other objects that teachers had randomly printed out from the Internet. Each student would be given a sort of scorecard with a set of boxes, and at each location they would draw the image they found on the card, eventually filling all the boxes. Although the activity itself had been preapproved, the counterparts were furious that the clues and images had not been submitted for approval beforehand and demanded to know what each one meant.

  Dr. Joseph looked upset. He had been reprimanded by the counterparts. We, in turn, panicked since we had no other activity for the afternoon. Still worse, we were worried that the counterparts would not let us plan any further activities. We promised to submit a detailed explanation of the clues and quickly replaced the treasure hunt with the viewing of a documentary.

  This was how the treasure hunt came to be replaced by a showing of March of the Penguins. It was easy to narrow down our choices: only nature documentaries or animated films were allowed, and March of the Penguins was already approved. Unfortunately, the classroom was designed in such a way that projecting a movie against the wall was not simple. The side walls had windows, and the front and back walls featured blackboards, as well as portraits of and me
ssages from the two Great Leaders, which could not be moved. Throughout the school, it was impossible to find a blank wall not adorned by both men. So the one hundred freshmen gathered in one of the bigger classrooms to watch a movie that was half the size it could have been.

  Wherever we were, the Leaders were too. And I wondered what would happen when Kim Jong-il died and Kim Jong-un took over, not knowing how imminent this was. Would a third portrait be added to every wall in the country? Would they have to take down some of the paintings of the father and son to make room for the grandson? Would they have to move some of the slogans and insert his sayings there as well? What about songs? What about books? What about bronze statues? It was endless, and it would be a major project. Katie remarked how much easier it would be if they could just Photoshop an image in rather than doing it manually.

  AT MEALS, THE boys flirted with Katie. Park Jun-ho quizzed her on the qualities she looked for in a man. When she named them, he said: “I have them all!” So she asked, in return, what he liked in a woman. “Obedience,” he answered. When we gave them a writing assignment entitled “How to Successfully Get a Girl,” some of the boys seemed mystified. They came up to me at lunch and asked, “Teacher, this is very difficult for us. How can we write this? We have never had girlfriends!” They were technically college juniors, having spent two years at other universities that were mostly coed. With such a fine pedigree and having grown up mostly in Pyongyang, these were some of the most eligible bachelors in the country, and yet the methods they came up with to woo their dream girl were almost childlike.