by Suki Kim
One wrote that if you saw your favorite girl drowning, you should rescue her, even if you did not swim, and then she would see that you are nice, and you would become boyfriend and girlfriend. Another wrote that if it rained, you must share your umbrella with your favorite girl if she did not have one. No one suggested anything so bold as going with a girl to a café or movie, but several wrote about meeting up at the Grand People’s Study House, their national library, which made me think that perhaps that was the main place where boys and girls met in Pyongyang. More than one described his ideal girl as one who would obey him, listen to him, and be a good mother to his son. After all, this was a country where the most important thing a woman had ever done was to give birth to the Great Leader—not unlike the Virgin Mary. Kim Jong-suk, Kim Il-sung’s wife and Kim Jong-il’s mother, has been immortalized as the revolutionary female general, one of the holy trinity of “Three Generals” (the others being her husband and son). However, Kim Jong-il’s various wives were never even acknowledged.* Most students wrote postscripts about how they really had no interest in girls and would rather study to help build their powerful and prosperous nation and make their Great Leader proud, as though they were conscious of who might read their words.
Some of the young teachers in my group were just as innocent. Sarah talked about a past romance, and yet after some time, I realized that the relationship had not involved any physical contact. I asked her what made it a romance and not a friendship, but she just smiled shyly. Katie also talked about dating but never allowing kissing. She kept repeating that she was okay being alone because God fulfilled her. I wondered whether my students were equally fulfilled by their devotion to the Great Leader.
One evening, after dinner, Sarah stopped by my room, looking like a teenager in her T-shirt and baggy soccer shorts. She told me that she had written a will before leaving home. She had no idea what it would be like in North Korea and asked God whether it would be all right if she died. And he told her that it would be. And she knew that he would show her the way. “I want my life to count,” said Sarah with wistful eyes, and for a moment, I felt a kinship with her. She said that she wanted to marry soon, now that she was approaching thirty, but there were no men for her at PUST. If she met someone who shared her dreams, she could imagine marrying him, moving here together, and dedicating her life to bringing Christianity to the people of North Korea.
She asked me if I had a boyfriend. I told her I was not sure, although there was someone I liked. I immediately regretted admitting this; I barely knew her, and she was a missionary. I was lonely, I guess. With each day, I felt more isolated. It was odd that I should have felt so in need of a human connection in this communal space. Every meal was shared, every second of the day spent in the company of others. In New York City, as a writer, a whole week sometimes passed in which I was holed up in my apartment and did not see a person and felt content, and yet here I wanted to pour my heart out to someone, anyone. And for that moment, it felt as though we were just two girlfriends whispering secrets to each other.
“What’s he like? Did you meet him at church?” she asked with a smile in her eyes, lowering her voice to say the word church.
I said no.
“Is he someone who could join you here?” she asked. She had a habit of opening her eyes unusually wide as though she were permanently surprised.
I knew what she was after, and I felt uneasy about where the conversation was going. So I just said, “Probably not.”
Her eyes widened even more. “He’s Christian, right?”
I was not sure how to answer this since I did not want to reveal myself, so I answered as truthfully as I could, reflecting on the fact that my lover was a writer. “He’s … spiritual.”
She asked again, “But does he not believe in Jesus?”
I could see the beginning of a rift, the disapproval in her eyes. I liked her, and I did not want to lose her. So I just repeated, “He’s spiritual.”
She seemed confused, but she asked no more questions. There was no doubt in her mind that I was just like her, a missionary, because why would I work without pay in this bleak land if I were not following a higher calling? But no real believer would be interested in a nonbeliever for a mate.
Life was about serving a purpose, and yet there was a gulf between us. Her life’s purpose was to serve God. Without him, life would lose its meaning and she might as well not exist.
What I did not tell Sarah was that during the first ten days, I had received just one email from the man in Brooklyn. When are you coming home? he asked. That’s all he wrote. He was a man of few words to begin with, and perhaps he felt nervous sending emails to this forbidden place on the other side of the world. For newly connected lovers, two months apart was an interminably long time, especially when our lives were moving at such vastly different speeds. Since I had arrived in Pyongyang, England’s News of the World had shut down after the phone hacking scandal exploded. The final Harry Potter movie had come and gone. Mumbai had suffered another bombing. A new nation had been born in Sudan. Amazon had just announced a new tablet to rival the iPad. I knew all this because I was one of the very few in all of North Korea who had access to global news. In my room, I always had CNN Asia on, often with the sound muted. In the past I had never watched much TV news, but here it felt comforting, a window to the outside world.
One evening, I was grading papers when I happened to look up and see the Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building on the screen. I burst into tears, seized by such a profound longing for home that I could not stand it. I paced back and forth, wanting to pick up the phone and call home, but of course we had no phones that could call outside. Nothing went in or out. It felt so stationary that it was sometimes hard to put dates to things.
I had asked my students when their favorite drama, The Nation of the Sun, was made, and they had no idea. Ten years ago? Twenty? They seemed to think it was about twenty, which made me realize that even their favorite TV program was not currently produced. Both Great Leaders always looked to be in late middle age. No one knew the exact age of the Precious Leader; it was not until later, after he came to power, that various media confirmed his age as twenty-nine. Their newspaper was filled with vague events with nonspecific dates, and on the one trip we had taken outside the gate, I had seen store signs with words such as namse (a word for vegetables no longer used in South Korea) that harkened back to decades ago. The entire country was like a linguistic and cultural Galápagos.
So time moved on—or didn’t—on this strange campus that seemed even stranger than the strange country beyond its walls, and, to find an anchor, I hung on to my lover’s email. When are you coming home? Those five words carried me as I woke up at 5 a.m. and opened the curtain to face each new day.
“So are you a writer?”
Sarah’s question shook me out of my reverie.
For a moment I was caught off guard, but then I said yes, I was a novelist, but I was there as a teacher. To my relief, she seemed satisfied with my answer and never brought the subject up again.
Shortly after my conversation with Sarah, I discovered that one of the teachers, a man from a Christian university in Mississippi, had Googled everyone from the group. Some of the missionaries seemed oblivious to their surroundings, even naive, often forgetting that our Internet connection was constantly monitored. A teacher from Texas told me that he got on the Internet and tried to pay for something with PayPal, but it was denied because the company blocked usage from countries under international economic sanction. Another teacher seemed surprised to learn that this country had gulags.
When Katie heard about the teacher who had Googled everyone, she panicked. She had done some NGO work helping defectors. Though I did not say anything to Katie, I was afraid that my cover had been blown. So far, no one in our group had asked me directly whether or not I was Christian, perhaps because they kept a low profile themselves. All I could hope was that the counterparts did not learn the truth.
Yet it was understandable that we would sometimes forget to be careful, since we had not been raised in an atmosphere of hypervigilance. With each day, I found myself slipping, usually at meals, where our conversations were more informal. Sometimes after teaching all morning, I became clumsy from fatigue. Other times I slipped on purpose.
Once, we were discussing sports—the students were uniformly passionate about sports—and they were curious about the NBA, but the only player they knew was Michael Jordan. Their knowledge was never up to date. Even the North Korean basketball superstar they talked about—Ri Myung-hoon, the tallest player in the world, according to them—had played little since the 1990s. They all claimed that they had never seen an NBA game, but some of them seemed more aware than they let on. One student asked, “Who is the best player now?” So he knew that Jordan had retired. I told him that it was Miami Heat’s LeBron James, but then decided I would be on safer ground with tennis and told a story about seeing two top-ranked players, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer, play at the U.S. Open a few years before.
“You saw them in person?” one of the students asked, incredulous.
We were not supposed to say things that could be seen as boasting about America, but I wanted them to know that seeing professional sports in person was very much a reality in the rest of the world, and that it was perfectly normal for players from Spain and Switzerland to travel to New York, and vice versa. I wanted them to know that no one told us where we could go and where we could not. So I just shrugged and said, “Of course, the stadium is only about forty-five minutes from my apartment by subway, so I go to the U.S. Open every year.” They said nothing, and I was not sure if they believed me.
Other times I would say things like “Yes, I learned to play pool when I did an exchange program in London during college.” Or “I backpacked across Europe when I was your age,” or “I was born in Seoul and still have family there, so I visit Seoul often.” They never asked, “How was it?” or “What is London like?” but I knew they noticed the fact that, unlike them, we teachers were able to travel freely. Their only response would be to suddenly go quiet, and I would pick up the conversation, saying something about Pyongyang instead, at which their faces would brighten.
They would ask me what I had seen in Pyongyang, and they would describe other worthy sites. There was a place called Golden Lane, they said, which was a bowling alley as well as a billiard hall. There was Changgangwon, a “service” place with a swimming pool and barbershop. Pyongyang Indoor Stadium was another place they were quite proud of. But none of them offered the phrases that usually accompany locals’ advice to visitors: You must go there next week, or Let me show you. No one here was allowed to go anywhere of his own accord, without permission.
The teachers had been talking about a possible trip to Kaesung next semester, so I asked the students how many had been there. Kaesung had been an ancient Korean capital as well as a bargaining chip during the Korean War, when both sides stalled in signing the armistice in hopes of securing it. Because of its proximity to the 38th parallel, the city had served as an inter-Korean trade zone since 2002. It was possibly the second most important city in the nation, only a couple of hours from Pyongyang, yet only one student had been there. During their time at PUST, they weren’t even allowed to visit their parents in downtown Pyongyang, only ten or fifteen minutes away by car.
Not only were the teachers’ movements similarly restricted, but communication was heavily constrained. Joan said that her daughter was mining her regular emails back home and had promised to tell her about anything urgent. Katie said that she was in contact with no one but her parents, and she generally wrote only one sentence to tell them she was okay. Sarah also kept things very short and to the point. I never emailed my parents from PUST. My mother was so upset and worried about my being there that she could barely look at me before I left. I sent a weekly email saying “I am safe” to my brother-in-law as a way of checking in on my sister, as well as letting the rest of the family know that I was alive.
We were always obedient. If any one of us had been wild and rebellious, that person could have tried to slip past the guards or climb the walls that surrounded PUST, but nobody ever dared. The constant surveillance by the counterparts and the minders evoked fear in us. We knew that the consequences were unthinkable, so we did what we were told.
We accepted our situation meekly. How quickly we became prisoners, how quickly we gave up our freedom, how quickly we tolerated the loss of that freedom, like a child being abused, in silence. In this world, there were no individual demands, and asking permission for everything was infantilizing. So we began to understand our students, who had never been able to do anything on their own. The notion of following your heart’s desire, of going wherever you chose, did not exist here, and I did not see any way to let them know what it felt like, especially since, after so little time in their system, I had lost my own sense of freedom.
BY THE END of the second week, the students seemed to have gotten used to the idea of office hours. Now that they had been commanded to come, they arrived in swarms. One afternoon, as Katie and I were getting ready for the students, Mr. Ri appeared at our door. Until then, no counterpart or minder had randomly turned up at my office. He made small talk and told us not to be nervous, which of course only made us more so. He then sat down in one of the spare chairs and began to page through the textbook on my desk. The book had already won the counterparts’ approval, so there was no need for us to be worried, and yet his behavior was vaguely threatening. Katie sat in one corner and began reading through student compositions, which made me panic slightly in case any of them revealed too much. So while exchanging pleasantries with Mr. Ri, I casually took a notebook and flung it over the pile of papers in front of Katie. Luckily, she caught on right away and pretended to be rearranging the desk, efficiently hiding the pile. Mr. Ri seemed not to notice. Continuing to skim the textbook, he remarked how hard English was. I told him in simple Korean, so that Katie could understand, that he should join our class if he wanted to learn more, but I joked that he would have to do his homework, and my invitation seemed to please him. It was hard to believe that only three years before we had shared tears at the airport. If he remembered it, he did not show it, and I certainly never mentioned it. In this world, sentimental reflection on a shared history was not a thing we could afford.
I then noticed several students at the door, who swiftly recoiled when they saw Mr. Ri. These were the most garrulous ones from the group, so it was eerie to see how they stiffened at the sight of him. Even Park Jun-ho, the student with perpetually smiling eyes and devilish charm, looked nervous. Mr. Ri seemed to want to stick around, but I put my foot down. “My students can’t really focus with you around,” I said with a smile, and he laughed awkwardly and left. Immediately, the boys visibly relaxed. Soon more boys arrived, and before we knew it, we had an office full of students. Some had questions about the textbook, but mostly they wanted just to talk. “Free talking in English!” they insisted.
While Katie told them a story about setting her kitchen on fire in China while trying to roast a chicken, I thought about what I could possibly tell them, but almost everything about my life was taboo. So instead of opening up about myself, I brought up their recent homework topic, “How to Successfully Get a Girl,” and asked whether people still subscribed to arranged marriages in their society. They said yes, some, but they themselves preferred the idea of marrying for love. However, they really did not think about it, since women typically married at twenty-seven and men around thirty. This was probably due to the fact that most men were required to serve in the military for ten years, starting at seventeen, although my students were exempt from such duty, as most children of the elite were. Then they asked how it was done in America, so I told them there were no arranged marriages, but some people now met via computer. I caught myself in mid-sentence, before I spoke the word Internet. Unable to explain about dating sites or speak fre
ely as they had requested, I could do nothing but return to the topic of English grammar.
THE FOLLOWING SATURDAY, I found myself at a table with three students wearing their khaki guard uniforms, by now a familiar sight. The students seemed more relaxed, and when I asked them why they had to guard the Kimilsungism Study Hall every night, they told me that they were guarding the spirit of their Great Leader. Then I asked them what was inside the building. Just classrooms, they said. This same building was where they disappeared in the late afternoons to study Juche, so it occurred to me that it was a bit like a church for them.
As I imagined all the more productive ways those young men could spend their Saturday nights, Kang Sun-pil added, “Oh, but it is not tiring at all. There are six of us. We take turns. It is really not difficult. We read and study English to pass the time, and if we learn English, we will be able to better serve our country and our Great General Kim Jong-il.” This was so clearly articulated that I did a double take. Until then Sun-pil had been so quiet in class that I had hardly noticed him, but in that moment I could not help thinking that if I ever slipped, he would report me. Then I looked at the other two at the table. Suddenly I did not trust any of them. These moments of doubt were like poison. I was not sure who they were, and I felt like a mother terrified of her own children, an extremely ugly feeling. But then one of them would say something adorable, and I would shake it off.
To change the subject, I told them that the teachers had been taken sightseeing that day. When I said that I had seen their subway system, they immediately guessed that I had been to the Buheung (Revival) and Yunggwang (Glory) stations, the designated stops for tourists, which I had been shown each time I visited Pyongyang. I also told them that I was taken to the Grand People’s Study House. At this, Ryu Jung-min suddenly perked up and asked if I had seen any students there. He looked at me intently, and from his expression, I gathered that this was an important question. To ponder its implications, I asked him to repeat it.