by Suki Kim
We did, however, pass two checkpoints, where guards with metal batons waved us down. At each one, the bus stopped and Mr. Han showed the guard a document he kept in his front pocket. These guards had on the same uniforms—blue with a white collar—worn by Pyongyang traffic controllers, who are always female and often photographed by foreigners making carefully choreographed, almost robotic movements to conduct relatively little traffic. These guards clearly had nothing to do with traffic.
Our schedule was, as usual, mapped out to the smallest degree. First we had to order lunch at Hyangsan Hotel, then head to the International Friendship Exhibition Hall before going back to eat. Hyangsan Hotel was a distinctly eighties-style structure with a marble interior and the generic feel of a dated, second-tier Hilton. In front, I saw five or six women squatting and cutting the grass with scissors. This was a familiar sight by now, but still strange. At PUST, and even in Pyongyang’s parks, I had noticed workers doing the same. Lawnmowers were used in the rest of the world, but not here. Was it about control or was there simply a shortage of gas? If people were perpetually squatting in public spaces for the glory of their Great Leader, would they come to believe in him more deeply? I had heard that the Mayans purposely made the steps of their pyramids very steep so that people had no choice but to climb on their knees.
The previous week, as our bus pulled up to the school after a shopping trip, I had seen my class outside, squatting and pulling weeds, not unlike the women outside Hyangsan Hotel. In his next letter to me, one of them wrote: “You might find it strange when you saw us near your dormitory gardening, but we like it, and it is good for us, and it is our duty to our Great Leader.” I thought perhaps his ego had been bruised.
Soon we drove five minutes to the International Friendship Exhibition Hall, which consisted of two similar-looking buildings about two hundred yards apart, designed to look like traditional Korean palaces, each with two soldiers guarding a heavy metal gate. The entrance fee was fourteen dollars per person. As always, we were met by a young woman who served as our guide. First we were told to put cloth booties over our shoes so as not to dirty the marble floors. Then we were told to leave all our things at the coat check and walk through a metal detector. Cameras were not allowed. We were then searched manually as at an airport. Finally, we were led inside to view a set of black cars and a railway carriage given to Kim Il-sung by Stalin and Mao Zedong. A digital display of the number of gifts housed there flashed from the wall: 225,954 items from 184 countries, indicated by flashing red dots on a map. Each room opened into another room full of things, and the guide explained that even if we spent only one minute per one present, it would take one and a half years to view all of them, and that gifts kept pouring in for Kim Il-sung even after his death.
Then she began to describe the presents in front of us, one by one. The replica of Mangyongdae, the house in which Kim Il-sung was born, was made from ivory and had taken ninety-six members of the Communist Party of China one entire year to make. There was a rock from Madagascar that was 100 million years old, she said. There were several presents from Robert Mugabe and Fidel Castro. A silver cup had been given to the Great Leader by Madeleine Albright on October 25, 2000. There was also a figure of a crane given by Billy Graham on April 2, 1992, inscribed “To His Excellency.”
We were then led along an extended hallway decorated with photos of giraffes, elephants, and lions. The guide explained that these animals were also gifts to Kim Il-sung and were now at the Korean Central Zoo in Pyongyang. Finally we came to a room with a big board on the wall, featuring a lot of numbers signifying that Kim Il-sung had visited sixteen countries fifty-four times in total, traveling 52,480 kilometers. Katie and I began to take notes and our minder frowned at us. But when we told him that Katie was interested in pursuing a higher degree in Juche, he softened.
Kim Il-sung had supposedly received 5,050 top government officials and met with 65,000 important people from various countries. In 100 countries, there existed 1,000 Juche research centers. In 106 countries, there existed 69,102,830 translations of Kim Il-sung’s works. In 100 countries, there existed 450 streets named after Kim Il-sung. He had received eighty honorary degrees from universities around the world, as well as 180 medals from twenty countries.
One particular set of numbers puzzled me: the board said that 172 countries had given 166,065 items. When I asked why this number differed from the number of presents cited in the first room, the guide explained that the larger number included gifts to Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-suk, and Kim Jong-il, and this number represented only gifts to Kim Il-sung.
We were then brought to a big room featuring a larger-than-life wax figure of Kim Il-sung himself, standing against a backdrop of pink Kimilsungias (hybrid flowers bred to honor the Great Leader; the ones named after his son are called Kimjongilias) and what looked like Mount Baekdu, smiling as though he were saying hello. We were told that it was mandatory to line up and bow to the figure, and I thought how strangely familiar he had become, now that we had spent more than two weeks surrounded by his portraits and his words, hearing his name in every possible context, and for a moment, it seemed true that he was always with us.
The guide explained that there were two hundred rooms in total, that the gifts were divided up according to the years and months they had been received and the country of origin, and that the rooms held so many things it was impossible to see them all. So we would see only two rooms, which held presents from the United States and New Zealand. She took us down the corridor and tried one door, which was locked, then disappeared for a few minutes. When she returned, she told us that today the rooms she had intended to show us were locked, and that we would instead visit the other building. One of the teachers whispered that considering the admission fee had been fourteen dollars per person, it seemed almost ungracious that they would not even show us one of these special rooms. But we had no say in this matter and had to move swiftly outside.
Just across the way, the other building looked a little smaller but was identically set up. Again we put on the cloth booties and were searched, and the display of presents began in much the same way. Our tour began in the general room with gifts from South Korea, including 850 items from Kim Dae-joong, the former South Korean president known for his Sunshine Policy of greater economic and political cooperation with North Korea. The South Korean Ace Furniture Company, whose president hailed from the North, had given 350 pieces of top-quality furniture including desks, chairs, and armoires, which, the guide explained, was their entire output for five months. (This could not possibly have been true; the company was South Korea’s leading furniture maker and surely produced more in that span of time.) There were also the familiar flashing numbers on a screen: 170 countries and a total of 59,864 presents. We were told that the number denoted only gifts for Kim Jong-il and was distinct from the first set of numbers in the other building. But at this point, so many numbers were jumbled inside my head that I did not much care about any of them.
We were then led along a corridor, again decorated with photos of wild animals, into a room where the presents were divided by countries. There was a silver tray and a gold watch from the U.S. House of Representatives, a blue flower vase from U.S. congressional delegates, and a pink crystal figure from the National Council of Christians. Here also were two familiar names: on April 1, 1992, Billy Graham had given the Great Leader a globe surmounted with white doves, and in 2006 Madeleine Albright had presented him with a Wilson basketball signed by Michael Jordan. The endless recitation of gifts was beginning to make me feel dizzy.
Finally we were brought to a room with a marble statue of Kim Jong-il sitting in an armchair in front of a wall illuminated to look like a sunrise, his face expressionless. I thought of the words that adorned the top of the IT building at PUST: LONG LIVE GENERAL KIM JONG-IL, THE SUN OF THE 21ST CENTURY. We had to bow here too. Our tour again ended without a look at any of the other rooms.
Mount Myohyang was beautiful, however. Natu
re did not lie, although it occurred to me that here even nature might, since we were being shown just one part of the famed mountain as we began hiking. The guide told us we were near Bohyunsa, the Buddhist temple where the famous monk Suhsan had gathered with his followers to counter the attack by the Japanese in the sixteenth century, although we would not be stopping there. Though the temple does exist, I saw no evidence that Buddhists had ever been to this mountain, only the enormous words THE LEGENDARY HERO, KIM JONG-IL carved into the rocky side of the mountain. Otherwise, the mountain was empty. Nearly anywhere else in the world, a mountain like this would be filled with families on a Saturday afternoon. Yet we saw only one group of schoolchildren the whole time we were there. They crowded around us and posed with us for pictures, but soon their teachers came down, stopped our picture taking, and took them away.
I fell into a chat with a few of the older teachers who were taking a break while the younger teachers climbed higher. One of them was in his seventies and originally from Pyongyang. He said that his father had been one of the richest men in the country before the war, and had owned a house and other properties where the Grand People’s Study House now stood. Kim Il-sung had confiscated all private property right after the war, and had relocated families all over the country, much the way Mao did during the Cultural Revolution. Families were separated not only between South and North but also within the country. This explained why whenever I asked a North Korean “Where is your bonjuk?”—a customary question to ask a stranger in South Korea—the person answered that there was no such thing in North Korea. Instead, I learned, North Korea had an unofficial caste system called songbun in which citizens were divided into three main classes and some fifty subclasses, based on a person’s political, social, and economic background, and although they pretended that such hierarchies did not exist, this affected their social mobility. The government had succeeded in wiping out the ancient clan system and replacing it with their own; many North Koreans no longer had the support of an extended family and had no one to rely on but their Great Leader. It was hardly surprising, then, that there were no noteworthy historical artifacts left on this famed mountain, since history itself was an obstacle in bolstering the myth of the Great Leader.
Another member of our group, a Korean-American woman in her sixties, told me about her family’s harrowing escape to the South during the war. She had been only eight months old when her mother decided to make her way south from Shinuju, the northwestern tip of North Korea. Her family had been one of the first Christian converts in the region, and her father had already gone south to start a church. So her mother packed up and began the journey with three children in tow, and at some point, she was told to give up the eight-month-old in case the baby cried and attracted the attention of the soldiers. But her mother did not give her up and miraculously made her way south and was reunited with her father. Decades later, during the 1990s, her eighty-some-year-old father returned to Shinuju with a humanitarian group. He pleaded with the authorities for a glimpse of his siblings, who lived within the city limits, and whom he had not seen in more than forty years. He was not allowed to visit them. Now ninety-six, he had asked her to make note of everything so that he might hear some details about his home before he died.
I thought about how, through all this, Mount Myohyang towered above, empty and stripped, one side carved to express allegiance to the Great Leader, a deformed remnant of what was once a great treasure, denied entirely to the people of South Korea, and perhaps denied to most people here as well.
Just then Mr. Han came over to inquire about my schedule, which seemed an odd thing to ask me while hiking. I told him that I usually went to bed before ten, sometimes as early as eight.
“Then you get up at five a.m.?” he asked.
This could have been an innocent guess, but it was so immediate, and I remembered writing an email to my lover saying that I got up at 5 a.m., and suddenly I was struck with paranoia. Had I said anything that revealed more than I cared to in those emails?
I thought of other comments Mr. Han had made over the previous two weeks. For example, he would casually say, “Comrade Suki, I hear you and Comrade Katie are the most popular teachers, and the boys are just wild about you. Maybe your teaching is too ‘free American style’ and maybe I should go check out your class, ha ha ha.” Or, “What’s in your bag? I like you so much but you always hide things from me. Why do you hold on to your bag all the time like that? Is there a secret there you are hiding from me?” Each time he tossed off such a comment, my heart would sink. Of course I had a secret, many secrets, and I carried my bag everywhere with me because it held the USB stick that held my notes for this book, a copy of which I never saved on my hard drive, and I often worried that one day he would demand to search my bag and destroy the USB stick. So I copied the documents onto three USB sticks, hid two in my room, and carried one with me at all times. I also copied my documents onto my camera’s SIM card. But even so, I was afraid that they would be discovered, and that I would lose them all.
On the drive back, as dusk fell, the minders got nervous. One of the older teachers had slipped and injured himself, and we were taking him to a hospital for foreigners in the diplomatic quarter in Pyongyang. The minders stopped at Hyangsan Hotel to see if they had any emergency care, but there was none. They seemed worried that we were behind schedule, and kept reminding each other that we should not be driving around at night. Someone asked if there was a city curfew and they said no, but it seemed that there must be an unofficial one. Between 6:00 and 7:40 p.m., the time it took us to reach Pyongyang, we again passed at least three groups of children sitting on the highway. They looked like they were between the ages of five and ten. It was dinnertime and the sight of unescorted children sitting on the pavement in the middle of a highway was unusual, but of course we could not ask the meaning of this. In the distance, I could see farmers tilling the earth despite the late hour. On a couple of occasions, I noticed formally dressed women walking alongside the highway, which seemed mysterious as there was nothing behind us and nothing they could be walking toward, and we had passed no buses or cars, and I knew there was no bus stop nearby, and it was rapidly getting dark.
There were no lights on in any of the houses we passed. It was possible that it was not dark enough to warrant turning the lights on, and yet … not one window during the entire drive revealed light. Either they had no electricity or there was a blackout, which was not uncommon in this country. But I had never experienced a scene so entirely devoid of noise. By “noise,” I do not mean literal sound, but the noise of life, the evidence of life lived behind closed doors. I saw no running dogs or children, no chimney smoke, no flash of color from a TV set, and this greatly disturbed me, and yet what troubled me more was the fact that I did not know and would never know the truth of what I was seeing.
I suddenly recalled a Dutch movie I had seen called The Vanishing. A young woman vanishes at a rest stop on a highway, and her grief-stricken lover spends years trying to find out what happened to her. When he finally tracks down the man who might have abducted her, he is presented with a choice: Do you want me to do to you what I did to her, or do you want to live the rest of your life without knowing? Those are your only two options. You know, as he does, that the truth can only be horrible, but you cannot help wanting to know, and the lover chooses the knowing, and the movie ends when he wakes in a coffin, buried alive.
At the same time, it was impossible not to know what was happening in this country. The answer was right before my eyes. Small, dark, emaciated people with dead eyes. A landscape devoid of any organic signs of life. I remembered how Katie had whispered the word slaves. And when I saw my students marching, I thought of the word soldiers. There they were, every direction we turned: soldiers and slaves.
It turned out that the injured teacher needed three stitches. The hospital for foreigners charged him seventeen dollars, which was a lot of money there, and they did not use any anesthetic or offe
r him antibiotics. Even the school doctor had no medicine to offer. Instead, we were told to see if we had brought any suitable antibiotics, and he ended up taking the Cipro he had brought with him.
LATER THAT NIGHT, Sarah told me that she was so glad to finally see the mountains here. Many of her students had grown up in rural areas, so they often wrote about mountains, along with catching frogs and chasing dragonflies. She said that it sounded beautiful and carefree, but as she spoke, it dawned on me that what she said did not make sense. Her students’ childhoods could not possibly have been so idyllic.
All her students had been born a few years before 1997, the worst period of the famine. North Korea had been on the brink of collapse. Even if they were from a privileged class, they could not have been shielded from the hunger and privation around them. So I was not sure how to make sense of the happy essays she described. Had they collectively been trained to say only good things about their childhoods? I wanted to believe their claims. I wanted to believe that some children had been utterly unaffected by the deadly famine, which seemed to have permanently stunted the people of North Korea emotionally and physically. It seemed unconscionable to wish for the ruling class to be spared the miseries of their countrymen, but I saw these young men daily, and it comforted me to know that these children, who had grown up to be such lovely, fine young men, might have escaped hardship.