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

by Suki Kim

  “We watched TV,” he said.

  THE NEXT MORNING we had Sports Day, and clearly their mood had lifted. Every school across the nation performed this ritual twice a year, and so the students were familiar with the routines and cheers. Everyone, including teachers, participated, and the entire student body was divided into two teams, one with blue baseball caps and the other with white. The students had been looking forward to it for weeks, but after days of torrential showers, they were very worried that it might be rained out. Thankfully, the weather had cleared.

  I could not help being reminded of my childhood in South Korea. We also waited all year for Sports Day, like American high school girls counting the days until prom. We were also divided into a blue team and a white team, and we played similar games, including three-legged races and tug of war, and had similar cheering competitions. The only differences were that we were elementary school children, and the time was the late 1970s. But I was not good at team sports and felt intimidated by the competitive spirit that seized my classmates. I remember moping around and waiting for my mother to appear with my lunch box containing her homemade kimbap. Every mother brought kimbap on Sports Day, and they all looked different, some very elaborate, with curlicue carrots and flower-shaped cucumbers, and it was as though the mothers were also in competition.

  On Sports Day at PUST, I dutifully participated in the games, and I clapped and cheered for my students’ team. If it had been a movie, perhaps that little girl from South Korea would have found some peace, but there were only fleeting moments of connection—during a race where a student and I had to run with a ball wedged between our heads; when all the students and teachers danced in a circle, hand in hand. But soon it was all over, and I returned to my dormitory while my students returned to their gardening duty, pulling up weeds all afternoon, even when the rain began to pour, on this Victory Day when, according to them, Kim Il-sung had risked his life to save them all.

  LATER THAT AFTERNOON, there was the Victory 727 celebration at the People’s Palace of Culture. Again, only teachers of Korean origin were invited. When we arrived, we noticed many shiny cars, including Land Rovers and Mercedes Benz 300s, all of them black like every other car I had seen in Pyongyang. I wondered if some of the attendees were my students’ parents. Every time I saw people in power, I asked myself the same question. I looked upon those people as the cause of North Korea’s ongoing demise, and yet I loved their children.

  As at the ceremony the evening before, the audience was made up of army officials and formally dressed civilians. About ten Workers’ Party leaders were seated in the orchestra center seats reserved for VIPs. I saw about twenty non-Koreans in one corner of the room, including two men who wore army uniforms and spoke Russian, a woman in a head wrap, and a black man in a traditional looking kaftan.

  The opening act was performed by the Samjiyon Band of the Mansudae Art Troupe, the country’s most renowned group of male and female musicians. Wearing fluffy, sequined, strapless gowns in pink, red, and white, the women onstage looked to me like Las Vegas showgirls, although the program said many of them had been awarded medals by Kim Jong-il and Kim II-sung. The backdrop was an abstract neon-colored projection that reminded me of the default screen saver on a new laptop. On the ceiling, I could see about fifty pink and red balloons as well as a tiny rotating disco ball.

  After the opening, the women danced to the music of “The Song of National Defense” and “To a Decisive Battle,” and the soloist, a solemn-looking man in black tie, burst into “The Song of the Assassin,” the theme of which was hunting. As we listened, it became clear that the objective of that hunting was to get the heads of the “Yankee nom,” which means, roughly, “Yankee bastard.” The refrain, over and over, was “Hunting American noms.” The word the performers used for Americans’ heads was not mauri but daegari, which is used only to refer to animals.

  Each time I visited the DPRK, I was shocked anew by their bastardization of the Korean language. Curses had taken root not only in their conversation and speeches but in their written language. They were everywhere—in poems, newspapers, in official Workers’ Party speeches, even in the lyrics of songs performed on this most hallowed day. It was like finding the words fuck and shit in a presidential speech or on the front page of the New York Times. Their spoken language was equally crude, no matter the occasion. For example, during the previous day’s speech, Lee Myung-bak and his administration were referred to as nom and paetguhri-dul (that bastard and his thugs). I was relieved that I did not hear my students speak Korean often enough to know whether they had inherited this legacy.

  Yet I would sometimes hear expressions that warmed my heart—archaic, innocent-sounding words that made me feel as though the entire country were a small village undisturbed by time. Instead of the prosaic soohwa, meaning sign language, North Koreans said “finger talk,” and instead of “developing photos” they said “images waking up,” which I found lovely and poetic.

  Next, a group of about twenty girls between the ages of eight and ten sang about their love of the motherland, smiling adorably. They followed that up with a perky song about the greatness of their Great Leader, and the three in front shook something open, unfurling the DPRK flag, which they raised over their heads with theatrical affection. Then, suddenly and in the same sweet voices, they broke into a refrain about the “burning hatred in our hearts,” and I had to close my eyes to escape the concert hall, the relentless slogans, the brutal words coming from angelic mouths.

  The show went on and on. At one point a man delivered a monologue in which he lashed out against South Korea. Everything the Lee Myung-bak administration did was the opposite of good, he said, sternly warning Lee to stop if he did not want to be killed. His closing words were “Ready, aim, fire,” followed by a simulated gunshot by the orchestra, at which the audience broke into applause.

  The last performer was a woman at the side podium wearing a hanbok, using her hand to make a “sand picture” that was projected on a giant screen. Deftly rearranging the sand, the woman made a picture of a figure wearing a chef’s toque, and the audience applauded. She transformed this into what looked like a pig with suckling piglets. Then some sort of bird. Then perhaps a revolutionary youth, although I was, by then, cocking my head along with the rest of the audience, trying to guess. On the ceiling, the disco ball continued rotating.

  * * *

  *1 Kim Jong-un had Jang executed for treason in December 2013. At the time of this writing, Kim Kyung-hui’s whereabouts are unknown.

  *2 I later learned that this was Ri Yong-ho, the Vice Marshal of the Korean People’s Army, who was removed from his post by Kim Jong-un in July 2012. He has not been seen in public since, and it is believed that he was either sent to a political prison camp or executed.

  13

  WHEN ARE YOU LEAVING?

  It was the last day of the summer session, and my students kept coming up to me, asking the same thing over and over, the way children do. I told them that all the teachers were going to meet at 6:30 a.m. to leave for the airport.

  “Teacher, we come and see you off,” they said, repeatedly.

  All of us knew they could not do that, as it would mean deviating from the schedule. Even though our dormitory buildings were next to each other, they could not just roll out of bed and come outside to say goodbye. Yet they kept promising. Teacher, we see you off tomorrow morning. One student must have said it five times.

  I liked believing that they very much wanted to, and that they repeated it so many times in order to show me that, but knowing that it was impossible filled me with sadness. There was no mercy here. I knew that, and yet each time it was confirmed I found myself surprised all over again.

  On the last evening, the students were for the first time given permission to join us after dinner in the cafeteria, where we sang and performed skits. It lasted about half an hour, and after the first twenty minutes, a few of the counterparts showed up. Their presence meant time was run
ning out, and the students became visibly tense. Some of the boys made eye contact with me and did not look away; that was all they could do. When nothing can be expressed openly, you become quite good at interpreting silence. And I read theirs as they read mine.

  For days, they had been teaching me a song. It was the least nationalistic song I had heard there, and when I told them I loved it, they were delighted and offered to teach it to me. Together, we translated the lyrics:

  Dandelions blooming on the hills of my hometown,

  Those times when I played flying a white kite,

  Ah, that blue sky I saw as a child,

  Why didn’t I know then that was the pride of my motherland?

  That evening I sang it with them, in English, then in Korean. It was the only way I could show them that I loved them and would miss them dearly. When I began crying, which I could no longer help, some of them whispered, Teacher, smile please. I kept hearing those words: Teacher, smile please. I wondered what they would say if they could speak freely, and this wondering made me cry more, and I worried that the counterparts would notice and would not like it.

  The last thing we were allowed to do together was pose for group photos. For the sake of efficiency, the teachers were seated in a single row, and each class of students took turns standing behind them, forming three rows. After a class had been photographed, the students in that group were to shake hands with the teachers and make room for the next group, then return to their dorm immediately. I heard my class calling out “Sophomores first!” because they knew that the students who had their photos taken last would get to be with the teachers the longest. One very tall student stood behind me during the photo session, and no matter how much the teacher taking the photo demanded that he move to the back row, he would not budge. When I turned around and met his eyes, he mumbled, “Thank you and goodbye, Teacher,” and I realized he had stuck to his spot just to tell me that. When the photographer told him yet again to move, I nodded, my eyes on his, hoping he knew I understood him, and it was only then that he moved. Later the teacher who took the photos told me that all the students wanted to stand close to their teachers. Being physically near them was the most they could do to show their love.

  I was as speechless as my students. I could not say, as I shook hands with each of them, Leave this wretched place. Leave your wretched Great Leader. Leave it, or shake it all up. Please do something. Instead I cried and cried, and I smiled. And each student met my eyes and smiled in return. And that was our goodbye. Some still said, “We see you off tomorrow, Teacher.” I wanted them to claim their own actions by saying “I” instead of “we,” but here there was no “I.” Even “we” did not exist without the permission of their Great Leader. As they stood in their units and marched back to their dormitories that evening, they bellowed out the song I had come to know best, as if to remind us and themselves to whom they really belonged:

  Without you, there is no us.

  That night, I looked out my window at the student dormitory, but it was completely dark, as though they had all instantly fallen asleep at the same time. But we had been together for a month by then, so even buried in that darkness, behind those opaque windows, each one was special and known to me.

  The next morning, at 6:30 a.m., standing outside the faculty dormitory with the other teachers waiting for the bus, I looked for my students, even though I knew they would not show up. Still, I clung to the hope that some exception would be made. Then I saw them marching toward the cafeteria, singing at the top of their voices. The distance between us was at most a hundred yards, but they never once turned to look in our direction. We boarded our bus and were told that we would be stopping at the IT building, where classes were usually held, because the chief counterpart wanted to say goodbye to us.

  At 7 a.m., we were parked in front of the IT building when we saw a few students coming down the road. They had finished breakfast and were apparently walking to classes, though we wondered who could be teaching them. Someone joked that the students would probably have Juche boot camp to counteract the influence of their brief Western education. Then I noticed that some of the students were craning their necks, looking for the faces of their teachers, and when they spotted us through the bus windows, smiles dawned on their faces, and some waved. But they could not stop walking, since a voice inside the IT building was shouting for them to come in, which they did, although many of them walked extra slowly, their faces still turned toward us. And even after they went inside, some of the boys stood at the window of the building, squinting to make out their teachers.

  That was how we parted, our gazes locked, the students watching from behind glass as we were driven to freedom.

  PART TWO

  The Sun of the 21st Century

  14

  REUNIONS ARE RARELY WHAT WE IMAGINE THEM TO BE. When I got back to New York, the man in Brooklyn and I went through all the phases of lovers: anticipation, doubts, resistance. “Let me look at you,” he said when we met at a sushi place on Smith Street. He seemed lost for words, except to note with concern that I looked thinner. Perhaps it was a compliment, but having just come from North Korea, “thinner” no longer sounded flattering. He seemed like a stranger to me that first night, as I must have to him. He had no idea what I had been through, and I did not try to explain.

  Instead, I retreated. He preferred texting to calling, but on those occasions when he did phone, I would inevitably let the call go to voice mail. I was not acting aloof, as lovers sometimes do. I just felt unable to face him after such a long absence. Separation had cost us. We were who we were despite the separation, and because of the separation. It was neither simple nor easy.

  For that matter, neither was New York. The free world I had so longed for, with its intoxicating lights and abundance, overwhelmed me, the way the dawning of spring stops me each year. The sheer suddenness of the sun feels like an intrusion, and I spend most of those months indoors. I am wary of the outpouring of so much life all at once, and I become tentative, like a child learning to walk and see and feel. August passed that way, and I felt a bit more comfortable in my skin as September rolled around. Yet by then it was time to pack and return for the fall semester. I did not have to return, but I did. There was still too much I did not understand but this time, I would be there until the end of December. I did not know if I would be able to endure it.

  LATE SEPTEMBER IN Pyongyang was cold compared to New York. I was nervous, not sure whether the bond between my students and me had survived our time apart. During the summer, they had let their guards down somewhat, but now I was again a foreigner, bearing traces of the outside world. Perhaps we would have to test the waters all over again. But when the students came into the classroom on my first day and I saw the pure delight in their faces, my heart melted. Some of them could not even meet my eyes from shyness and excitement. I noticed small details—that some looked frailer, that one now had a slight limp, and I couldn’t wait to talk to them.

  At lunch, I asked a few students what they had done over the summer vacation and was bombarded with tales of leisure time filled with activities with friends. Park Jun-ho said he had gone swimming for three to four hours at a time at the gymnasium at least three times a week. Han Jae-shik said that he had gone Rollerblading at the gymnasium and seen the Arirang Games with friends a couple of times. Kim Tae-hyun said that he had thrown a birthday party in August at a restaurant in the Chongryon Hotel.

  “Seventy students came!” he said with smiling eyes. “Only twelve from my former university, and the rest from PUST. It was a good time!” I wondered who his parents were that they were able to throw him such a lavish party, and I also remembered how easily my students lied.

  Jae-shik explained that parties outside PUST were different, that they could do more than just sing.

  “At a birthday party, there would be food the birthday boy’s mother would make,” he said. “There would be some drinks.”

  “Alcohol?” I asked.
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  His only answer was a smug smile.

  Jun-ho chimed in: “There were these girls there, but Tae-hyun would not let me near them. He was so protective of his younger sisters that I only got to speak to a couple of them!” He gestured with his arms spread open, mimicking his friend furiously guarding the young women.

  “I don’t know what he is talking about,” Jae-shik said, rolling his eyes. “Tae-hyun has only one sister!”

  “Oh yes, but all the other cute girls were the friends of Tae-hyun’s sister!” Jun-ho countered.

  Jae-shik exclaimed, “I only saw three girls there!”

  “Because they were not interested in you!” Jun-ho said, chuckling. “But I saw seven. The girls were all saying about me, ‘What a charming guy!’ ”

  Finally, one of the students from the adjacent table leaned over and said: “Change the topic please. This guy,” pointing at Jun-ho, “is too interested in the younger sisters of his classmates! Always going on and on about younger sister younger sister!”

  While they were sparring about girls, I remembered what Dr. Joseph had said: that some of the students would be sent to do manual labor in August. It seemed at least these students had avoided it. They looked unfazed, luminous, as though they had never lifted a finger in the sun.

  At dinner that night, I found out that some others had not been so lucky. One student told me that he had been sent to work at a construction site for ten days, from six a.m. until six p.m. He said it matter-of-factly, explaining that they were building an extension for the Korean History Museum. He had felt alone there, he said, since most of his friends had been building an extension for Kim Hyung-jik University. The other two at the table remained silent. When I asked whether they too had been sent to a construction site, they shook their heads and said that honor was only for those living in Pyongyang’s central district but they lived in a suburb, and to assist their Great General and their powerful and prosperous nation, it was imperative that university students contribute in “building buildings.”