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

by Suki Kim

  The next day, I saw a student whom I had been very fond of, who was no longer in either of my two groups. For the fall semester, I was still assigned to Classes 1 and 4, but the students had been shuffled around according to their grades; some students had been moved to higher levels, others dropped to lower ones. I called the student over to join me for a meal. He broke into a shy smile but kept saying that he was embarrassed, and I realized that he meant he wanted others to come sit with us. Of course, I had forgotten that they could never be one on one with us, so when I saw another familiar face, I called the student over to join us, and my student relaxed visibly.

  The talk was mostly about basketball, which he loved but could not play anymore because his new group preferred soccer. At first, I wondered why he could not just play with his old friends, but then I remembered that that was the way things went here. Each group was like an army platoon, and a student who changed groups did not just move his belongings to a new room; he did everything with the new group. They had lived this way all their lives and did not question it, but, sitting across from one of my loveliest students, I suddenly found it hard to swallow, and I put my spoon down. He looked at me innocently and asked, “Professor, are you not hungry?”

  THIS SEMESTER, I was asked to teach the counterparts—the people who read and approved all our teaching materials—as well as the students. I jumped at the opportunity. There were thirteen men, mostly in their forties and fifties, and two women in their thirties. One said that he had worked for the Department of Communication and Information. I had no idea what that was, but I knew not to ask further. Others were professors of computer science, agriculture, and engineering, and the two women said that they were secretaries. I recognized some from the cafeteria, but I had never seen most of them before.

  Where had all the other teachers gone if every university in the country had been closed? With no students to teach, were they at construction sites too? Why were these men chosen to be sent to PUST? Though many of them read English well, they all wanted to improve their spoken English and said that they were very happy for this chance to converse with a fluent speaker. Some days I had the uneasy feeling that I might be teaching the very people who were monitoring our emails, that I was training them so that they could spy better.

  Spying was not the only thing I worried about. I dreaded bumping into some of the minders or the counterparts because they could be unpleasant, but darkness fell so early at that time of year that I had no choice but to go running during the day, between classes. On one such afternoon I saw Mr. Hong getting out of the school van. He was one of the men I tried to avoid, since he had a habit of making spiteful comments with an oily smile. Today was no exception.

  “Comrade Kim Suki does whatever she feels like, no matter where,” he said. My running must have struck him as either too American or too leisurely, or both. “The more I see Comrade Kim Suki, the more I’m certain that she’s not the right material for the DPRK. She doesn’t know how to control students to get them to excel and respect her as well as fear her, all at once. Please don’t feel offended by anything I say. I only want to help you.”

  His style of criticism—indirect, using the third person—was not unfamiliar to me. I had interviewed many defectors in the past, and it was surprising how many of them readily bashed the people around them, often behind their backs. I wondered if their behavior stemmed from the lifelong indoctrination of weekly critiques, from the constant spying on their fellow citizens.

  Mr. Hong shook his head and continued, clicking his tongue, “Really a long road ahead for Comrade Kim Suki. I taught at Kim Chaek University for ten years, and I am part of the National Education Committee that grants people PhDs and Masters, all thanks to the solicitude of our Great Leader, and I could declare with certainty that she has no clue about teaching!”

  I was now getting a bit worried that this might be a roundabout way of terminating my employment there, so I asked, “Did my students say something to you? Is the school unhappy with my teaching? Is my class not good?” We were speaking in Korean, and for “not good” I used the Korean word byulro, which could also be translated as “not all that.”

  “Byulro? What kind of a word is that?” He looked away, feigning boredom. For a moment, I thought perhaps that particular word did not exist in the North.

  “Do you not understand this word?” I asked him.

  “Byulro? Byulro? I don’t understand, Comrade Kim Suki! You are byulro!”

  I realized then that he knew exactly what the word meant and was just playing games.

  He wasn’t done yet: “But students do like her very much. When I see Comrade Kim Suki casting her feminine glance over her students in the cafeteria, I wonder if her students are all captivated by her feminine charm. They must lose sleep at night thinking about their teacher. They are young virile boys after all.”

  I was feeling increasingly uncomfortable, though his behavior did not surprise me. The minders sometimes said things that bordered on sexual harassment. Luckily, Mr. Hong’s cell phone (counterparts and minders always carried them) rang, and I walked away.

  Immediately I went to see Beth, who told me that as a “white face,” which was how she and Joan often referred to themselves, she never got such treatment. Mary, who was a Korean Chinese woman in her late thirties, told me that perhaps I should try to wear more conservative clothing, although I failed to see how much more dour I could look. In trying to pass for a missionary, I generally wore long skirts, high-necked blouses, and cardigans in lukewarm shades of beige and brown. I also spoke to Abigail, a Korean-American teacher in her fifties with a long history of dealing with North Koreans.

  “Oh, the minders and the counterparts do it all the time,” she said. “They are unbelievably repressed. They can’t do anything. So they get all worked up and harass women verbally to take out their frustration. Even ones in high positions you’d never expect to do such a thing will suddenly say things that back home would be considered harassment. Besides, these guys do it also to get bribes. That was a form of blackmail. They whine about everything. Every visa process, they will claim difficulties every step. What he was angling for was extra cash. You just have to be polite but firm. Smile and say: ‘In my country if you say such a thing, you could go to jail.’ That will shut them up!”

  Abigail was more matronly and was there with her husband, though, and I was not sure the same approach would work for me. Suddenly the prospect of living in the same building and eating three meals a day with the very men who watched me and reported on me and harassed me felt insufferable.

  Later that evening, I spoke to Ruth, who confirmed my feelings. She was a Korean New Zealander, thirty and single, and had taught at YUST for years. She had had similar encounters and now she knew better. To avoid being alone in public, she always teamed up with another teacher, even at meals, and she took care to walk back to the dormitory in a group. Although her Korean was excellent (her mother had made her memorize a page from the Bible in Korean each day), when the counterparts spoke to her in Korean, she pretended her Korean was not good enough. She also made sure the counterparts knew that she had no spare money so that they would not pressure her for bribes. As for my running, she did not understand why that should be a problem.

  “Just run during nap time,” she said, shrugging.

  “What nap time? You mean like siesta?”

  She burst out laughing and said, “You didn’t know about it? It’s between twelve and two! Have you ever seen anyone walking around then? They all nap because You-Know-Who told them to!”

  The campus was extremely quiet during those hours, but I had always assumed that the students were preparing for afternoon classes or attending extra Juche lessons. According to Ruth, some of the Korean Chinese workers—the cleaners and some administrative staff—had complained about not being able to get work done during the “damned nap time,” which applied to every North Korean on campus, both the students and the counterparts. The nap
time was confirmed by my students. They all went back to the dormitory and slept, it turned out. Some told me the naps were specific to PUST, and that they had never heard of a nap time before they arrived there.

  Whatever the case, from that day on, I ran unmolested through that dead quiet campus, where everyone was fast asleep, as directed by their Great Leader.

  THE GLOOMY FACES at the next staff meeting told me that something bad had happened. One of the summer missionary teachers had written a blog post about her experience at PUST in the Washington Post. They would not show it to us, or even tell us what she had written, and it was too risky for us to visit the website. All we knew was that President Kim was very upset and said that they intended to screen teachers more carefully.

  “I told every teacher that they shouldn’t talk to the press, and that if they were approached, they had to send everything my way first,” Joan said, somewhat defensively.

  “Did the summer staff sign the same agreement we signed last winter?” asked a British teacher who had been at the school since it opened.

  “No, but I did tell them to be discreet!” Joan replied.

  Another teacher added, “She wanted to return here next summer, and even bring her husband, and now I guess not.”

  They all nodded, agreeing to be extra careful from then on. It was eerie to see how quickly imposed censorship led to self-censorship. I was afraid they would make me sign some sort of agreement, and I instinctively tightened my grip around my key chain, to which I had attached two USB sticks. I knew I would eventually tell the world what I had seen there and that this would cause my colleagues much anguish, the thought of which was upsetting. I could only hope that they would forgive me by turning to the Bible and their Lord who, according to them, created everything, including me and my eventual, inevitable betrayal.

  15

  IN OCTOBER, I LEARNED THAT STEVE JOBS HAD DIED AND that Qaddafi had been killed in Libya. Newspapers around the world were buzzing about the Arab Spring, about a new order in which civil discontent could no longer be so easily suppressed. In the DPRK, however, life continued exactly as it had for the past sixty-some years, with no news that did not concern the Great Leader.

  Lessons also continued much as they had during the summer, but because of the more demanding fall curriculum there was no time for activity hours or a weekly personal letter, so I could not be as creative. A new system of team teaching had been introduced to ensure that we kept each other in check, just as the students did with each other. This was a different thing altogether from my arrangement with Katie, who had been a TA and followed my lead. Katie had not returned for the fall semester, and neither had Sarah. Now I had to check every lesson with Martha, the other team teacher—a twenty-four-year-old Brit who taught Classes 2 and 3—and I felt the small freedom I had in teaching evaporate.

  Still, using the excuse of teaching students the difference between casual and formal language, I came up with a lesson involving a job application letter, and it was approved. I hoped to find out more about how employment decisions were made there, and also to show them that we chose our jobs outside. The assignment was to write a letter applying for a dream job. Many simply followed the example on the board, which was a letter applying for a job as a translator. Only a few came up with their own job possibilities. One wrote a letter to Manchester United asking for a position, offering to provide a résumé, as though this was a reasonable way to prove one’s worth to a professional soccer team. Others said they wanted to apply to the NBA but did not want to ask a Western person for a job, so I told them that they could give the person they were addressing a Korean name. Another student told me that he wanted to ask Bill Gates for a job but had no address for him. I told him just to make up an address for the moment, but since he had never seen a foreign address, he was still baffled. Without access to the Internet, even simple tasks caused them great stress.

  Almost no one understood the fundamental idea behind writing such a letter. They would write sentences such as “I have no job and would like a job” or “I am bored and want a job.” The entire concept of making oneself marketable in the eyes of a prospective employer did not exist.

  Since this was a lesson on comparing formal and informal, I insisted to Martha that I needed to check up on their informal letter-writing skills. Then I asked them to write me a personal letter to remind me who they were. The resulting letters were far more emotional than I had expected. Many filled both sides of the page. Instead of writing their names at the end, some described themselves and asked me to guess who they were, and one of them signed his letter with “Shy boy (only in English).” Another tried to be funny and wrote, “My brain is bad, and my appearance is ugly. My head looks like a pumpkin and my body looks like a potato. Now can you name who I am?” Yet another wrote, “Dear Professor, considering your elegant manner, we think you must have a charming guy, how on earth find this guy.” They talked about Sports Day and the spelling bee and missing Katie. One of them mentioned how touched he had been when gardening duty lasted longer than usual one evening, and Katie and I waited for them so we could all have dinner together. Another wrote, “In the summer semester, you were our good professor, but you were also like our familiar sister. We regretted not to see you off when you left for the airport.” Yet another wrote, “During the vacation, I missed your catchword, ‘gentleman,’ and it used to make us amazed but we could read your mind that you wanted us to be gentle in life.”

  Many recalled the last evening of the summer semester when I sang their country’s song with them. One wrote, “Your singing struck a deep impression on us because you sang this song happily, and sadly, and your eyes were drained in tears. If you thought about the days you spent with us, you would have been happy and if you thought about separating from us, you would have been sad.” Most of them had remained stone-faced then, but another wrote, “On that day, teacher, you cried, and of course we cried in our minds too.” This might be as far as I could go in reaching them, I thought.

  Or maybe I could go further. Since technology in North Korea was so dated and they were exposed to so little of it, I wanted them to see what was out there. I could have starred in a commercial for Apple the way I made sure to always keep my brand-new MacBook open on the lectern during lessons. I also pulled out my Kindle whenever I could. I kept thinking of the ways to make them aware of the world of modern technology. For our next writing exercise, I decided to use obituaries of Steve Jobs to teach them about the art of biography. The catch was that I had to run the material by my team teacher before getting it approved by the counterparts.

  Martha came into my office, holding up the printout of the nine obituaries I had selected, shaking her head. “Most of these won’t work. We’d have to delete all the interesting parts. In this Cuban blogger one, for example, about how she came from a repressed society and felt personally touched by Steve Jobs, we’d have to cut out her discussion of politics. And this article about the Chinese reaction is no good. The Chinese are laying down flowers at his memorial tribute as though he were Mao. The counterparts will never go for that.”

  Martha was a good Christian girl and firmly believed in rules, but she was also young, so I put my foot down. “Why don’t we just cut a paragraph or two?”

  So we sat in my office, butchering perfectly well-written articles. In the end we narrowed it down to three: CNN, Forbes, MTV. The one that worried Martha was the obituary from the MTV website, which listed devices the students had never seen, like iPods and iPads. “These mean nothing to them,” Martha insisted. Although the counterparts approved the lesson, none of the students, some of whom were computer science majors, had ever heard of Steve Jobs. They showed little interest, not even when I told them he had helped mastermind the machine they saw sitting in front of me.

  It seemed odd that they had all heard of Bill Gates but drew a blank on Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs. The only two English-language writers I ever heard them mention were Sidney Sheldon and
Margaret Mitchell. Several students told me they had read “Disappeared with the Wind” and quoted passages from it. In 2002, I had visited Kim Il-sung University, and students there had told me the same thing. Perhaps it was the conflict between North and South, in which the North wins, that appealed to them. “Do you know the words to ‘Aloha Hawaii’?” the two youngest counterparts in my class, both in their late thirties, asked, referring to the “very famous” American pop song. When I told them that I did not, they were surprised. I later looked it up and discovered that in 1973 there had been a concert and album by Elvis Presley called Aloha from Hawaii. What washed ashore or found its way into North Korea had a random feeling to it; there seemed to be no pattern, no rhyme or reason to what aspects of Western culture—whether an icon like Michael Jordan or the detritus of the culture—might be allowed in.

  THIS SEMESTER ALREADY felt different. The students were used to me now, and we were all less cautious. Many of them now told me openly that they were not allowed cell phones at PUST; however, a few sometimes borrowed them from campus workers to call home. They had very powerful parents, so it made sense that they could wield some influence with the workers. Although these parents were not allowed on campus, they could, on rare occasions, stop at the gate to see their children briefly or drop off things. One day, a student could not make it to lunch with me as scheduled. Later, he explained that his mother had come to the gate with rice cake and roast chicken because it was his birthday. He was an only child, and she wept during their twenty-minute meeting, so he told her, “If you keep crying, I am going to go back inside.” He was laughing as he said this before his friends, but his eyes watered.