by Suki Kim
The students asked me the meaning of the word exclusive, so I gave as an example a very well-known Pyongyang restaurant, Okryu-gwan. One student brightened and told me that his friend from middle school was a waitress there. She had not passed the university exam, so she had been assigned a waitress job. I asked if she gave him extra naengmyun, and he said never, but that she served him fast. Clearly, even residents experienced long waits at restaurants, just as visitors did. In any case, the class all shook their heads at my example and said, “No, that is not exclusive, that is popular!” Then they said perhaps I meant the Koryo Hotel restaurant. At Okryu-gwan, they explained, they paid for a meal with a government-issued food ration ticket. At Koryo Hotel, however, they were expected to pay with money, which excluded some customers.
“Are the same number of ration tickets given to everyone?” I asked.
They answered yes, although some added that the number of ration tickets depended on the person’s loyalty to the party. This ration ticket versus cash system was confusing. I knew that the State distributed some things for free while others had to be paid for, but I could never get an answer as to where they got money.
One student surprised me by giving Samsung as an example of an exclusive label or company. They were not supposed to praise anything South Korean, and moreover, Samsung was not as big a presence there as Hyundai, whose founder, Jung Juyong, hailed from North Korea and had once led a hundred trucks containing 1,001 cows across the DMZ (demilitarized zone) into the North, among other inter-Korean projects.
Another change was that they now asked things about America. At dinner, one student cautiously asked, “In America, among college students, is it a secret to have a girlfriend?” I said, “No, it’s pretty natural for us, but I come from a different kind of society. What about here? Is it a secret?” He nodded, but another student shook his head. They were hesitant, yet it was a step forward that they trusted me enough to ask such a thing.
Since they liked sports, I decided to give them a short article to read on why baseball and basketball were more TV-friendly than soccer in the United States, and the counterparts approved it. The author’s main argument was that soccer was less well suited to commercial breaks, which made networks less enthusiastic about airing soccer matches. There was no such thing as a commercial in the DPRK, so I explained that a commercial was a very brief movie made by a company to sell a product. I used as an example one of the few locally produced products, a bottled spring water called Shinduk Saemul.
“Okay,” I said. “During a basketball game, let’s say there’s an interruption for a commercial featuring Michael Jordan.” They smiled at this reference. Then I pretended to be Michael Jordan dribbling a ball and dunking it, turning around, wiping sweat off his forehead, taking a sip from the bottle of Shinduk Saemul, and saying, “Wow, Shinduk Saemul is the best!” They all burst out laughing, and I explained that that would be a typical commercial in my country. I told them that if the company that made Shinduk Saemul were owned by a person, rather than a government, the company would “target” the basketball audience by hiring Michael Jordan and paying the television station for airtime. The company’s goal was for viewers around the world to watch the commercial and want to drink the same water Michael Jordan drinks and buy it. They liked the notion of a famous American basketball star drinking their water, and, amazingly, they seemed to understand the general concept of marketing. Their curiosity grew.
“How many TV channels do you have in America?” a student asked at dinner one night.
“A lot,” I said.
“A hundred?” A hundred television channels was like a joke to them when they only had three government channels, so he was probably just guessing wildly. But in fact my cable TV provider offered nearly a thousand channels.
“More,” I said, shrugging. “We have about thirty free channels, but hundreds of ones through cable TV, which we pay for. These are very specific. There are movie channels, cartoon channels, news channels, sports channels. For example, children’s programming might be divided into cartoons and liveaction shows, but there might also be different channels with cartoons for three-year-olds, five-year-olds, and ten-year-olds. Same for sports. There are channels that show only basketball, golf, baseball, American football, and more, throughout the day.”
Some gawked at me, and some just lowered their gazes. I could not tell if they believed me, but my detailed answer seemed to bother them. I was being bolder than ever, but by that time I trusted them not to report me. I also knew that I could somehow connect it to the lesson on TV commercials if I were questioned by counterparts. For weeks afterward, several students asked me the same question about the number of TV channels in America, and my answer always had the same effect: a look of disbelief and something else I could not quite grasp—something between envy and self-doubt. I was not boasting about American television, since much of it was junk, but I wanted them to see that we had choices, many choices, and that what their leaders had told them about them being powerful and prosperous was pure fantasy. They were behind, farther behind than almost everyone else in the world, and if they wanted to truly become a powerful and prosperous nation that produced much more than spring water, it was important for them to rise up.
But I could not tell them any of this, so instead I kept repeating that we had a choice of hundreds of television channels.
Another time, they talked about exchange programs, and one student said that his roommate wanted to go to Stuttgart, Germany. I told them I had been there and they asked when.
“Oh, when I was living in London many years ago. Germany is close to England. Europe is small. For example, it only takes two hours and fifteen minutes by train to get from London to Paris.”
“What about the sea?” the student asked, shocked.
I explained that a tunnel had been built and that it was a high-speed train.
“How many kilometers is it between London and Paris?” he asked.
I did not know the exact number, so I told him that I would get back to him. A few days later, I told the student that I had looked it up on the Internet and that the distance was 340.55 kilometers. This knowledge seemed to bother him. Perhaps he now realized that my Internet was different from his intranet, and I wondered if he would deduce that the transportation system in his country remained decades behind, and that his world was designed to restrict movement.
Even the counterparts had little knowledge of time and distance beyond their daily commute. During one of our lessons I asked them about their morning schedules, and it turned out most of them left their houses in Pyongyang around 6:30 a.m. in order to arrive at PUST by 8:00. Then I asked how long it took to get from Pyongyang to Wonsan, one of their major cities. It was like asking a group of American teachers how many hours it takes to go from New York City to Washington, D.C. One answered three hours. Another said eight. Another said fourteen. When I asked why their answers were so vastly different, they remained silent. I could not tell if this was due to their lack of English, to embarrassment over their inefficient transportation system, to ignorance, or if it was because so few of them had ever been to Wonsan. One answered as if he were speaking on behalf of the class, “I do not like trains. I drive there. So I do not know the time it takes from Pyongyang to Wonsan.” Concepts like jet lag and frequent flyer miles confounded them. It seemed that these middle-aged men were as clueless as the undergraduates.
I recalled how Mrs. Johnson, the fortysomething Korean wife of an American teacher, had remarked that teaching these North Koreans was “a waste of time” and that her nine-year-old daughter knew more about computers than the computer majors there. Of course, the DPRK purposely infantilized its citizens, making everyone helpless and powerless so that they depended on the state.
WITH MIDTERMS APPROACHING, the students were in a small panic. Their grades were so important to them. Some told me that they studied during nap time instead of sleeping and one stayed up so late memorizing vocabula
ry that he suffered nosebleeds from stress. This was a system where hierarchy was everything. I learned that even the morning roll call was in order of their class rank. Many of the students came from their local Middle School Number 1, and some of their parents worked at Hospital Number 1 and lived in District Number 1. Each person’s value was clearly marked in numbers.
In other ways, their world was not so different from ours. Although they did not travel freely, the elites there moved in a small circle. Many of the students had known each other since they were young. One student proudly told me that he had gone to Pyongyang Eastern District Middle School Number 1, the second best school in the whole country, right after Pyongyang Middle School Number 1, the school their Great Leader had attended. Seven other students from Class 1 had gone there too. The school offered a class on Mao and had an exchange program with China’s Beijing Middle School Number 5, where they had an entire course dedicated to Kim Il-sung. The parents of the more privileged students all seemed to be either core members of the Party or prominent doctors. Many of their fathers had been abroad for work, to China or Libya or Russia. Their mothers usually did not work. If their siblings were old enough, they attended one of the well-known Pyongyang universities. Many of my students were only children, though.
Those who were not from Pyongyang—who were instead from other cities such as Hamhung, Saryun, Nampo—had different stories. Their parents were often local doctors or scientists, and their siblings were in the army. Some admitted that they had no idea how long their brothers or sisters would serve—perhaps nine or ten years. As far as I knew, the mandatory service was ten years for men and seven years for women, but it seemed to vary. One of them said that his older brother had been in the army for five and a half years and was stationed in the northernmost corner of the country. I replied that it must be very cold there, and he nodded and said he missed him very much. His brother had been allowed to come home only once. This, in a country the size of Pennsylvania! These students seemed to have ended up at PUST on the basis of academic merit. Their more modest upbringing was visible in their suits, their shoes, their bags, their pens, which were never quite as nice or fancy as those of the Pyongyang students.
Yet there were a few exceptions—non-Pyongyang students who seemed like the wealthiest of all. Some of the border regions had recently benefited from illegal trades with China, and I suspected the parents of these students might have bought their children access to PUST. These class differences seemed positively capitalist, yet another crack in North Korea’s facade.
The more I learned about their system, the more I saw that their obsession with grades sprang from more than a zeal for academic excellence. They believed that grades and rankings determined virtually their entire futures. For example, they did not apply to colleges. They took college entrance exams during their junior and senior years of high school, and then their regional governments decided which colleges they would attend. There were no interviews. But it was not all determined by grades. Their family backgrounds, or their songbun, played a crucial part in determining which colleges they were assigned to. According to President Kim, there was a long waiting list for next year’s undergraduates at PUST because every Party leader in this country wanted his son here instead of at a construction site. Corruption was everywhere. Their grades weren’t the only thing that would save them, but they were the only thing under their control.
It was the same with their careers. Jobs, like college, were decided for them by the government. My students insisted that this was a fair practice. Their government based its decision on three things: the person’s ability, as indicated by his grades; the reports made about him by his friends and teachers; and, finally, his loyalty to the Party. I wanted to know more details about the last criterion, but questions about their political party were forbidden.
Finally, I asked, “So the job application letter I assigned you never gets written in your country?” They all answered, “Exactly, we do not write such letters.” Later, a student asked me whether Americans wrote such letters. I told him yes, and that I myself had written such a letter to get my first job out of college. He asked what happens after that, and I explained that we get called for an interview if we are chosen as a candidate for a job. He seemed mystified. “Then what happens at these interviews?” The only interview they had ever had was here at PUST, in order to evaluate their proficiency in English. I knew that writing such a letter was something they most likely would never have to do, and now I regretted giving them the assignment. Was I unnecessarily upsetting them by suggesting what existed beyond their borders?
AS HOPELESS AS it seemed at times, teaching them never felt to me like “a waste of time.” The students were becoming more aware about the world beyond theirs. One of them asked me the date for International Youth Day. He said that they did not celebrate the day, but a few foreign teachers had taught him about it last semester and he could not recall whether it was November 11 or 12. It turned out to be August 12, according to Google, which I relied on almost as much as they relied on books written by the Great Leader. When I told him the next day, he was elated.
Another repeated a riddle he had heard somewhere: “The man that made it didn’t want it. The man that built it didn’t need it. The man that used it didn’t know it.” He said that he just could not figure it out. “A coffin,” I told him the next day. He then wrote to me in his letter, “Frankly, I did not know that an answer to this riddle would be on the Internet, and on the occasion of that answer, I realized how useful the Internet was.”
At dinner one night, I took a risk and told the students that I was able to call home. Some teachers had begun using Skype to call their families, although most of us shied away from it, not wanting to expose our families to those who were listening in. The students seemed either confused or uninterested, but I kept going.
“Have you heard of Skype?” I said casually.
They shook their heads.
“It’s a program on the Internet, and we use it to make phone calls anywhere in the world.”
“Is it free?” one asked.
I said yes, and that seemed to impress them. Yet they looked confused, and they did not ask any more questions about it, although I kept dropping the word Skype over the next few weeks.
When I told them that Katie, who was now working in the Middle East, had emailed to say hello to them, Kim Tae-hyun immediately asked, “You can be in touch with Miss Katie from here?”
“Sure,” I said casually. He did not ask anything more and seemed deep in thought.
“When did she say hello?” another student asked.
“Just yesterday,” I said. The whole table became quiet.
This semester, a library had been set up on the third floor of the cafeteria building. One area consisted of the stacks, with books that had mostly been donated by South Korean organizations. Almost none of them contained pictures, though a few inevitably slipped by. For example, there were some South Korean architecture magazines, which had a few pages of advertisements for condos, showing famous actors and fancy high-rises. One student told Ruth that he had seen a picture of South Korea in a book at the library. She asked him what he thought of it, and he answered, “Bright.” There were computer stations and a study area with large tables. None of the computers there were connected to the Internet.
There was also a small room with about ten computers, in front of which a female guard stood watch. The door to it was closed, but there were windows so we could see in. The teachers said that soon some of the graduate students would be taught about the Internet there. (The grad students were a small group of men in their mid-twenties, studying English, computer science, and economics. I rarely saw them except when we stood in line at the cafeteria.) This was a major development, and we all anxiously waited for further news.
16
THAT OCTOBER, IT RAINED A LOT. THE SAME RAIN FELL HERE as anywhere else, and that seemed wondrous to me, and I remembered the monsoon i
n Seoul, and for the first time I even missed it. Often I stood by my window and watched the rain for hours because it was like a whiff of home. The sameness of every day under a constant watch had begun to take its toll again. A feeling of hopelessness saturated me and could not be washed away. My thoughts were the only thing I could claim as my own, and they circled in my head all day long until I wrote them down. But words were not enough.
I missed my lover. I carried my longing for him everywhere. It was like an illness and at times had nothing to do with him. Missing him was my only reminder of life in New York and the girl I used to be. I missed that girl, in jeans, which Kim Jong-il had banned, rather than my dreary missionary schoolteacher outfits, and with a glass of wine in downtown Manhattan instead of asleep at 8 p.m. just because it was dark outside and we weren’t allowed to go anywhere, and those still awake were either the students on guard duty or the other teachers reading their Bibles. In that world, I needed a lover, no matter how abstract, and that need drove me crazy some nights. I wrote him feverish emails that I did not send. Besides, he wrote me back so infrequently that he could not be considered a lover in any worldly sense.
The few times he did write me, he seemed to have misunderstood my coded emails. I had warned him before leaving that our correspondence would be monitored, but he kept forgetting and would write that he was befuddled by what I had written, as though he expected me to explain myself. One time I included a word he had often used about feeling low: anhedonia. I was afraid to use the word depressed because I feared a screener of my emails would conclude that I was saying negative things about the place, so I wrote that I “had” anhedonia and I misspelled it on purpose so that the minder would not be able to look it up. But my lover did not understand and simply wrote back with the corrected spelling of the word.