by Suki Kim
The frequency of guard duty depended on a man’s professional position, but they all performed this duty throughout their lives. Women, too, though they did not have to continue doing it once they gave birth.
As I had suspected, such duty existed in every one of the villages I had seen alongside the roads on our field trips. Those shrine-like buildings, known as Kimilsungism Study Halls, existed in every hamlet of their country, like churches or McDonald’s all over the world.
22
ESSAY WAS A MUCH-DREADED WORD AMONG MY STUDENTS that fall. They were very stressed about having to write one, since it would be as important as exams in calculating their final grade. They were supposed to come up with their own topic and hand in a thesis and outline. When I asked them how it was going, they would sigh and say, “Disaster.”
I emphasized the importance of essays since, as scientists, they would one day have to write papers to prove their theories. But in reality, nothing was ever proven in their world, since everything was at the whim of the Great Leader. Their writing skills were as stunted as their research skills. Writing inevitably consisted of an endless repetition of his achievements, none of which was ever verified, since they lacked the concept of backing up a claim with evidence. A quick look at the articles in the daily paper revealed the exact same tone from start to finish, with neither progression nor pacing. There was no beginning and no end.
So the basic three- or five-paragraph essay—with a thesis, an introduction, a body paragraph with supporting details, and a conclusion—was entirely foreign to them. The idea they had the most difficulty comprehending was the introduction. I would tell them that it was like waving hello. How do you say hello in an interesting way, so that the reader is “hooked”? I offered many different examples, but still they would show up during office hours, shaking their heads and asking, “So this hook … what is it?”
ONE MORNING, THEY shouted, “We beat Japan!” in unison as I walked into the classroom. Their national team, Chollima, had just beaten Japan’s Samurai Blue team for the World Cup qualifying match. The match had taken place at Kim Il-sung Stadium and had been televised live.
Here, the rage against Japan remained as vivid as when Japan had colonized Korea more than half a century before. The students were exuberant, proudly telling me about Jong Tae-se, their national team’s striker, and another one of their players who had been scouted by Manchester United. They did not acknowledge the fact that Jong was in fact a third-generation Zainichi Korean, a term used for ethnic Koreans born, raised, and living in Japan whose loyalty lies with North Korea. In their eyes, Zainichi Koreans were Japanese, their sworn enemy, and yet at opportune moments they considered them North Koreans.* I knew better than to comment on that.
“How exciting!” I said brightly. “Wouldn’t it be great if Chollima makes it to Brazil for the World Cup?” They all nodded, smiling.
It was not until later that day that I looked on the Internet and learned that North Korea had already been knocked out, and the results had been announced some time ago. The match against Japan had to be played simply because it was a game owed. Either the students would not admit this, or they did not know the truth. Not only that, I learned that the game had not actually been televised live. Rather, it had been broadcast as soon as it ended, when the regime could be certain that their team had won. One student told me that it was very boring to watch only winning games. Moreover, no matter how hard I searched online, there was no mention of a North Korean footballer playing for Manchester United. As always, their government had sown misinformation, and my students’ claims lacked any basis in reality, so I could hardly expect them to back up their theses.
YET NOW THAT the graduate students had begun using the Internet—for about three or four hours a day, they told me—my students had become aware that they were missing out on something. At meals, I took out my laptop to show them the photos I had taken on Sports Day. They liked looking at photos of themselves and always wanted me to zoom in on their faces. “Okay, most handsome!” a cheeky student might declare. “You can print that one!” I changed my screen saver to a shot of the Manhattan skyline so that they would inadvertently get a glimpse of it. Sometimes I would open up a cute program called Photo Booth and take pictures of us sitting together while tiny pink hearts scrolled across the screen. “What are they? Why are those small pink things moving like that?” they would exclaim and then burst out laughing. Maybe it was because they had been taught since birth that they were soldiers that I liked to see them express simple joy.
They had also begun to express their admiration more openly. “I never saw a computer so thin!” said one student, regarding my laptop. Another said that he had never heard of a Mac until now and asked if it was the same as Windows. I reminded them about our previous lesson on obituaries and Steve Jobs. Some also remarked that my dictionary was unusual, to which I responded that a Kindle was not a dictionary but an electronic device that could contain thousands of books, the way an electronic dictionary holds thousands of words.
A student told me that he was very curious about my computer because his major was information technology. At his former university, he had been in charge of the intranet, and he hoped that after graduation he would be assigned to work for Chosun Computer Center. He added that he would have learned “hacking” in his junior year had he not been transferred to PUST. When I asked him if there was an actual course on hacking, he told me a story about a notoriously smart second-year student at his former university. One day the student hacked into the government system and improved all his grades. Government officials found out but decided that since the student was so brilliant, they would let him keep the high grades. The moral of this story seemed to be that hacking is a crime, but permissible if done well.
The student then asked if my MacBook connected to the Internet. I had recently been asked by another student if I could connect to the Internet using my iPod, which they had seen me listening to while running. They did not understand that it was not enough to have a device capable of connecting to the Internet; you had to have access to a signal. I explained it as well as I could and added that I could connect to the Internet with any computer, virtually anywhere, including parks and cafés, except in his country. I knew I should not be talking about this, but I could not keep silent.
Soon, one by one, my students began asking questions.
“Did you watch movies on the Internet today?”
“How long could you watch movies for?”
“How many movies can you watch?”
“Well, imagine infinity,” I said, struggling to explain. “The Internet is a little like infinity. There are hundreds of thousands of websites that can be visited, tens of thousands of movies to choose from.” They nodded, but then again, they always nodded.
One of my most sophisticated students, Song Seung-jin, asked me if I could help him find information about alcohol. He wanted to write about its advantages and disadvantages, but he had never drunk alcohol and did not know how to go about researching it. He was a son of a doctor who had been surrounded by medical information all his life, with the ambition of becoming a doctor himself, and yet he did not have a clue as to the effects of alcohol. What he was suggesting, I realized, was that I look it up for him on the Internet.
This vacuum of information was becoming an inconvenience the students could no longer ignore because they lived with us, who had the knowledge they lacked, who expected them to know some of it for the papers we assigned and the conversations we had at mealtimes. We, the products of Western culture, were reminders that this vacuum was a real obstacle to learning.
But misinformation and lack of information were not the only problems in teaching them how to write an essay. In their storytelling, a conclusion was always predetermined. For example, we had organized a competition, just like in the summer, for which the students were supposed to come up with brief, original skits, and Ruth, who was advising some of them, poked her head int
o my office one afternoon with a question. I had avoided her for some time now, but I was relieved that, apparently, my cover had not really been blown, since she assumed that I was Christian, but just not as devout as her.
“Do they sell organs in America?” she asked.
I shook my head and said, “No, that’s illegal.”
She explained that one of her students had an idea for a skit about a man who is horrified by organ buying and selling in America, and amazed when he comes to North Korea and finds out that hospitals are free, due to the solicitude of the Great Leader.
Class 4 performed a skit about a group of firemen rescuing a couple caught in a fire, before breaking into a song about the Great Leader. The winning skit was about a landowner’s brutality against farmers, and was set during the era before the Korean liberation, which, the narrator explained, had been heroically conducted by their Eternal President Kim Il-sung. At the end, the whole cast again burst into a song about their gratitude to the Workers’ Party. The exact reason why they suddenly thanked their Party was unclear, but all of the skits ended, regardless of plot, with a song of gratitude to either their Leader or their Party.
INSTEAD OF A lesson on sources, which was not possible here, I asked that they read a simple essay from 1997 that quoted President Bill Clinton on how important it was to make all schools wired. I got it approved by the counterparts because it related to our current textbook theme of college education. I hoped that they would grasp how behind they were. I also gave them four recent articles—from the Princeton Review, the New York Times, the Financial Times, and Harvard Magazine—that mentioned Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, and Twitter. None of the pieces evoked a response. Not even the sentence about Zuckerberg earning $100 billion from something he dreamed up in his college dorm seemed to interest them. It was possible that they viewed the reading as lies. Or perhaps the capitalist angle repelled them.
The next day, several students stopped by during office hours. They all wanted to change their essay topics. Curiously, the new topics they proposed all had to do with the ills of American society. One said he wanted to write about corporal punishment in American and Japanese middle schools. Another wanted to argue that the American government’s policy of deciding a baby’s future based on IQ tests should be forbidden. A third student wanted to write about the evils of allowing people to own guns so freely, in America. A fourth student said biofuel was toxic and America was the biggest producer of it. A fifth wanted to change his topic to divorce. There was no divorce in the DPRK, but in America the rate was more than 50 percent, and divorce led to crime and mental illness, according to him. “So what happens when people are unhappy here after being married for a while?” I asked. The student looked at me blankly. Still another student wanted to write about how McDonald’s was horrible. The same student then asked me, “So what kind of food does McDonald’s make?”
One student asked me which country produced the most computer hackers; he had been taught that it was America. This question stumped me, especially since I had just seen a news item on CNN Asia about cybercrime by North Korea. Instead, I told him that computer crimes could be committed anywhere, by anyone, even a visitor, so it would be hard to pinpoint one country as the source.
When their thesis sentences came in, I saw that one student had written: “Despite the harmful effect of nuclear weapons, some countries such as the United States keep developing nuclear weapons.” It seemed he had no idea that North Korea’s development and testing of nuclear weapons was an international concern. Another wrote that starvation was an impossible problem to solve, especially in Africa, and especially since even rich countries, such as England and America, had starvation problems. Another chose the topic of money and how it made some societies do unethical things.
One thing was clear. Their collective decision to switch their essay topics to condemn America seemed to have been compelled by the articles about Zuckerberg. What I had intended as inspirational, they must have viewed as boasting and felt slighted. The nationalism that had been instilled in them for so many generations had produced a citizenry whose ego was so fragile that they refused to acknowledge the rest of the world.
My efforts to expand their awareness kept backfiring. The paragraph about kimjang I had assigned led to a pile of preachy, self-righteous tirades. Almost half the students claimed that kimchi was the most famous food in the world, and that all other nations were envious of it. One student wrote that the American government had named it the official food of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. When I questioned him, he said everyone knew this fact, and that he could even prove it since his Korean textbook said so. A quick Internet search revealed that a Japanese manufacturer had claimed that kimchi was a Japanese dish and proposed it as an official Olympic food, but had been denied. Somehow this news item had been relayed to them in twisted form and was now treated as general knowledge.
To correct my students on each bit of misinformation was taxing and sometimes meant straying into dangerous territory. Martha said, “No way. Don’t touch that. If their book said it was true, you can’t tell them that it’s a lie.”
Sometimes they would ask why I never ate much white rice. They piled their trays with huge heaps of it at every meal, whereas I always put just a little on my tray. I explained that I liked white rice but did not care for it all the time. They asked what kinds of food I ate other than rice and naengmyun, their national dish. I couldn’t exactly go on about fresh fruit smoothies and eggs Benedict, so I named two Western dishes I knew they had heard of: spaghetti and hot dogs. I knew that North Koreans enjoyed their own version of sausage because I had seen them lining up for it at the International Trade Fair. One of the students then wrote in his kimjang homework, “Those Koreans who prefer hot dogs and spaghetti over kimchi bring shame on their motherland by forgetting the superiority of kimchi.” Nothing, it seemed, could break through their belligerent isolation; moreover, this attitude left no room for any argument, since all roads led to just one conclusion. I returned the paper to him with a comment: “Why is it not possible to like both spaghetti and kimchi?”
Despite the failure of her forks and knives experiment, and though it was not encouraged, Ruth still wanted to educate the students about Western culture. She downloaded a song called “Around the World” by a techno duo called Daft Punk and songs by the hip-hop band Roots so that they would experience different types of music. The counterparts approved this since it related to the textbook, but all the students hated the songs. The only thing they did not hate, though they did not seem to like it much either, was rock ’n’ roll, inspired by the Beatles’ “Yesterday.” Later, a few students told me, “This hip-hop is only words, and techno is only beats. Boring!” Another shook his head and agreed: “Disgusting!” The others chimed in, “It is like our song, ‘Yanji Bomb,’ about the bomb our Eternal President Kim Il-sung used against Japanese Imperialists. It is all words too, but that was done a long time ago. A very old song. So we are ahead of Americans!”
AFTER SEVERAL LESSONS on the essay, a student said to me at dinner, “A strange thing happened during our social science class this afternoon.”
They never volunteered information about their Juche class, so I listened intently.
The student continued, “We had to write an essay!” He explained that they normally wrote short compositions in Korean and he had never thought of them as essays before, but now he did, and it made him feel strange.
“What was so strange?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, pausing thoughtfully. “I looked at it as an essay, and I realized that it was different now. Writing in English and writing in Korean are so different, but then it is also the same, and I kept thinking of the essay structure as I was writing it, and it made me feel strange.”
I did not question him further, but I thought I understood. It must have been deeply confusing to approach his writing on Juche like an essay. In his country there was no proof, no checks and balances—unl
ess, of course, they wanted to prove that the Great Leader had single-handedly written hundreds of operas and thousands of books and saved the nation and done a miraculous number of things. Their entire system was designed not to be questioned, and to squash critical thinking. So the form of an essay, in which a thesis had to be proven, was antithetical to their entire system. The writer of an essay acknowledges the arguments opposing his thesis and refutes them. Here, opposition was not an option.
I stared across at him and felt a familiar sick feeling. Perhaps this was only the beginning. The questions they would have. The questions they should be asking. The questions they would realize they had not been asking because they did not imagine they could, or because asking meant that they could no longer exist in their system.
* * *
* The most famous Zainichi Korean is Ko Yong-hui, who died in 2004. One of several consorts of Kim Jong-il and the mother of Kim Jong-un, her low-class birth, or songbun status, has been whitewashed and she is known as the “Mother of Great Songun Korea.”
23
THANKSGIVING WAS COMING, AND THE NEWS AT HOME, according to CNN Asia, was the rising candidacy of Herman Cain, followed by accusations of sexual harassment. One of the headlines read: “God told me to run for President.” This was familiar to me. When I asked the other teachers why they had come to PUST, each of them had a similar answer. “God brought me here.” When I asked how much longer they would be here, many answered, “For however long God wants me here. He knows everything. He will decide.”
This reminded me of Ruth’s claim that the Lord has his designs, and that the sufferings of North Koreans were a temporary stage on the way to heaven. Gulags, then, served a purpose in the name of Jesus, much the way my students were taught to follow their Great Leader despite the famine, or rather because of the famine, which was reinterpreted as a form of martyrdom necessary to the building of a “powerful and prosperous nation.” Thus, the Arduous March became a rite of passage that helped unite them against an outside world that demonized them.