Without You, There Is No Us (10 page)

8

A
FTER
TWO
WEEKS
,
THE
TEACHERS
WERE
ELATED
TO
be taken on our first excursion outside the city, to an apple farm thirty minutes away. It was a weekend, yet on either side of us we saw people working in fields so lusciously green that they looked as though they had been painted. For a moment, the stories of bare land and bare mountains and the SOS from the World Food Program and the sanctions from the United Nations condemning the DPRK for human rights violations seemed like stuff that people had made up out of boredom or malice. For a moment, I wanted to believe what was before my eyes—an immaculate landscape and clean air. I could almost imagine families with picnic baskets in tow on their way to pick apples, but the road remained empty the whole way there.

At one point, in the distance, we saw what looked like dark straw houses. The minders told us they were part of a model folk village for tourists that was under construction, and that this land had once belonged to the capital of Koguryo Kingdom from Korea’s Three Kingdom Era. For a moment I felt excited, remembering how, as a schoolchild in South Korea, I’d learned about this fantastic kingdom famed for its horse-riding warriors and exotic costumes for much of the first millennium. And here it was, this land still here with the low mountains shadowing the horizon, and green patches of land stretching in front of us.

Then the bus swerved closer to the edge of the road, and I saw a few people walking alongside it. Their faces were ghastly, as though they had not been fed in years. A skeletal woman held out a pack of cigarettes as though offering it for sale to any passing bus, although there was none but ours. When we passed closer to one of the construction sites, the workers became visible, with hollowed eyes and sunken cheeks, clothing tattered, heads shaved, looking like Nazi concentration camp victims. The sight was so shocking that both Katie and I drew in sharp breaths. We could not say anything or show our feelings, since the minder sat nearby, but we exchanged glances and Katie mouthed the exact word that struck me at that moment: “Slaves.”

It was clear to me that there was one set of people in Pyongyang—among them my students, the party leaders, the minders—who were well fed and had healthy complexions and were of regular height, and then there were all the other people, the ones I glimpsed through the windows of the bus. On weekend shopping trips, I had seen them on the streets, cutting trees or sweeping the sidewalk or riding trams. They were often bony, their faces almost dark green from overexposure to the sun or malnutrition or something worse. They were generally shorter and markedly smaller in every way, with haunted eyes. The old ones almost always walked stooped. They seemed to belong to almost an entirely different race than my students. Yet these people we had just passed appeared even more emaciated.

We were barely twenty minutes out of Pyongyang. One of the slogans posted everywhere at the school and on the buildings in the city was Kim Jong-il’s dictum “Let’s Live Our Way.” Juche meant exactly that: to live on your own without relying on anyone else. But “our way” did not seem to me much like living on your own; it seemed more like living off the blood of the rest of the country without having to see them. And not relying on anyone else seemed more like total isolation. I thought of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” in which the princes and nobles lock themselves in a castle to avoid the plague, but of course the plague knows no boundaries and all of them succumb to its “darkness and decay.”

Just thirty minutes outside the city, we pulled up at the apple farm, endless fields of fledgling trees in perfect rows spread out before us. Our minder told us that these hundreds of thousands of apple trees were so special that they bore fruit within a year, while trees everywhere else took several years to produce apples. The farm was about fifteen hundred acres, he continued, and produced thirty thousand tons of 106 varieties of apples. We were becoming used to North Korean hyperbole. A student had once told me that his former college, Pyongyang University of Printing Engineering, was the only such college in all of Asia, and one of only two such universities in the world, the other one being in Germany. Several other students insisted that their former universities were the best in the world for this or that. The idea that North Korea alone excelled while all other nations were falling behind seemed a near obsession.

Waiting for us at the top of the hill were three men in khaki uniforms and a female guide in her twenties—quite pretty, as female guides always were. In the distance was a set of long, low buildings with bright blue roofs, which the guide explained was a factory for slicing and drying apples, and I recalled the packaged snack, labeled simply “Dried Apples,” sold at the city’s Potonggang supermarket. Other than alcohol, cigarettes, and water, this seemed to be one of the few locally produced products. In the future, the guide told us, they would also grow other kinds of fruit at the farm, and there were plans to raise turtles.

Then she launched into a very long description of the two-year history of the farm, highlighted by the times that Kim Jong-il had visited. Among his comments: The apples were very big and round, and he was happy that now his people would be fed apples. Then he worried about the working conditions of the workers and sent tractors to transport them from tree to tree and from their homes to the farm. He even sent every worker a color TV and ordered that they be given access to a signal, like the citizens of Pyongyang. When he returned the next year he commented that the apples were so good it was a shame for him alone to see them, and that he wished he could share the sight with everyone. So it went, with detailed accounts of everything Kim Jong-il had said, and even where he stood as he spoke the words. “Our Great General Comrade Kim Jong-il is not only the greatest in leading our powerful and prosperous nation but even well versed in apple growing,” the guide declared. As she launched into an anecdote about an Italian diplomat who had visited the farm and applauded the Great Leader and donated even more apple seeds, I began to feel restless.

Luckily, at that moment, two women from our group asked to use a toilet and got one of the men in charge to drive them in a car to the village at the bottom of the hill. I did not need to go to the bathroom but seized the opportunity to escape more tales of the Great Leader and the wondrous apples, and see the neighborhood below. Two minders, of course, came along. The village consisted of a cluster of fifty or sixty houses and a huge Kim Il-sung mural at the top of concrete steps like a shrine. The one-story houses looked identical, each with a blue shingled roof and a small garden. The minders took us to the first of the houses and pointed to an outhouse in the yard. The stench was so unbearable that I felt nauseated just standing in line. Since we were all women, the minders remained about fifty yards away on the other side of the stone fence.

Just then, a wooden door slid open from the house and an old woman’s face appeared. She was so wrinkled and small and missing so many teeth she could have been a hundred years old. “Who’s here? Where do you girls come from?” she asked. This surprised us since the few locals who ever got this close to us always avoided our eyes. This old woman looked genuinely curious. I said hello in Korean. Almost immediately, one of the minders shouted: “Old woman, these are visitors to the farm! Get inside!” His tone was ice cold, menacing. The old woman did not even reply but immediately shut the door. We were in her yard, using her facilities without permission, and yet she was ordered inside.

Slaves.
The word came back to me again. In that brief moment, I felt a paralyzing fear, and I wanted to get out of this country. I was afraid of getting stuck here. I was afraid of the minders who could order the old woman to go away, and the speed with which she listened. I recalled the way my students stiffened at the sight of Mr. Ri. The terror here was palpable.

When we returned to the rest of the group, all of us were suddenly told that, because it was Saturday, the workers were resting so we could not tour the factory. On the way back, the bus took a different route, and we passed no skeletal workers.

AT
DINNER
,
WHEN
I told the students at my table that we had visited an apple farm, all three brightened and exclaimed, “Daedonggang Fruit Farm?” I nodded. I told them it was my first visit to such a fruit farm, a fact they found incredible. “I’m a city girl,” I explained, “and in America, teachers teach and farmers farm,” to which one student responded, “Strange, I am a city boy too, but in our country we, even the university students, all know how to farm.”

The students proudly said that the apple farm was the eleventh
songun
(military first) wonder of their country, and that they had helped to build it. They told me that in April and May 2009, college students from throughout Pyongyang had spent every Sunday digging holes for the trees, working in teams. They seemed genuinely fond of their memories of working there, though one student admitted that it had been hard because it was extremely cold that spring. I asked if they had since visited to see—and taste—the fruits of their labor. There was a pause before they told me that they had not seen the farm since the trees had been planted. Yet the farm was less than half an hour’s drive from the school.

To ease the sudden awkwardness, I asked about the other wonders. They seemed relieved and volunteered information eagerly. When General Kim Jong-il took over after Eternal Great Leader Kim Il-sung’s death in 1994, they told me, there had been only eight wonders, but now they had twelve. The first one was the Sunrise at Mount Baekdu, where Kim Jong-il was born. The second was the winter pines at Dabak Military Base, where Kim Jong-il had first thought of the
songun
policy. The third was the azaleas at Chonrung frontline base, where Kim Jong-il often visited. The fourth was the night view of Jangja mountain, where Kim Jong-il had taken refuge during the Korean War as a child. The fifth was the echo of the Oolim Falls, which Kim Jong-il said was the sound of a powerful and prosperous nation. The sixth was the horizon of Handrebul field, the site of Kim Jong-il’s 1998 land reform. The seventh was the potato flowers from the field of Daehongdan, where Kim Il-sung had fought the Japanese imperialists and Kim Jong-il upheld his revolutionary spirit by starting the country’s biggest potato farm. The eighth was the view of the village of Bumanli, which Kim Jong-il had praised as a socialist ideal that shone bright during the Arduous March. The ninth was the beans at the army depot, which Kim Jong-il once said made him happy that his soldiers were well fed. The tenth was the rice harvest in the town of Migok, so plentiful that Kim Jong-il had declared it to be a shining example of socialist farming. The eleventh was the apple farm, and the twelfth was the Rongyun fish farm of southern Hwanghae province whose sturgeons swarmed toward the sea, just as the satellites of the DPRK, under Kim Jong-il, flew toward the sky. The students uniformly remarked that the increase from eight to twelve wonders under the Great General’s guidance meant that their country was powerful and prosperous and would continue to be so.

It was at moments like these that I could not help but think that they—my beloved students—were insane. Either they were so terrified that they felt compelled to lie and boast of the greatness of their Leader, or they sincerely believed everything they were telling me. I could not decide which was worse.

Three times a day, the boys lined up in neat rows, divided into groups, and marched from the dormitory to the cafeteria, chanting songs in military fashion. With each day the songs became more familiar to me. There was the ubiquitous “The Song of General Kim Jong-il.” And there was another I heard so often that I found myself inadvertently humming the refrain, which went “Without you, there is no us, without you, there is no motherland.” By
you
, they meant Kim Jong-il.

Once I asked them the title of the song they had been singing that afternoon, and they said “Victory 727
”
and explained that it commemorated the DPRK’s victory over the U.S. on July 27, 1953. That was the date the armistice was signed by both Koreas, and, of course, the very existence of an armistice means there was neither a victor nor a victory, but I could not tell my students that. Another song was called “Dansumae.” When I translated the title as “In a single breath” (Chosun Central TV translates it as “Without a break,”), they waved their hands, dismissing that as the literal meaning. The phrase seemed to have some other connotation, since I remembered seeing it as a slogan mounted on top of several buildings around Pyongyang. The real meaning, they told me, was to conquer and destroy instantly. One student said, “For example, it means that we could take over South Korea and conquer and kill everyone there instantly!” I must have looked taken aback because the second boy at the table dropped his face and the third laughed nervously.

Then I would remember that they had been raised with the belief that a war with either South Korea or imperialist America was imminent. For them, this threat was very real, or at least their government told them it was. And, although they were students, their lives were as regimented as those of soldiers in barracks. Beyond guarding the Kimilsungism Study Hall and the Forever Tower, as well as scrubbing the outside of the latter, they tended the grounds for several hours a week and cleaned the classrooms, bathrooms, and hallways. They had to count the spoons and the chopsticks to be sure none were missing. Each group had access to the bathhouse for a shower or haircut only during assigned hours, and every morning and afternoon they did group exercises. In their dorm, four students shared a room, and one was designated as the room manager, responsible for maintaining cleanliness and morale. The room manager reported to the class monitor. The chain of authority was clear.