Without You, There Is No Us (14 page)

Every one of my students had told me he was going home for the month of August. Unless they were pretending, it seemed they knew as little as we did.

12

T
HE
DAYS
LEADING
UP
TO
THE
END
OF
the summer semester were a jumble. There was much picture taking and sporting competition, as though the incessant activities would distract us from our approaching goodbye. I was torn between sadness and the desire to escape this place. I had been invited back to teach during the fall semester, and I had said yes, but I was honestly not sure if I could go through with it again.

After lunch on July 26, Ruth and I were called to President Kim’s office and told that we would be attending the ceremony for the 58th Anniversary of the Great Victory at the Pyongyang Indoor Stadium. This was a state event, hosted by the Workers’ Party and the Pyongyang People’s Committee, on the eve of Victory Day. Among the invitees were a small group of the PUST senior staff; we would be the only teachers. Joan later told me that she had been working with President Kim for nearly a decade, since the idea of PUST was first conceived, but had never been invited since she was a “white face.” We were chosen, she said, because we were both returning in the fall and because we were of Korean heritage.

When we arrived, it was dead quiet inside the stadium, even though all twenty thousand seats were occupied. Half the attendees were army personnel, the other half citizens in gray summer suits, a sort of civilian uniform for Party members. I saw no non-Korean faces. The stage was decorated with the words
ONE
HUNDRED
WAR
,
ONE
HUNDRED
WIN!
58TH
ANNIVERSARY
OF
VICTORY
727
, and on either side of it were similar slogans. On stage, three rows of chairs faced the audience.

Soon about a hundred men came out wearing army uniforms, the same ones my students wore to guard the Kimilsungism Study Hall, and everyone in the audience rose and clapped as the men took their seats on the stage. Many of them were porky, with rotund bellies and generous jowls, and their jackets were covered with shiny gold medals. There were two women among them, one wearing a white pantsuit, the other a
hanbok
. It seems likely that one of them was Kim Kyung-hui, sister of Kim Jong-il and wife of Jang Sung-taek, then the second most powerful man in North Korea.
*3

One of the men walked to the podium and began reading an address that was at times unintelligible because of the terrible speakers.
*4
It was mainly about the glorious achievements of Kim Il-sung, and the heroic way he had fended off the attacks of the American imperialists and won the war. Curse words directed at the United States and South Korea were scattered throughout the speech. The speaker said that Lee Myung-bak, then the president of South Korea, was driving the entire peninsula into the greedy hands of America, and that if this continued, Seoul would turn into a “sea of blood” filled with “death and corpses.” The event was being taped and televised, and we were periodically told by our minders to applaud. The man ended his speech with the words “Long live our Great Leader Kim Il-sung! Long live our Great General Kim Jong-il! Long live our Workers’ Party!” Then we all rose to our feet and shouted the words together.

When we returned to school, around 5:30, I sat alone in my office and was puzzled to hear what sounded like bits and pieces of the very same speech. Although the sound was garbled, I was able to trace it to the open window of one of the bigger classrooms around the corner. I pretended to use the bathroom and tiptoed over to that corner. Through the window I could see the students watching the taped speech on TV as a part of their special afternoon meeting.

At about 6:45, I sat in the cafeteria and watched my class walk in. They wore dark expressions and avoided our eyes. Some of them literally cringed at the sight of us. I should have felt hurt, but I understood. I had seen and heard the speech. It could only have been deeply confusing to be exhorted to prepare for a war against the American imperialists and then have to turn around and face us. They were like soldiers during wartime, preparing for death and destruction, while we bounced around, asking “What’s your plan for the summer break?” or “Do you have a girlfriend?” Tonight, when they saw us, I knew that I had become the enemy, South Korean and American, the very target they had been taught to shoot and kill.

So I sat there and waited, and as I expected, no one wanted to take a seat at my table, until finally one of the class monitors joined me. He took on the burden of eating with me for the sake of his classmates, who did not want to. From his face, it was impossible to detect anything. When I asked why they were late for dinner and what they had done in their afternoon meeting, he simply shrugged.

“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, summer and fall, 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 Il-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
nom
s.” 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
cunt
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 chef 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.

13

W
HEN
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 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 running 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 my white kite,

Ah, that blue sky I saw in my childhood,

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 that 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.