Without You, There Is No Us (17 page)

“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 vocabulary 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 class dedicated to Kim Il-sung. The parents of the more privileged students all seemed to be either core members of the Party or leading scientists or 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 teachers, 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 benefitted 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

T
HAT
OCTOBER
,
IT
RAINED
A
LOT
.
THE
SAME
rain fell here as anywhere else, and that seemed wondrous to me, and I remembered the monsoon in 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.

Sometimes he would talk about the difficulties of being in New York, which I knew, or used to know, but those “difficulties” now seemed unreal. One time he wrote that he was hung over and couldn’t concentrate, and that he was going to miss his deadline. Those were the woes of the free world, the angst of an artist, and he had no idea how luxurious it sounded from where I was sitting. Another time, he sent me the draft of an article he had written, with a title and his full name, even though I had told him never to say anything that might reveal him to be a writer. But I knew there was no way for him to feel the paranoia of the world I was occupying. And so I longed to hear from him, and yet I was relieved when he did not write for a stretch of time.

Besides, writing emails was a long and laborious process. I did not know exactly how they monitored our emails, but I was worried that being online made it easier for those in charge to sift through my other emails, or even access my hard drive. So I always composed emails off-line, in a Word document, which I read over and over to detect anything that might get me in trouble. Then I would go online, copy and paste the text into an email, and press “Send,” only to find that the electricity was out. Often, this was how my weekend passed, writing and rewriting short emails, then waiting for a connection to send them. But there wasn’t much to write about anyway. Every day was more or less the mirror of the day before.

With each day, my concerns became smaller. I looked up the amount of protein in canned fish, since that was my main source of nutrition some days. The cafeteria food consisted mostly of marinated vegetables, and I hardly touched the meat, which was served very rarely. I was not much of a meat eater and was also suspicious that it might be dog meat, which had been served once during the summer. I snacked on nuts and dried fruits that I had brought with me from New York, and I bought extra eggs during my grocery outings and boiled them in my electric kettle. I had never been a health freak, but there I was acutely aware that I could not afford to get sick. Luckily, Pyongyang Shop in the diplomatic compound carried several kinds of canned sprats from Latvia, and the price dropped as the expiration dates drew near.

This semester, in addition to the stores at the diplomatic compound and Potonggang Department Store, we were allowed to shop at Tongil (Unification) Market, a block-long cement building full of tiny stalls selling vegetables, meat, fruit, clothing, household equipment and electrical appliances. The exchange rate fluctuated from week to week (in the summer it had been 2,500 won to a dollar, but now it was 3,500 won to a dollar), as did the food prices. For example, the price of eggs, which were sold in tens, in a makeshift straw carton, kept changing, from three dollars to two dollars, then back to three. Fresh fruits were so expensive that I did not see how people there could afford them. Plastic hangers that might cost ninety-nine cents for ten at a discount store in the U.S. were priced at a dollar each. An ancient-looking Chinese-made flip phone cost eighty dollars. Virtually every product that was not fresh was made in China.

At the market, the sellers were all women, dressed in turquoise uniforms. The customers wore bulky coats and looked like peasants. No one appeared to notice the presence of foreigners, since this place seemed to have become a mandatory tour stop. Once, a couple of the saleswomen asked me where I was from, and when I told them that I had grown up in the South, they said that they had assumed as much from my Seoul accent, which they found beautiful. That was the first time I realized that some ordinary North Koreans liked South Koreans, or maybe even found us glamorous. It was the same with the students. Although we weren’t allowed to speak Korean with them, some of them had heard me speak the language with the minders, and had remarked that they found my accent very attractive. This surprised me, since their government spoke of South Korea with such venom; and yet there was warmth on a personal level.

THE
ONLY
OTHER
time we got to see the city during the week was on an outing to the Seventh Pyongyang Autumn International Trade Fair. Inside a big building called Three Revolution Exhibition, booths were set up on two levels, with an enormous poster of Kim Il-sung and red banners with quotations by Kim Jong-il. The booths had a seemingly random selection of products for sale, including laptops, sewing machines, solar panels, pantyhose, body lotion, straw containers, and vitamins. Although it was billed as an international fair to show the “flourishing trade” between the DPRK and seventeen other countries, including Italy, Germany, and Switzerland, almost all the booths I saw belonged to Chinese companies, with only a handful representing local concerns, such as Chosun Computer Center.

After a look around each booth, which took less than thirty minutes, Ruth and I got bored and walked out of the exhibition hall. We had one hour before we had to meet everyone at the bus. Our minders were still inside with the group, and they were not watching us because they knew that there was nowhere for us to go except for the blocked-off area outside, manned by guards. So we walked to an area at the side of the building where about fifty or sixty people were sitting on plastic chairs around plastic tables, and a couple of food trucks were selling lamb kabobs,
naengmyun
, instant ramen, and other food. We splurged and treated ourselves to a bag of Singaporean potato chips and cans of instant coffee.

“To suddenly make our own choices … I don’t know what to choose!” exclaimed Ruth, settling on lamb.

I ordered a cup of instant ramen, which turned out to be Chinese and tasted of some foreign spice. We South Koreans grow up on packaged ramen the way American children grow up eating peanut butter sandwiches, and even a child is able to tell the flavorful ones from the bad. Ours were usually spicier and heartier, but here, any ramen available out in the open was Chinese. I never came across North Korean ramen.

It was a chilly but sunny afternoon, and there were many people eating outside. About half of them looked Chinese or Korean Chinese, groups that seemed to account for the majority of foreigners in Pyongyang, but the rest were local. The only thing that distinguished the Pyongyang citizens from the Chinese were the Great Leader pins on their chests. Many of them were eating
naengmyun
with beer, a combination that was popular mainly during hot summers in South Korea, not in the late fall. None of them were as well kept as our students, but then no one ever looked like our students. Still, these people had ruddy cheeks and did not look as famished as most people I saw outside the bus windows or even in the market.

The more I saw North Korea, the more I realized how similar it looked to the parts of China that I had seen. On my way home from the summer semester, I had stopped in Seoul and given a North Korean cookbook to my sister’s Korean Chinese housekeeper. As she looked through the photographs of dishes, she exclaimed, “Oh, this is our food! It’s Chinese! I feel homesick just looking at these pictures.” For South Koreans, however, many of the dishes in the book were foreign. On the streets of Pyongyang, the people looked Chinese to me. They wore clothes imported from China. Women’s hair was inevitably permed and pinned with sparkling barrettes the way I had seen women style their hair in China. Kim Il-sung lay embalmed in Kumsusan Palace much the way Mao lay in the Mausoleum of Mao Zedong. The scene before me could have been a small Chinese colony.

Perhaps the similarities were not all that surprising. For more than sixty years, North Korea’s closest ally, apart from the Soviet Union, had been China. While South Koreans became consumed by American influences to the point that its youth adopted American names and mannerisms and looks, and its young women dyed their hair blond or red and turned to plastic surgery to Westernize their features, North Koreans took up the aesthetics of China. Culturally and visually, the nation seemed to have grown to resemble China. And this made me wonder: If North Koreans were to see Seoul today, would it look American to their eyes? Sixty-some years ago, the superpowers had artificially divided Korea, and this Chinese Korea was the legacy of that division.

Sitting there, I felt increasingly uncomfortable. When I visited either of the two Koreas I always imagined that I was traveling back to my roots and would discover new truths about my past. Now it occurred to me that the past I was seeking had for many years been buried under and overtaken by American and Chinese influences. The Korea of my imagination existed only in paintings, history books, the memories of older generations, and in the remnants that I glimpsed, every now and then, like shards of glass poking out from the buried past.

“
WE
ARE
GOING
outside tomorrow!” Ryu Jung-min blurted out during lunch. It appeared that he could not control his excitement, since the students rarely volunteered information. I asked him where they were going, and he answered, “We don’t know. But we are going outside!” Another student added, “Yes, maybe for one hour, we don’t know. But it is our first time since we came to PUST.” They said that they had been told it was part of their studies, and that maybe they would be taken to a construction site in Pyongyang. Not to work, just to have a look
,
they insisted.

At dinner, Choi Min-jun confirmed that it was true. He had no idea where they were going either. When I said that perhaps his parents might walk by and see him while he was in Pyongyang, his eyes widened. “But Professor, our parents don’t know we go!”

At breakfast the next morning the students were dressed in their usual dark jackets and ties. They were leaving at nine o’clock, they said, yet they still did not know where they were going, or even how they would get there. On my way back to the dormitory, I saw two of the senior teachers talking quietly. They were discussing how afraid the graduate students were of being drafted to do construction work, so I asked about that day’s trip and my students’ mention of going to a construction site to watch, not work.

“What is there to watch at a construction site?” one of the teachers asked. “If you are called to those places, you do the labor, you don’t watch. In any case, the kitchen was ordered to pack two hundred lunches.”

All day long, I worried about my students. I imagined them being driven to a construction site and told to do manual labor, and I was afraid that it would become a regular occurrence. Maybe they would be required to work the field every weekend instead of playing basketball or pacing the walkway, memorizing the English vocabulary on their MP3 players. Would these days of studying English and writing letters in English soon become the stuff of fantasy?

I went for a run later than usual that day, and I was circling the campus at about five p.m. when I saw two double-decker buses coming toward the IT building. I had never seen the buses before, so perhaps the school had borrowed them. The students were back! The sense of relief I felt was enormous. Even if they had spent the day lifting heavy objects, at least they had been allowed to come back to school before sundown, with enough time to shower before dinner. I turned down the volume on my iPod and scrutinized the faces in the bus windows. From far away, it was impossible to see much, but they were still wearing their suits, which suggested that they had not been doing manual labor. What had they done for the past eight hours?

The answer, when it came, was strange. At dinner, they told me that they had gone to Pyongyang Central Zoo and Mangyongdae, the birthplace of Kim Il-sung. I looked for signs of contradiction in their faces but found none. It had been a sunny day, but their faces were not sunbaked, and they did not look nearly as exhausted as they would have if they had spent the day in a construction field. The odd thing, of course, was the fact that they had suddenly been given this trip. This was midterm time, and all other university students across the country were doing labor. But these students were taken to a zoo and the birthplace of their Eternal President. Not only that, the guide at Mangyongdae had explained things to them in English, they told me, and they understood everything since they had been there many times in the past.