Without You, There Is No Us (19 page)

Once a student asked me the meaning of
biological parent
. My students found the idea of adoption bizarre. They did not understand why anyone would take on a child that was a stranger and claim him as theirs. When I explained that some people could not have children or felt that adoption was preferable to having a biological child since the world had so many orphans who needed parents, the student immediately responded, “How sad it is then for a baby! Just because the parent is too poor and give the baby to the orphanage, a rich American would buy the baby.” I suspected that perhaps they had been taught negative propaganda about Americans adopting babies from China.

Many students were confused by the idea of
women’s studies.
Some guessed that it was a major where girls were taught how to cook and put on makeup. After they learned that it had to do with women’s rights, they said that in their country such a major was not necessary. According to them, equal rights for women had been formalized in 1946, when Kim Il-sung announced that women made up “one wheel of a wagon in socialist revolution and construction.” This referred to DPRK propaganda about women as one of the driving forces of its nation building.

Another time, they told me that only women wore jewelry, and only after graduating from university. “Why only women? What about men?” I asked. “Don’t they wear wedding rings?” They said no. They seemed aghast at the idea that any decent man would be seen wearing rings.

“Do American men wear jewelry?” they asked. “Even earrings?”

“Some, I guess, mostly young men though.”

Their eyes widened. One student said, “There are some strange things about America that I would never understand, like this adoption of buying a baby and men wearing jewelry!”

Then they asked, “What about hip-hop and techno?” There was a mention of it in their conversation textbook, which was not as outdated as the others, and they could not make sense of it. I was not sure how to explain hip-hop to young men who had heard only—or at least professed to have heard only—songs about their Great Leader. I said that it was a sort of music that young people liked, but also more than that—an attitude that expressed itself in many aspects of youth culture, including fashion and language. But even I was dissatisfied with that explanation, and finally I said maybe it was the sort of thing you just had to experience. Then one of them nodded and said, “Yes, we never really understand until we see it.”

But no phrase puzzled them more than
Social Security deduction
. They understood the meaning of the word
deduction
, but the rest was a mystery. They were also confused by taxes, which I felt safer discussing now that it was related to a lesson. So I explained that Americans’ taxes are deducted from their pay and used to fund programs that benefit the disadvantaged, including those who are poor, disabled, or retired. Since their argument for the superiority of their society was that everything in North Korea was free, my explanation confused them. Yet they now trusted me enough to know that I would not lie to them. I explained that Social Security was exactly what it sounded like: guaranteeing security for members of society, and that you could almost think of it as a socialist aspect of capitalism. Everyone in the nation contributed to it, but each person’s contribution was based on his income. They nodded, but I was not sure how much they understood.

How was I to explain the entire world to them, this unfathomably diverse world brimming with possibilities, where Arab youths were turning their rotten regimes inside out using the power of social media, where everyone except them was connected through the Internet, where the death of Steve Jobs could move a nation as stoic as China? From there, this world seemed completely inaccessible, and yet vague hints of it were everywhere, even in the pages of this outdated English textbook once approved in China.

Then one of them said, “All this is interesting, all about being international. But some of us don’t want to be international. Like what happened with Professor Ruth.”

He was referring to the incident with Ruth and Classes 2 and 3. He said that he had asked some of his friends in Class 4, who had also refused, “Why did you make Professor Ruth nervous and upset?” But he confessed that he too found using forks and knives cumbersome. “With Korean food, it is very difficult,” he said. I asked him if being asked to try it once seemed disrespectful to his Korean identity, and he replied no. Two of my former students who now belonged to Class 2 brought it up over a meal as well, saying that they felt embarrassed at the way a few classmates had reacted. Some of them had felt offended, and some had not, and before they knew it, the matter had gotten out of control. Class 2, as a group, decided against using forks and knives, and the other classes followed. “Professor Ruth just gave up!” another one who had been offended shouted. It was one of the very rare times when I had seen individual students protest anything, and it was a relief to hear individual voices, to see them disagree with one another, as well as with an authority figure. Still, they all had refused to use forks and knives, because they did everything as a group.

A
FEW
DAYS
later, Ruth told me that she had not just given up. A counterpart had stopped by her office and suggested that she stop pushing her students to use forks and knives. “The thing is, I had their permission from the beginning,” Ruth insisted indignantly. “They okayed it. I had to submit the plan to them, and they approved. I never would’ve done such a thing without getting permission first. The school is lenient. It’s the students who are more conservative.” She seemed hurt, and for a while, the forks and knives incident continued to be the talk of the campus.

18

T
HE
DÉJÀ
VU
OF
EVERY
DAY
EXTENDED
TO
our rare outings. The teachers were taken on the same organized trips in the fall as in the summer—to a mountain, a church, and a couple of major national sites. The trip I was most looking forward to was the one to Kaesung, the capital of ancient Korea. It was located only five miles from the DMZ and the JSA (Joint Security Area), which I had never seen from this side. For the teachers who served as our liaison with the counterparts, getting a trip approved was a complicated process that involved applying for travel passes for not only the visitors but also the vehicles, and it usually took several weeks. The trip had caused much contention between the minders and the missionaries. On Saturdays, the minders had Daily Life Unity critiques, and besides, the DMZ was under the control of South Korea, and not open to tours from the North Korean side. However, Sundays were also out, since the teachers had religious services. Ultimately, the trip was rescheduled for a Friday when most of us had classes to teach and could not go.

Instead of Kaesung, we were taken on our only overnight trip, this time to the Mount Kumgang Tourist Region, an inter-Korean project which, since 1998, had been developed and operated with South Korean money for South Korean tourists, though they had not had access to it since 2008, when a South Korean housewife was randomly shot dead by a North Korean soldier.

Due to poor road conditions, the trip took eight hours each way. Along the way, we saw a number of trucks and buses stopped at the side of the road, gray fumes rising from their engines. This sight was so frequent that I began counting the breakdowns, stopping at fifteen. When our bus also broke down about an hour outside Pyongyang, someone whispered that it must be the bad fuel sold there.

A replacement bus was dispatched, and after about an hour we were on our way. The view along the highway was the same as on our other trips. After five or ten minutes of driving with nothing but farmland on either side, I would see, far in the distance, a group of identical houses, a bigger building with a Great Leader portrait that looked like a school, and a tall tower with the slogan
OUR
GREAT
LEADER
KIM
IL
-
SUNG
IS
ETERNALLY
WITH
US
. This same grouping of buildings appeared over and over, as though identically copied. At one point, I saw a building with the same sign as the Kimilsungism Study Hall on campus. PUST, I realized, was just another version of these villages.

Suddenly, as we passed the city of Wonsan, the sea appeared and my heart leapt. Here it was, the Eastern Sea of Korea, looking utterly unspoiled, so different from the crowded and overdeveloped South Korean side, which was so close, only a couple of hours south of us by car. This coastline had no hotels, no condos, no beach bars, no commercial logos, nothing but itself, and we all sighed in unison. It was beautiful, yet eerie, since it seemed no one was allowed on it, either on the beach or in the water. I did not know how else to interpret the absolute emptiness.

We drove another two hours to the Mount Kumgang Tourist Region, which was like a ghost town since no South Korean tourists came here now. There were some Chinese and Korean Chinese tourists but not many. That evening, the electricity was out everywhere, and we were told that the only place serving dinner was the restaurant next to the hotel. On each table were small plates full of tiny pink and white pieces of raw meat for barbecue. It turned out to be black pig, but it looked like something at a market that was about to be thrown out. The soup was lukewarm and smelled strongly of fish.

I was seated with President Kim’s secretary, a Korean Chinese woman from Beijing. Her family originally hailed from North Korea, and she still had relatives here. “People here used to be wealthier than us in China,” she said, remembering the seventies and eighties, when the Soviet Union still existed and the North Korean economy was much better. “When we were little, my mother would visit her parents and bring back so many things from here—clothing and appliances, anything at all. Now it’s the opposite. We find it hard to keep in touch with our relatives here because they always ask for money.” I had heard similar complaints from other Korean Chinese people with relatives in the North. All of them inevitably said the same thing: they had no choice but to give their relatives whatever they needed because they were family.

After the meal, some of the teachers grew lively and stood up to sing. First there was a rendition of “Amazing Grace.” Then a Korean American teacher got up and said, “I don’t usually sing songs like this, but today I’ll sing Choi Jin-hui’s song. Mr. Ri, you must know this song, everyone knows Choi Jin-hui here, no?” Choi Jin-hui is a South Korean singer popular among the older generation. Mr. Ri gave no reply and walked out, which mystified most of us. Then another teacher got up and sang “Woorinun,” a folksy South Korean song. The other minder, Mr. Han, and the two North Korean drivers walked out. Then one of the older teachers explained that North Koreans could be punished for listening to South Korean songs. “Now we know what we must do if we need to get rid of them!” another teacher said.

The next morning, we all started hiking up Manmulsang Hill, but I had an attack of vertigo and turned around, and then waited for the others in the outdoor parking lot. Our two drivers waited with me, along with two other drivers whose Chinese groups had also gone hiking with guides. When I pulled out my laptop, they gathered around me to look at it but quickly lost interest and sat down on the pavement, where the other drivers played poker while listening to a CD of Simon & Garfunkel at top volume. It must have been a black-market CD, but it struck me as strange that they chose such iconic 1960s American music, especially since they could be punished for playing it. For a little while, as I sat on a bench with my laptop with “Bridge over Troubled Water” blasting in the background, it seemed an autumn day like any other. But the bench, I noticed, had a sign that read “A long bench our Great Leader Kim Il-sung personally used. 1973.8.19,” so I immediately stood up and looked around for a rock to sit on. Then I noticed that all the rocks were inscribed with Great Leader quotations (there are reportedly about four thousand such inscriptions in this mountain range).

Just then, we saw people descending the hill. The drivers immediately switched to North Korean music, and just as quickly the spell was broken.

On the way back, once we passed Wonsan, the landscape was again barren. Again, I saw people squatting on the highway, moving only when the bus got close. Sometimes two or three sat talking, and sometimes it was a larger group, sitting in a circle and eating. These scenes did not make sense to me as they were sitting either on the shoulder or on the road in the middle of nowhere, until it dawned on me: This was their café, their public square. The stretch of empty highway closest to where they lived was the only place where they saw evidence of the outside world. They sat on the pavement to feel connected.

The other trip we took was to the tombs belonging to Dangun, the mythical founder of Korea, and King Dongmyeong, the founder of Koguryo, the ancient kingdom that existed in what is now North Korea. It was a bit odd to be taken to the burial places of these ancient kings when we were ceaselessly told that the Great Leaders were their kings. Once Martha had devised a lesson using a news item about the British royal wedding. (In the DPRK, according to my students, a wedding was usually just a dinner at home with neighbors; there was no wedding dress or exchange of rings). The students had never heard of either William or Kate, so I explained that Britain had a queen and asked which countries still had a king. They answered, “Japan!” and “Cambodia!” and “Korea!” I asked where their king was, since the Korean monarchy had ended in 1910, and they all shouted out “Kumsusan Palace!,” where Kim Il-sung lay embalmed, looking eerily alive.

But it turned out that Kumsusan Palace was not the only resting place of a king in North Korea, and now we were on our way to the other one. Once out of the city limits, we were stopped twice at checkpoints. I recognized the empty road as the same one we took to the apple farm.

“I used to live near here, and when I was fifteen I was rounded up for the construction of Kim Il-sung University,” said an old Korean man who sat next to me on the bus. Those who were originally from the North often broke into such confessions to whoever would listen. This man had been eighteen when he fled to the South alone in 1950. He was the only son among four children, and the family thought that he should go first, and planned to follow soon after. Then the border closed. In the 1980s he found a way to visit Pyongyang and was able to meet with his parents twice; each time, he was allowed to spend just one night at their home. Now everyone in his family was dead except for one brother, and their visits were restricted to a few hours at a restaurant at the Koryo Hotel. But those visits cost too much. He had to pay money to the North Korean officials who approved and arranged the meeting, to the minder and the driver, and then to his family members since everyone here was needy.

I asked if he felt at home here, especially since some neighborhoods had probably not changed at all. “No, not at all,” He said, shaking his head. “This is all foreign to me. PUST is so near where my family lives, but I can’t keep in touch with them. I’m not allowed to even call them. I can’t go visit any of my old places since we can’t move around freely. And I’ve given so much to this land, and I can’t help but feel resentful.” The whispers became heated, and I glanced at the front of the bus in case the minders could hear us. We were arriving at the tombs, and I did not speak with him again.

The remains of both Dangun and King Dongmyeong had been excavated, and the tombs had been built by Kim Il-sung in 1993. The Dangun tomb was a large pile of cement bricks shaped vaguely like a flat-topped pyramid. There were no visitors, only the guide and a guard at the tomb. The focus of the tour guide’s speech was, as always, the Great Leader. Surrounded by bare hills, this tomb of the son of a bear from thousands years ago seemed unreal, like a mirage.

King Dongmyeong’s tomb looked remarkably similar. Another immaculate grave with no one about. Inside a nearby stone structure, which served as a small museum, there were rather modern, manga-like paintings on the wall, which were said to have been excavated, though they bore no resemblance to Koguryo-era art.

Next to the tomb was a small Buddhist temple, also rebuilt in 1993. A lone monk greeted us at the gate as though he had been expecting us all afternoon. Unlike the gray ones often seen in South Korea, his thin red robe looked Tibetan. The Worship Hall had a golden Buddha in it, and the monk went inside to light candles. Like the church we had been taken to in Pyongyang, this one had the feeling of a stage set, except here there were no worshippers. Most of the missionaries refused to enter. A border existed here too. Perhaps here was our greatest fear, the fear of the other.