Without You, There Is No Us (20 page)

19

W
ITH
THE
ARRIVAL
OF
NOVEMBER
,
THE
WIND
AT
night turned thorny, with ice in it. At PUST, they did not turn on the heat in the dormitories until well into winter, so I covered myself with layers of thermal underwear, fleece tops, and a down coat to stay warm. In the evenings, I would bury myself under a double layer of blankets and force myself to go to sleep early because it was too cold to be awake. The rabid dogs that had bitten four workers had been put down with rat poison and, according to Ruth, the North Korean staff had eaten them. Now that the dogs were gone, I wanted to walk alone outside again, but the evenings were so cold that we all took the enclosed walkway. On some nights, when the footsteps of the students echoed down the long, dark corridors, I felt almost as though I were in a Harry Potter movie, in some gloomy passage of Hogwarts castle.

But when I looked across the courtyard at the six students on guard duty each night, I felt like a spoiled American. In this weather, guard duty meant standing for hours in below-freezing temperatures. In their khaki uniforms and parkas, the students on duty would come to dinner a bit earlier than the others. They were unwaveringly somber and rarely met my eyes. It was as if they were about to go to battle. Sometimes I tried to talk to them, but often they looked too serious and ate silently. I could not decide if they were simply depressed about having to stand outside all night in the Siberian cold, or if they saw this as a holy mission and felt unable to converse with me because they suddenly viewed me as an American imperialist. When they did speak to me, it was just to say that yes, it was cold outside, just a little bit, but it did not bother them. Then they would hurry off together.

Of course the female guards must have suffered too, but these were my students, and I did not want them to freeze in front of an empty building. At times, I wanted to shake them and say, “The man is dead! He died in 1994, and you don’t have to stand outside all night for him!”

Although they probably did not know it, we shared a Confucian heritage, and I wondered if this was their version of an ancestor worship ritual. If it was, it had become so single-mindedly devoted to their Great Leader that it was no longer recognizable as a remnant of Confucianism. Besides, they were raised to believe that they could be attacked at any moment and must be ready to defend themselves against invasion. There I was, a spy of sorts, hoping not to plant bombs but to plant ideas. They had their mission, guarding a shrine to their only ancestor, and I had mine.

AS
THE
CHILL
deepened, the electricity went out nearly every day. I would get ready to put the kettle on for my morning coffee only to find that there was no power. Or just as I was brushing my teeth before bed, the bathroom would turn pitch dark. I had brought three flashlights with me, a miniature one that I attached to my key ring so that I could find my way back to my room at night, and two bigger ones that I kept by my bed and in my office.

When the lights went out, darkness fell so abruptly and completely that I could almost touch it. Sitting with a group of students in my office, I would be going over the differences between a past participle and a past perfect participle, and suddenly the room would go dark. Immediately I would reach for my flashlight, and we would continue, using the flashlight like a candle, because this was the way of things. There were many evenings when I would stand in the corridor with a flashlight so that the students could find their way to the cafeteria for dinner. The unpredictability of the outages made lesson planning difficult. We all shared one printer and one photocopier. When the power went out, we could not use either one, and sometimes we had to change the lesson at the last minute. Yet there were moments when the blackouts felt like an adventure, because I was a visitor and I knew such inconvenience was only temporary.

ONE
EVENING
,
WHILE
we were walking back from dinner, a student shouted, “The light’s come back on!” in Korean, and we all felt pleased that we would be returning to brightly lit rooms. Then he asked me how to say it in English, so I did an impromptu lesson on different phrases: “The light’s back on,” “The light’s gone out again,” and “The light’s come back.” They liked learning practical phrases they could use every day.

“Do the lights go out like this in New York, too?” one of them asked.

“No, never like this,” I responded, shaking my head.

A few of them laughed awkwardly, and I wondered if my answer had sounded callous. I tried to recall which year the last big blackout had been, and I thought maybe I should tell them about it. But then I realized that it might strike them as even stranger that my entire city had made such a big fuss over a blackout when such outages were a daily occurrence for them. So I kept quiet, and one of them asked, “But since you pay rent in your country, do you also have to pay for electricity?” I expected this. Whenever the teachers pointed out anything that made life outside sound better than in North Korea, they inevitably brought up the solicitude of the Great Leader, under whose reign everything was free. So I just answered, “Yes, true, we have to pay for electricity, but I know that it’s free in your country.” I did not point out that this free electricity did not flow equally in all parts of the country. They seemed relieved and looked at me with something akin to pity, and said proudly, “Yes, it’s free for us.” In that moment, I felt relieved that they took comfort in their superiority, no matter how illusory.

Many of them asked me often if it was as cold in New York as it was there, and I would answer, “Yes, about the same. But it feels a bit colder here.” They seemed puzzled that I found it so excruciatingly cold when I came from a place that also had harsh winters, but I could not tell them that it did not feel as cold in New York because heat, for the most part, was plentiful there.

When the electricity was working, I would turn on the TV to ward off loneliness. Ruth had attached a metal hanger to my TV to serve as an antenna, so on some nights I was able to tune in the local channels: Chosun Central TV, Korean Educational and Cultural Network (KECN), and Mansudae TV. But KECN was said to be on for just a couple of hours each day and was never available when I tried it, and neither was Mansudae TV, a weekend-only network that was only for Pyongyang citizens. So in reality there was just one functioning channel, which came on at around 5 p.m., shutting down at 11 p.m.

At seven o’clock, there was a news program for twenty-five minutes, almost exclusively about Kim Jong-il. There was no live film, just old photographs of him visiting factories, and the newscaster would read, verbatim, whatever he had supposedly said on those occasions. Next there was a thirty-minute music program, in which the lyrics scrolled across the screen karaoke style. The songs had titles like “The Way of the Victory.” Then there was a slot for a drama or film, followed by another news program on the more recent movements of Kim Jong-il. This was the news that my students had mentioned watching each night. There were, of course, no commercials, but the news was sometimes interrupted by Kim Jong-il quotations that filled the screen. Another music program followed; one night it featured a group of men playing the accordion to a song about Kim Jong-il. After that came a peculiar segment called “The Report by the Unification and Peace Committee.” Every night the broadcaster delivered a soliloquy berating South Korea and the United States, using oddly colloquial expressions like “freaking out” and “cut the crap.”

In some ways, watching their news felt more like listening to a radio drama or an audiobook. There was not much live action; instead the anchor would speak in a melodramatic tone, like a stage actor overplaying his role, describing the movements of the Great Leader in such intricate detail that Kim Jong-il became extremely vivid in listeners’ minds. This singular obsession with his every movement, from the way he laughed to the exact angle of his gaze, was because only one topic existed. There was only so much you could say about one man who was probably sick in bed, so they filled the time by dissecting every last aspect of his life.

The only international news item not involving the Great Leader that I recall was a mention of the flood in Thailand, which featured photos of the devastated areas and of people being swept up by water. The rest of the time, the commentators exhausted every glorifying adjective to describe Kim Jong-il, who was “so great” and “very great” and the “greatest.” The message was, of course, the same in their newspaper,
Rodong Sinmun
, as well as in the students’ Juche class. I once saw a student’s notebook in which one page was entitled “The Great Achievement of Our Great General.”

At one point, the students’ favorite topic of conversation was a Chinese drama based on a 1936 Russian novel by Nikolai Ostrovsky called
How the Steel was Tempered.
It aired from 8:30 to 9:30 on some nights. There was one television on each floor of their dormitory, and at least sixty of the hundred freshmen gathered in front of one of them. It was like a party, they said. Steel was a metaphor for the character of the hero, and the show had very good morals, they told me. Since Russia and China were their allies, they said, they understood their culture better and vice versa. For example, when the North Korean film
The Flower Girl
was shown in China, they had heard that all the streets were empty because every Chinese was home watching it. I did not have the heart to tell them that what was currently popular in China was no longer an old North Korean film but glitzy South Korean soap operas featuring stunning plastic-surgery-enhanced actors. Released in 1972,
The Flower Girl
was about the persecution of poor peasants under the Japanese occupation. It was based on an opera supposedly written by their Eternal President Kim Il-sung, and starred then seventeen-year-old Hong Yung-hui, who became known as one of Kim Jong-il’s mistresses. I had once tried watching the film and had found it too slow and dated.

I promised to try watching their favorite drama so that we could discuss it over meals. But I had already tried the last one,
The Age of Steel
, and found it dull, so I asked if this one was better. Most said yes, but one told me, “Well, we do not have anything else.” This was the first time any of them had admitted such a lack.

I
HAD
NOW
been back for more than a month, and the sense of being watched at all times was draining. I felt as though I was being buried alive, like sand was being poured into my face. I began to feel a nausea, almost like seasickness, from the sameness of each day. To fight it off, I took up basketball on those rare afternoons when there was some sun despite the cold. I had brought a soccer ball and a basketball from New York to give to my students, since I had noticed in the summer that the ones they were using were tattered and getting flat. We were supposed to hand such gifts over to the counterparts, who would distribute them to the students at the right time. But I was afraid that the counterparts might keep them. Back home, I had printed out fifty copies of a set of the best photos of my students from the summer and, upon returning, I had submitted them to the counterparts to be given to the students. Although a few students thanked me for them, they mostly avoided the topic, so I was not convinced that they had been allowed to keep the photos. Because of that, I had been looking for weeks for an opportunity to give them the balls directly. One afternoon, when I saw both classes on the court, I ran to my room, grabbed the new balls, and came back out. Then I casually handed them to the monitors and said, “Hey, do you want these? I bought them for me, but I don’t have much time to play.” It was as simple as that, and they used those balls for the rest of the semester.

Sometimes I played with them, but most times I took a ball from the teachers’ supplies and dribbled alone during their nap time or on weekends. The court was right beneath their dormitory, and often I saw smiling faces pressed to the windows when I played. They loved to count the rare occasions when I made a shot. It soon became a favorite topic at meals. One would say, “Professor, you are getting better. Before it was one out of fifty, now it is more like one out of ten. Yesterday I saw you got thirty-two in out of a hundred and sixty-four tries!” Another would say, playfully, “You are improving, Professor. But you could be better. You teach me English, I teach you basketball!”

On some days, though, it was simply too cold, or the court was too wet to play, since the drainage system at school was almost as bad as the one in downtown Pyongyang, and there were pools of water everywhere. Those empty, bleak days felt longer. It was now dark by 4:30 p.m., and the concrete campus, already so dreary, became even more so. The early winter light was relentlessly gray, and I dreaded the weekends. Although I saw the students at meals, I had no classes to teach, and the only things to look forward to were the trip to the stores on Saturday and the Sunday service.

“Even inside the market, everyone’s watching us,” Mary warned me. “You don’t know who will report you, so don’t do anything that will get us in trouble.”

Despite her warnings, Mary herself had been buying small rice cakes and passing them out to homeless kids who roamed the market and picked pockets. She would walk fast and slip food into their hands and keep on walking so that no one would notice. I worried about her getting reported.

On weekend nights, I felt even more helpless. I longed for phone calls, an outing to a movie, a restaurant, the little things I took for granted in the outside world. I moped about the campus, and sometimes peeked into Ruth’s room. The fat Bible usually sat on her table, along with an open notebook in which she had copied out passages and underlined phrases. That was how most of the missionaries passed the time: rereading the Bible, gathering together in the evenings to share their thoughts about scripture. Not all teachers attended these Bible studies, since there were factions among the missionaries, so my absence was tolerated. Looking at Ruth, I thought that she seemed comforted.