Without You, There Is No Us (18 page)

I wondered if there was some reason why two hundred North Korean students who looked better than any of their peers needed to be present at Mangyongdae on this particular day. Perhaps there were important foreign visitors, and the regime, famous for positioning people in the right place at the right time, needed these students as a backdrop. The students said that people had stared at them as they were being given the guide’s explanation in English, but they did not know who these “people” were.

For the next couple of days, the students could not stop talking about the animals and about how spectacular and big the zoo was. One student told me about a dog climbing on the back of a goat and how funny that was. They seemed greatly impressed by the “animal tricks.” Another said that nearby was the Daesung Amusement Park where he had gone as a child and would certainly return some day with his children. They talked about the lions and tigers and asked if I had ever been to a zoo myself.

The last time I had been anywhere near wild animals had been on safari in South Africa. I had gone there in 2010 to cover the World Cup, when North Korea’s Chollima team had qualified for the first time in forty-four years. But I did not tell my students that, or how their team faced Portugal, the opposing team, all alone in a stadium packed with more than sixty thousand Portuguese fans and just seventy North Korean laborers shipped in from Namibia. Seeing the World Cup in person would have sounded unreal to them, and besides, they did not like the topic. North Koreans still seemed to feel great shame over their team’s loss, despite the fact that in the world’s eyes it had been an admirable effort. But for them failure of any degree was not tolerated.

Instead, I told them that I did not much care for zoos. This was true. As a little girl, when my parents took me to the Changgyeongwon Zoo in Seoul, I would look at tigers, giraffes, and penguins and think how claustrophobic they must feel, stuck in small cages and tanks all day; how humiliating it must be to be peered at, objectified.

“Why don’t you like zoos?” the students asked, wide-eyed.

“I don’t like to see things trapped.”

We had just learned the word
trapped
. They all nodded with apparent understanding.

“You mean, like in a prison?”

“Yes, I want things to be free. I would like to set those animals free if I could.”

As I said the words, I realized that I was becoming more passionate on this point than I should have allowed myself to be. Yet I knew that the very reason they kept talking about their day at the zoo was the same reason we teachers jumped at the chance to go to the grocery store in Pyongyang once a week, even if there was nothing we needed to buy. I could not imagine a group of American college students enjoying a zoo as much as they had.

Whenever the conversation got awkward, there was always a student who broke the ice. “You know Bae Young-taek?” Park Jun-ho asked. “Well, our bus passed right by his apartment! Young-taek was so sad. He kept staring at the window to see if anyone might be there by chance. His family had no idea we were passing it!”

Another student said that they had taken a group photo at Mangyongdae, and this photo would be given to every parent individually. Copies would first be handed to the parents of each class monitor, and those parents would in turn send the photos to each household. All this seemed so strange. There must have been a reason why this trip had suddenly been arranged, and why the evidence of it was being delivered to each student’s family.

After dinner I took the enclosed walkway back to my room. I no longer walked outside in the dark alone since there had been reports of rabid dogs on the loose, biting workers. The walkway was like an unlit tunnel, and I had to use a flashlight to find my way. I thought about emailing my lover about the dogs, since almost every other topic was taboo, but then I imagined him in Brooklyn, where the tree-lined streets had “curb your dog” signs everywhere and people hired walkers and daycare services for their dogs, and it seemed absurd. Instead, I buried myself under blankets, and for a moment, it felt as though I were inside a zoo and had become one of the animals in cages, while the wild dogs roamed freely.

17

R
UTH
,
MEANWHILE
,
BEGAN
INTRODUCING
THE
USE
OF
FORKS
and knives, which she had brought with her from China. We all used spoons and chopsticks there, and no one thought twice about it. However, she explained to the students that it was time they became “international men.” At the beginning of each meal, she would politely say to those students at her table, “Welcome to our restaurant. I’m sorry but I have to confiscate your spoons and chopsticks and give you these instead.”

Most of them had never used forks and knives, and they were at a loss as to what to do with them. There was rarely any meat to cut with a knife, and they were accustomed to using spoons to scoop up rice. Watching Ruth with the students was a bit like watching Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle from
Pygmalion
. Some could not stop giggling; others were confused and embarrassed. One later joked, “A meal with Professor Ruth is not a meal but a class. We must use these forks and knives while focusing on speaking and listening in English. Too many things to do at once. It makes our heads ache!”

THE
TOPIC
OF
the current reading from the textbook was love. I had to teach a short story on love titled “Love Under the Nazis,” about impossible love during wartime. As I reviewed vocabulary such as “Nazi” and “concentration camp,” I wondered whether they had any inkling that their Great Leader was considered one of the worst dictators of the modern era, almost on par with Hitler or Stalin. In the morning, Martha handed me a sheet that read, “Love _ kind. Love _ patient …” with blanks to fill in for the verbs—a grammar exercise that had been approved by the counterparts. I glanced at it quickly.

“Isn’t this some cheesy song from the eighties?” I asked. There were moments like these when I let my guard down and forgot where I was.

“This is straight from the Bible!” Martha said, dumbfounded.

I immediately covered with “I know, but it’s also from a song!” I was lucky that she was too young to remember the eighties, because she looked at me earnestly and asked, “Which song?” I suspected the counterparts had not realized the quotes were from the Bible when they approved them; this was a risky move on the part of Martha, who had come up with the idea of doing this exercise. We all had an agenda.

Martha then told me that she had tried to make her students write about love but it wasn’t really possible. “All my students kill off everyone in their stories. They’re obsessed with death. I don’t know if it’s their culture or if they’re just being boys.” Theirs was a culture where any place of work was referred to as
juntoojang,
or “battlefield.” Everywhere around the city I saw this word, even on the back door of a big restaurant, and when I asked a student about it later, he explained, “That would mean an area where the restaurant workers prepare meals.” Even the word
monitor
, which in South Korea was
banjang
, was translated there as
suhdaejang,
which means “platoon leader.” A classroom was not a classroom but a platoon. They marched in groups, singing songs about war. Their culture was saturated with messages about killing South Koreans and Americans and references to horrifically gruesome acts, and it seemed as though they spewed those messages back out unthinkingly, perhaps in the same way that young Americans mimic behavior they see in violent movies and video games. There was really no point in holding a discussion about different kinds of love, since they all agreed that the only real love was the love of the motherland.

“Can you love someone from an enemy country?” I asked.

“No!” they shouted out.

“Can you be friends with someone from an enemy country?”

“No!” they shouted out again.

“What about me?” I asked them later, during a meal. It was not fair to put them on the spot, but I was curious. One answered, “You are different because you are our teacher.”

THE
INTRODUCTION
OF
forks and knives was not working out. “Some days here I feel really cranky,” said Ruth while we were in line for teachers and graduate students at the cafeteria. At breakfast, she told me, a student from Class 2 had refused to use a fork and knife. Then another refused as well. She explained to them that she was preparing them for the day when they would have to have a meal with a foreigner in a foreign place where there would be no chopsticks. But they responded that they did not care about becoming international men. It was just not important to them. They would not budge. Finally she told them, “If you don’t respect others, they won’t respect you.” Now she was afraid that her next group at lunch would also refuse.

I had just heard U.S. defense secretary Leon Panetta on CNN ASIA, expressing pretty much the same sentiment about North Korea. In anticipation of the impending talk in Geneva between officials from the United States and North Korea, Panetta had given a press conference where he said that North Korea’s nuclear proliferation was “reckless and provocative,” and that its actions could “only lead to the possibility of escalation and confrontation.” In a small way, the same drama was being played out here in this corner of the Rang Rang District of Pyongyang, where the future leaders of North Korea felt bossed around by foreign teachers and refused to play along. Martha shook her head and said, “This just tells me how deep the divide is between them and us.”

The Class 3 students also refused to use forks and knives. Ruth came to my office afterward and said that she felt discouraged. The refusal was clearly made as a group, so she thought perhaps the boys had brought up the matter with the counterparts during the more recent Daily Life Unity critique.

“It’s the divide,” Martha said again.

WITH
THE
MIDTERMS
approaching, I went in search of chocolate during one grocery outing. We were allowed to give the students such treats if there was a specific occasion for it, and if we gave the same thing to everyone. Unfortunately, there were not many options when it came to one hundred individually wrapped small pieces of chocolate, given that I could not shop around. Many products on the shelves were of dubious quality—either expired, almost expired, or from countries I had never associated with the product, like Latvian cookies. I did see Swiss chocolates, but they were preposterously expensive, and another teacher pointed out that it would be like giving fine wine to a nondrinker, since these students did not know good chocolate from bad. I had never missed Hershey’s Kisses or miniature Snickers bars as badly as I did then.

While looking for chocolate, I was reminded of my father. His family had lived in Seoul during the war, and they fled when the bombs fell, just as my mother’s family had. They weren’t lucky enough to make it onto a vehicle, according to my father, although this use of the word
lucky
would make my mother unusually quiet. If only they had walked instead, she probably thought, then her brother would have been spared. My father instead would become lost in memory. He often talked about a certain American soldier who gave him chocolate. “Chocolate was like gold, better than gold, diamonds. I’ll never forget what it tasted like.” He remembered the smiling soldier throwing him a tiny piece, which he caught. He was six years old. The memory was dear to him, so lucid against the vague panorama of three years of dire war. What he recalled was kindness, but I cringed at the description. I had grown up seeing too many movies with heroic Americans saving poor Asian children, and I did not like the thought of my father on the receiving end.

Yet here I was, decades later, an American buying chocolate for North Korean boys. The only suitable ones were bite-sized Malaysian milk chocolates, and they tasted like watered-down, artificially sweetened caramels—I could not finish even one. Mary said, “They’re all like that, less cocoa content, but I’m from China, we’re used to it.” The students seemed to like them, though, and this eased the tension of exam day.

Two classes, fifty students in total, took the exam together, and between first and second period, when the next set of two classes came to take it, the teachers had to make sure that the groups did not speak to one another, since cheating was not uncommon. Afterward, I asked the students how they thought they had done. Several said they found the reading comprehension section difficult but the texts fun, especially the one about blue jeans. They were referring to a short article about Levi Strauss and how he had begun producing jeans to serve miners during the Gold Rush. This was the exact reading that had worried Mary, although the exam had been approved by the counterparts.

One student said, “I had no idea that blue jeans were originally made for miners, but one thing I never could understand … why are torn jeans fashionable?” There had been no mention of torn jeans in the text, and I doubted any foreign visitor to Pyongyang would wear them. He had to have seen them somewhere, most likely on a forbidden DVD. To some degree, I had the same question he did: why do we tear perfectly good fabric to look stylish? However, analyzing trends in Western fashion would have required a lot of other information, which I was not allowed to give. So instead, I tried to explain the idea of casual dress in Western culture through the example of baseball caps, which many Americans wore but which they never did (except on Sports Day, when the teachers lent them caps). He answered, “That is different from us. We do not wear those caps because we think they are not elegant.”

GIVEN
HOW
FIERCELY
competitive the students were, the day after an exam was a hard day for the teachers. We were bombarded with questions about the exam. If students discovered they had made mistakes, they became utterly dejected. To accommodate their incessant questions, Ruth decided to hold an extra afternoon session where she brought a projector and gave a PowerPoint presentation explaining exactly how she had graded the oral exam. After the special session, Ruth showed up in my office, outraged. She had tried hard to explain her methods, but the students got so angry about their low marks, they walked out as a group before she had even finished.

“It’s just so rude,” she said. “I can teach English all I want to them, but how is it supposed to work if they totally lack any social skills, and won’t learn any?”

She leaned back further in the chair, upset. I offered her dried apricots, which were precious to me in this land where fruit, even dried, was a novelty. She popped one in her mouth and said, looking seriously troubled, “They say that they want to learn English, but they don’t like us. Their attitude is like ‘Just give us the English we need but don’t step over this way.’ But you can’t expect everything when you give nothing.”

That was the inherent contradiction. This was a nation backed into a corner. They did not want to open up, and yet they had no choice but to move toward engagement if they wanted to survive. They had built the entire foundation of their country on isolationism and wanting to kill Americans and South Koreans, yet they needed to learn English and feed their children with foreign money.

PANICKED
ABOUT
GRADES
, the students came to see me in pairs, and soon my office was packed. They said they found it hard to improve their reading grades because the textbook was not only confusing but very dull. Their textbooks were outdated—PUST had such profound faith in Chinese education that they only allowed tests and textbooks that had been approved in China, and those were often old. For example, one of the readings from the textbook was a piece called “Judge by Appearance,” which described a woman trying to pay for something with a two-dollar check, and a cashier who did not bother to ask for her ID because she was dressed like a beggar but instead kicked her out. Such texts required a footnote from me. I told the students that most people no longer purchased things with a personal check but with a credit card. Back in the summer, Katie had shown them her credit card and told them that she paid for things with it, and they claimed to have understood, but then they said that she must be using her IP address.

Also, their North Korean dictionary was so unreliable that they thought the word
guy
meant bastard. One student told me that they had been very upset with an American professor who taught them over the summer and started nearly every sentence with “you guys.” Often students used words or expressions that were British or obsolete. They would say, “I was watching TV, and it was fun and I shouted hip hip hurrah!” or “Professor, it is raining like cats and dogs outside,” or they would toss out a word like
portage
. I had to look some of these words up in the dictionary on my Kindle, which I pulled out as often as possible, so that they would get used to seeing it and wonder about it. No one had said anything yet, but they looked at it with curiosity.One afternoon, two students showed up in my office with a question about the word
blockbuster
. Their dictionary defined it as a type of bomb. Does the phrase
blockbuster movie
mean a film about a bomb or just a war film, they asked. When I explained that the most common definition of the word was a commercial success, their faces brightened. “Like
The Lion King
?”
Along with March of the Penguins
, it was the only other American film they admitted having seen. I wanted to tell them that there were a massive number of blockbuster films, some of which I was certain that they would prefer.

Another time, a student came to me to ask about some phrases in their textbook having to do with air travel. “What is economy class?” he asked. “Do they give classes on an airplane about the economy?” I tried to explain the concept of class, which existed there as well under the unofficial caste system of
songbun
, though North Koreans pretended it did not. Still, the idea of paying for different levels of comfort was difficult to explain. And it was nearly impossible to make them understand words like
passport
and
insurance
, which also popped up in the textbook we were using.