Without You, There Is No Us (4 page)

For a moment, I felt a pang of envy. I remembered those few drifting years after college, taking off alone with a backpack to explore the world. I thought I was playing a dare with life then, challenging my limits, but I was scared most of the time and wept for no clear reason in dingy hostel rooms across Europe and Central America. But the years had worked their magic, and that scared girl I had been in that remote place in time had dissolved into infinite invisible threads, so thin and delicate that I could almost touch her and then lose her the next minute. Now, almost two decades later, it felt as though she had reappeared, still uncertain, still afraid.

Katie began telling me her life story with youthful exuberance, taking for granted that I would be interested, which in fact I was. It was in college that her American father met her mother, an exchange student from South Korea. They now lived in Maryland, where he worked as an engineer. He was worried, she said with a laugh, that she might catch the eye of some high-level Workers’ Party guy. But she told him that the worst thing that could happen to her would be getting kicked out, and her mother said, “What do you mean, the worst thing? That would be the best thing! The worst thing would be if they were to detain you!”

I empathized with her father and worried for her sake. Katie was tall, about five foot nine, and enigmatically beautiful, with chestnut, shoulder-length hair, a creamy complexion, and hazel eyes that sometimes appeared green. Her father thought that North Korean men might whisk her off in the middle of the night, and I felt nervous about her taking off to the Middle East alone. When I voiced this concern, she suddenly became quiet.

“I stay away from men,” she said. It wasn’t always easy being half Korean, she told me. She did not know much Korean, but she knew the word
twiggy,
a derogatory term for people of mixed parentage. In college, she had a Korean American boyfriend she loved. She knew that, as the eldest son of the eldest line of his family clan, he could not marry a woman of mixed blood, and she told him this worried her. But he said that by the time they married, his grandparents would be dead and it wouldn’t matter. Still, the relationship ended badly, leaving her heartbroken. Soon afterward, she found refuge in God. She had been raised Christian, but until then she did not have true faith. She swore then that she would never entrust her heart to anyone except God. God would not disappoint her the way men had.

It occurred to me then that everyone’s threshold for pain is different. For some, the end of a romance is devastating enough to make them turn to religion for refuge. For others, it is simply a cautionary tale, something to keep in mind for future loves. Like Katie, I could not shake off the hurt of a bad relationship, and instead sat brooding with that pain for years. Yet, now that I found myself so far from home, it was hard to understand why I had stayed unhappy for so long. Sometimes the longer you are inside a prison, the harder it is to fathom what is possible beyond its walls.

That night, however, we had a job to do. The first lesson was on letter writing, and Katie and I decided that we would ask the students to write to us about anything they wanted and would use the letters to gauge their proficiency in English. We wanted to keep it simple, because Beth had warned us that many of the students did not know even the basics of how a letter is written, and that we must explain it to them. After all, it was not clear how functional North Korea’s postal system was. There did not seem to be any mailboxes, and letters took a long time to be delivered; besides, when you suspect that the contents will be monitored, letters lose their meaning.

What if you forget me?
I had asked my lover from the JFK airport before heading off. At the other end of the phone, he remained silent. I imagined he did not know how he would feel months later, or perhaps my question struck him as childlike. Ever since I was thirteen years old, whenever I went away, I had always feared that I would be forgotten. Since we were dealing with North Korea, there was no guarantee as to when I would return, and he did not want to make any promises. Even if we swore by them, they would have been just words. But I was a writer. I believed in words, even if they only masked the uncertainty of time passing.

From this side of the border, however, there was no way of reaching out to him. In a few days, I was told, the school would connect Internet service to the faculty dormitory, and I would be able to email him. But I already knew from the rules that whoever was in charge would be able to see everything on screen. I had set up a new email address specifically for my stay there, as recommended by Joan, so that there would be as little as possible for them to monitor.

I imagined the lovers of the past who ended up on either side of the border after the war. Neither letters nor phone calls since. I imagined them waiting, waiting for a sign of their beloved. I had never experienced the desperate longing of a mother for her child—the loss and yearning my grandmother and my great-aunt must have felt. But I understood the longing of lovers, and I imagined them waiting for the border to open, the days turning into weeks and then years, which then became the rest of their lives. I imagined the longing of not just one person but of an entire nation. The idea of it put the concept of a long-distance relationship to shame. The eternal wait must have become a test of loyalty. Who could stay faithful to their beloved the longest? Love did not conquer all. Lovers were punished for loving—the forced separation bled their hearts. I imagined these pent-up feelings percolating in the air and hushed in the soil of the Korean peninsula, this diseased nation split in two.

THAT
FIRST
MORNING
, as I looked out at their alert faces, a boy rose from his seat, and all the others followed. They then shouted out, in unison, in English, “Good morning, Professor!” I scanned the room once and said, “Good morning, gentlemen!” I am not sure why I addressed them as “gentlemen.” It was not a word I would have used with a group of American college students. Perhaps it was the way these particular boys looked in that particular moment, so immaculate and orderly that I was reminded of the way my father often used the word
gentleman
to describe any foreign male he admired. It was one of those English words that had infiltrated the Korean language, where it came to denote a sort of dashing modern man.

The boys burst out laughing. Some looked embarrassed and kept giggling. And so the first lesson began—more of a get-to-know-you session than a real lesson. I told them to ask anything they wanted to know about me and Katie. One by one, they stood up from their seats to ask questions.

“How many siblings do you have?”

“When is your birthday?”

“What is your favorite color?”

One boy asked, “Did you enjoy the flowers outside this morning on your walk to class?” These must have been the tiny orange and pink flowers I had seen, and Katie was quick to ask, “Did you plant them?” They nodded, smiling shyly.

Suddenly I remembered a similar moment just a few years before at a private university in the Midwest where I taught creative writing to undergraduates. On the first day of class, I had told the students to ask me anything. I hoped they would want to know about the secret to writing well, and I was prepared to tell them that there was no secret and that we each had to find our own voice, so welcome to class! Instead, they had only one question: “Did our university approach you for this job or did you have to apply for it?” The message was clear. They wanted to know if I was worth their tuition. That moment had been like a splash of cold water, and I never liked to reflect upon it afterward. I wondered what made young people of a similar age think so differently.

The young men in my first period belonged to Class 4, which meant their English was expected to be the weakest, yet I had no problem understanding them. Still, the next group, Class 2, spoke markedly better English, and their questions were more sophisticated. One asked Katie, “You look Asian. Are you Korean?” Katie told them that her mother was Korean and her father was American. The class nodded, although I could not tell if her answer made sense to them.

Then a tall boy stood up to ask me if I suffered from motion sickness. The last time he had flown, he told me, he found it quite shaky. I asked him where he flew from and to, and he mumbled that it was domestic. I was not sure if I should ask further about the exact location, so I left it at that. I had never heard of domestic routes in North Korea and still haven’t, so if there were any, he must have been one of the very few who experienced plane travel.

I asked the students to pick a topic of their choice and write a letter in English to me or Katie. On the board, I showed them the way a formal letter is written—the date, address “Dear so-and-so,” followed by a comma, some sample sentences, “Sincerely,” and so forth. It seemed strange to be teaching something so basic to college students, and yet, as I faced the blackboard with a piece of chalk between my fingers, I had only to tilt my face thirty degrees upward and I would be staring straight at the portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il—one dead and the other hanging on for his dear, great life. And when I faced the boys, my eyes rested on two very similar slogans on the wall behind them: “Our Party sent our students to college to read a lot of books and study hard,” attributed to Kim Il-sung, and “Our Party wants our students to study hard,” by Kim Jong-il. Every student, at all times, wore a pin bearing the tiny image of Kim Il-sung’s face on a red background on the left-hand side of his chest, presumably because it was closer to the heart.

I told them that the letter was not only a convenient short writing exercise, but also a way for me to get to know them better, and that it would not be graded. Hearing this, they seemed both relieved and disappointed. I could not tell if they wanted to be graded or not. In those first few days, the students nodded so eagerly at everything I said that I was never sure if they had understood anything at all. When they handed in their letters, I saw that most of them had copied my sample word for word, starting with “Dear so-and-so,” and signing the letters “Sincerely, Suki.”

They wrote about their families, their ardent desire to better their English, and their love of sports, mainly basketball and soccer, although one student did write of his passion for golf and how he played it often. I learned that many of their fathers were doctors and scientists. One student wrote that his family had moved to Mansudae Avenue just a few weeks ago, thanks to the Great Leader, and another mentioned his nice home on Unification Street. From this, I gathered that Mansudae Avenue and Unification Street were coveted addresses. Another wrote about a family outing to Okryu-Gwan, Pyongyang’s best restaurant, about yoga being his favorite pastime, and about how he hated candy. A third student wrote that his friend was born in Beijing because his father had been a diplomat.

It was clear that these were not the North Koreans I was used to seeing depicted in the media. I had spent months interviewing defectors in Chinese border towns as well as in Seoul, and nothing in their testimony could have prepared me for these young men. Most of the defectors were impoverished farmers from the northern edge of the country, bordering China, very far from Pyongyang. My students, however, came from the upper echelon of the DPRK. Many of them had transferred from either Kim Il-sung University or Kim Chaek University of Technology—the equivalent of Harvard or MIT. They missed the prestige of their old schools and their friends there. Some of them seemed reluctant to serve as guinea pigs in their government’s brand-new experiment where the teachers were all foreigners and the lessons were conducted in English.

Interestingly, almost none of the students brought up the Great Leader in the first letter, as if there was a tacit understanding not to go there. Yet one student wrote:

The Juche ideology is the most correct and unique one. It illuminates the way of the world’s revolution. The Great Leader applied the Juche ideology to the whole sphere of revolution and construction. As he led our revolution correctly, our country was able to grow from a poor country to a powerful and prosperous nation. Nowadays, his idea is admired as the best in the world.

About five minutes before the end of the second period, I saw the face of Beth, the dean, who was at the window, looking nervous and motioning me to come outside. My heart sank. Had I already done something wrong? Said something inappropriate, somehow been reported by a student from the first class? Each group had a monitor, who ordered the rest of the class to rise and call out “good morning” when I walked in and gave me a roll book, in which I was required to briefly note what I taught each day. I would eventually learn that there was also a vice monitor and secretary, whose identities were not revealed, and Dr. Joseph, a Korean-American missionary in his fifties and our liaison with the counterparts, had told us that any of these students or others might report on us or record the class with an MP3 player. The counterparts, he said, would read the students’ reports or listen to the recordings and would sometimes observe our classes. I became nervous that I had come this far only to be thrown out.

My worries were unfounded. There had been a room change at the last minute, and I had walked into the wrong class. Instead of Class 2, I had just taught Class 1. The mix-up caused a great stir, and Beth was not sure whether I should just stick with Class 1 or start all over with Class 2. The problem was that Class 1 was composed of twenty-six top-ranked freshmen, and Class 4 of the twenty-four lowest-ranked, and since their levels differed so vastly, it would mean a lot more work for me, Beth said, adding that she would ask the counterparts for permission to let me teach whomever I decided on.

I hesitated; part of me feared that more teaching duties would take time away from writing, the real reason I was there, but I knew this might be a great opportunity to experience the extremes of the student body. As I walked into the cafeteria after class, still uncertain, and joined the line for teachers and graduate students, a few of my Class 1 students ran up to me with anxious faces. “Will you be our teacher?” they asked. “Will you stay with us?” It appeared that rumors circulated fast in this tiny community—not surprising, perhaps, since most things were visible from every corner. “Is that what you all want?” I asked. They nodded eagerly as though I were about to present them with the biggest gift of their lives. So it was decided right then, and, though I did not understand it at the time, it was more than the decision to be just their teacher.