Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

by Suki Kim

“If you keep moving like this, one day you’ll be too far away to come back.”

When you lose your home at a young age, you spend your life looking for its replacement.

Separation haunts the affected long after the actual incident. It is a perpetual act of violation.

Over there, coffee will feel like currency, someone had told me, and this was true. I am not loyal to any brand, but in my dormitory at PUST, my Breakfast Blend coffee from Trader Joe’s felt like a true luxury, the mark of capitalism,

Although it was my second time visiting North Korea, I burst into tears while saying goodbye to my minder. I was not a journalist on assignment in that moment. Instead I was thinking of my grandmother and my uncle, and my great-aunt and her daughters, and of the millions of Korean lives erased and forgotten. Right there, on the tarmac, before boarding the chartered flight with everyone in our mission, I told Mr. Ri that I was sick of this division, and that I would probably never see him again because the people of his country were not allowed to leave or even have contact with the rest of the world, that his country was so isolated that even I, a fellow Korean, could only visit it as part of the American delegation, shadowing the American orchestra, and that it broke my heart to see how bad things really were there. I said all this standing on that tarmac, my face covered with tears, the floodgates open after thirty-six hours of enforced silence. This, in hindsight, was thoughtless of me. I was about to climb onto that flight and return to the free world, but he was stuck there, and the other minders saw this encounter. But, surprisingly, tears ran down his face too, along with the faces of two other minders nearby. They said nothing, just cried and cried.

North Korea was the evangelical Christian Holy Grail, the hardest place to crack in the whole world, and converting its people would guarantee the missionaries a spot in heaven.

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.

On that visit to my ancestors’ graves, it occurred to me that tradition is not well suited for globalization.

And the storytelling continues as I type these words here in New York, in a language alien to those who lived through the division, a language that shields me from the worst of my grief. For even now, decades after I first adopted it, English does not pierce my heart the same way that my mother tongue does. The word division weighs less than bundan, and war is easier to say than junjeng.

Although we were forbidden to tell them anything, they knew we had the answers.

Was this really conscionable? Awakening my students to what was not in the regime’s program could mean death for them and those they loved. If they were to wake up and realize that the outside world was in fact not crumbling, that it was their country that was in danger of collapse, and that everything they had been taught about the Great Leader was bogus, would that make them happier? How would they live from that point on? Awakening was a luxury available only to those in the free world.

I was not allowed to tell them that their intranet was not the same as the Internet—that the rest of the world was connected while only they were left out.

Hardly anyone knew what country had first landed men on the moon, despite the fact that they were science and technology majors.

When we decided to make origami together, we learned that they knew how to make nothing except war planes.

Another thing that baffled the students was the pronoun “my.” When referring to Pyongyang, they never said “my” city, but rather “our” city. The DPRK was never “my” country but “our” country.

They also seemed to fear office hours. This came up because, even though it was only our second week, Class 4 was already falling behind, and we were told that the counterparts had instructed us to give them extra help. However, when Katie and I set up office hours for those who needed tutoring, we could not persuade anyone to show up, no matter how much we pleaded. The students did not understand what office hours were and viewed them as punishment. We also realized that they were frightened at the idea of being with us one on one, and so we told them they could come in pairs. Still, one student insisted, “Please, can you tell me in the classroom?” Finally we told them that it was mandatory for them to come, and they seemed pleased to obey.

AT MEALS, THE boys flirted with Katie. Park Jun-ho quizzed her on the qualities she looked for in a man. When she named them, he said: “I have them all!” So she asked, in return, what he liked in a woman. “Obedience,” he answered.

Katie also talked about dating but never allowing kissing. She kept repeating that she was okay being alone because God fulfilled her. I wondered whether my students were equally fulfilled by their devotion to the Great Leader.

We accepted our situation meekly. How quickly we became prisoners, how quickly we gave up our freedom, how quickly we tolerated the loss of that freedom, like a child being abused, in silence.

asking permission for everything was infantilizing.

I could not help noticing that if you replaced the word Jesus with Great Leader, the content was not so different

I knew I would eventually tell the world what I had seen there and that this would cause my colleagues much anguish, the thought of which was upsetting. I could only hope that they would forgive me by turning to the Bible and their Lord who, according to them, created everything,

“During the vacation, I missed your catchword, ‘gentleman,’ and it used to make us amazed but we could read your mind that you wanted us to be gentle in life.”

none of the students, some of whom were computer science majors, had ever heard of Steve Jobs.

Of course, the DPRK purposely infantilized its citizens, making everyone helpless and powerless so that they depended on the state.

“Why don’t you like zoos?” the students asked, wide-eyed. “I don’t like to see things trapped.”

“So are you saying that it’s okay for North Koreans to rot in gulags because in your estimation it isn’t real?” Ruth seemed taken aback, but I continued. “I think this ‘temporary’ life of yours being a schoolteacher in a nice dormitory for a semester before you get back home to New Zealand is a different kind of ‘temporary’ life than the lives of these people, who are basically slaves to their regime. If the eternal life waiting for them in heaven is so amazing, should the millions who are suffering here just commit mass suicide? Why don’t you go check out a gulag and then dare to tell me that it’s temporary?”

it was not Pyongyang’s physical attributes that made it so ugly in my eyes. It was what it stood for.

Finally one student asked, timidly, “Were they pretty?” I nodded and said, “Yes, the prettiest girls from Seoul, as handsome as my gentlemen from Pyongyang.”

They asked what kinds of food I ate other than rice and naengmyun, their national dish. I couldn’t exactly go on about fresh fruit smoothies and eggs Benedict, so I named two Western dishes I knew they had heard of: spaghetti and hot dogs. I knew that North Koreans enjoyed their own version of sausage because I had seen them lining up for it at the International Trade Fair. One of the students then wrote in his kimjang homework, “Those Koreans who prefer hot dogs and spaghetti over kimchi bring shame on their motherland by forgetting the superiority of kimchi.”

Dear mother, the faster the days elapse, the more I miss you. But this takes a toll on my studying so I try to avoid feeling homesick. I look at your picture every night before bed, and I want to make you proud.

When I first began to write them, I did not think I could finish one because writing an essay was very confusing to me. But the more I learned, the more attractive I felt to essays, and through essays I could change peoples’ mind.”

I was sixteen when I first met you. You were fourteen. I taught you math at your home, and your parents were happy. Then you moved away and I did not know how to find you until you called me one day to tell me that you were taking the exam for the university. I then called you every day to see if you passed. Then I tempted you to come out, and we met often, I walked you home, then you walked me home. The last time we met at the skating rink and had a fight. I am sorry. Next time when I come home, I will do what you want. You can teach me Russian. I will teach you English. Big ship leaves slowly, so wait for me.