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

by Suki Kim

There was the ubiquitous “The Song of General Kim Jong-il.” And there was another I heard so often that I found myself inadvertently humming the refrain, which went “Without you, there is no us, without you, there is no motherland.” By you, they meant Kim Jong-il.

Usually, one teacher brought a keyboard and played hymns while another played the flute. I sang along, but I could not help noticing that if you replaced the word Jesus with Great Leader, the content was not so different from some of the North Korean songs my students chanted several times each day.

Hyangsan Hotel was a distinctly eighties-style structure with a marble interior and the generic feel of a dated, second-tier Hilton. In front, I saw five or six women squatting and cutting the grass with scissors. This was a familiar sight by now, but still strange. At PUST, and even in Pyongyang’s parks, I had noticed workers doing the same. Lawnmowers were used in the rest of the world, but not here. Was it about control or was there simply a shortage of gas? If people were perpetually squatting in public spaces for the glory of their Great Leader, would they come to believe in him more deeply? I had heard that the Mayans purposely made the steps of their pyramids very steep so that people had no choice but to climb on their knees.

pink Kimilsungias (hybrid flowers bred to honor the Great Leader; the ones named after his son are called Kimjongilias)

thought how strangely familiar he had become, now that we had spent more than two weeks surrounded by his portraits and his words, hearing his name in every possible context, and for a moment, it seemed true that he was always with us.

It was hardly surprising, then, that there were no noteworthy historical artifacts left on this famed mountain, since history itself was an obstacle in bolstering the myth of the Great Leader.

On the drive back, as dusk fell, the minders got nervous. One of the older teachers had slipped and injured himself, and we were taking him to a hospital for foreigners in the diplomatic quarter in Pyongyang. The minders stopped at Hyangsan Hotel to see if they had any emergency care, but there was none. They seemed worried that we were behind schedule, and kept reminding each other that we should not be driving around at night. Someone asked if there was a city curfew and they said no, but it seemed that there must be an unofficial one. Between 6:00 and 7:40 p.m., the time it took us to reach Pyongyang, we again passed at least three groups of children sitting on the highway. They looked like they were between the ages of five and ten. It was dinnertime and the sight of unescorted children sitting on the pavement in the middle of a highway was unusual, but of course we could not ask the meaning of this. In the distance, I could see farmers tilling the earth despite the late hour. On a couple of occasions, I noticed formally dressed women walking alongside the highway, which seemed mysterious as there was nothing behind us

But I had never experienced a scene so entirely devoid of noise. By “noise,” I do not mean literal sound, but the noise of life, the evidence of life lived behind closed doors. I saw no running dogs or children, no chimney smoke, no flash of color from a TV set, and this greatly disturbed me, and yet what troubled me more was the fact that I did not know and would never know the truth of what I was seeing.

the speed with which they lied was unnerving. It came too naturally to them—such as the moment when a student told me that he had cloned a rabbit as a fifth grader, or when another said that a scientist in his country had discovered a way to change blood type A to blood type B, or when the whole class insisted that playing basketball caused a person to grow taller. I was not sure if, having been told such lies as children, they could not differentiate between truth and lies, or whether it was a survival method they had mastered.

also noticed a few bony women stooping over pools of water on the ground with buckets. They would pour earth into the water, let it soak up the water, then shovel the wet earth back into the buckets and dump it into a pile. This seemed to be Pyongyang’s version of a storm drainage system.

Did this mean the government had set up a fake election just for us?

Yet I would sometimes hear expressions that warmed my heart—archaic, innocent-sounding words that made me feel as though the entire country were a small village undisturbed by time. Instead of the prosaic soohwa, meaning sign language, North Koreans said “finger talk,” and instead of “developing photos” they said “images waking up,” which I found lovely and poetic.

When nothing can be expressed openly, you become quite good at interpreting silence.

It was eerie to see how quickly imposed censorship led to self-censorship.

and your eyes were drained in tears.

“On that day, teacher, you cried, and of course we cried in our minds too.”

When the lights went out, darkness fell so abruptly and completely that I could almost touch it.

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.

I was both impressed and disturbed by the buddy system. I noticed that with the shuffling of classes from summer to fall, most of the pairings changed as well, and students were never seen with their former buddies again. Yong-suk had been Hwang Jae-mun’s buddy during the summer, but now, despite the fact that they were in the same class, Yong-suk was devoted only to Sang-woo. There was perhaps nothing unusual about friendships shifting at the beginning of a new semester, but in this case buddies were paired by the school, through designated seats and room assignments. Their loyalty to each other seemed boundless, and that made their ability to shift alliances overnight seem oddly heartless. Also, the ease with which they followed orders to immediately become someone’s best friend struck me as unnatural.

Finally it dawned on me that my longing for him and missing him simply did not matter. So long as I was there, he was no longer relevant. Love could not save me.

This vacuum of information was becoming an inconvenience the students could no longer ignore because they lived with us, who had the knowledge they lacked, who expected them to know some of it for the papers we assigned and the conversations we had at mealtimes. We, the products of Western culture, were reminders that this vacuum was a real obstacle to learning.

The nationalism that had been instilled in them for so many generations had produced a citizenry whose ego was so fragile that they refused to acknowledge the rest of the world.

Nothing, it seemed, could break through their belligerent isolation; moreover, this attitude left no room for any argument, since all roads led to just one conclusion.

I did not question him further, but I thought I understood. It must have been deeply confusing to approach his writing on Juche like an essay. In his country there was no proof, no checks and balances—unless, of course, they wanted to prove that the Great Leader had single-handedly written hundreds of operas and thousands of books and saved the nation and done a miraculous number of things. Their entire system was designed not to be questioned, and to squash critical thinking. So the form of an essay, in which a thesis had to be proven, was antithetical to their entire system. The writer of an essay acknowledges the arguments opposing his thesis and refutes them. Here, opposition was not an option. I stared across at him and felt a familiar sick feeling. Perhaps this was only the beginning. The questions they would have. The questions they should be asking. The questions they would realize they had not been asking because they did not imagine they could, or because asking meant that they could no longer exist in their system.

The temperature was dropping every day. On some days, my fingers were too numb to hold the chalk while teaching. We all wore winter coats all the time, even in the classrooms. I still had to wear a skirt, so I doubled up on tights. Now that it was almost Thanksgiving time back home, I was even more homesick, though I had grown up celebrating Chuseok, the Korean Harvest Day, not Thanksgiving, and I did not eat turkey. At some meals, the students tried to distract me with funny stories, almost as if they could sense my spirit sinking.

Upon reaching my room, I would reflect upon my day with the students, going over each detail, writing it down, and would be struck by a gnawing feeling, a disturbing, almost physical sensation that something was deeply wrong.

Being in North Korea was profoundly depressing. There was no other way of putting it. The sealed border was not just at the 38th parallel, but everywhere, in each person’s heart, blocking the past and choking off the future. As much as I loved those boys, or because of it, I was becoming convinced that the wall between us was impossible to break down, and not only that, it was permanent. This so saddened me that some frozen dawns, when I woke up to the sound of the boys doing their group exercises, I had to fight not to shut my eyes and go back to sleep.

Many wrote to their mothers. They were heartfelt letters. One wrote: 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.

I felt disappointed and felt as if you are changeable and deceived me.

None of that had any bearing on my daily life, and it was strange how quickly I could put the thought out of my mind. His presence was irrelevant because, for the moment, we belonged in different worlds. This realization was alarming. It felt like a taste of how my students viewed me, or of what might have been behind the vacant gazes of Pyongyang citizens. A foreign visitor could never penetrate their world, let alone appease their suffering. No one ever deviated from the script.

This unexpected chance to join the Harry Potter bandwagon made them feel included in a world that had always been denied to them.

DURING THE LAST week there, I dreamt of vomiting. I vomited up the images of the silent villages alongside the roads, the gaunt faces outside the van window, the Great Leader slogans and the Great Leader songs and the Great Leader portraits that marked every building, every living creature, every hushed breath like a branding iron. In my dream, I threw up every last bit of my final days into a black plastic bag, which was so heavy that I had to drag it with both hands to dump it into a pit next to the teachers’ dormitory. Alone in the Siberian winds, I stood gazing down at the bag that seemed to be breathing, so resilient that it refused to die. Then I woke up, and it was 5:40 a.m. Outside it was pitch dark,