Without You, There Is No Us (16 page)

Whatever the case, from that day on, I ran unmolested through that dead quiet campus, where everyone was fast asleep, as directed by their Great Leader.

THE
GLOOMY
FACES
at the next staff meeting told me that something bad had happened. One of the summer missionary teachers had written a blog post about her experience at PUST in the
Washington Post.
They would not show it to us, or even tell us what she had written, and it was too risky for us to visit the website. All we knew was that President Kim was very upset and said that they intended to screen teachers more carefully.

“I told every teacher that they shouldn’t talk to the press, and that if they were approached, they had to send everything my way first,” Joan said, somewhat defensively.

“Did the summer staff sign the same agreement we signed last winter?” asked a British teacher who had been at the school since it opened.

“No, but I did tell them to be discreet!” Joan replied.

Another teacher added, “She wanted to return here next summer, and even bring her husband, and now I guess not.”

They all nodded, agreeing to be extra careful from then on. It was eerie to see how quickly imposed censorship led to self-censorship. I was afraid they would make me sign some sort of agreement, and I instinctively tightened my grip around my key chain, to which I had attached two USB sticks. 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, including me and my eventual, inevitable betrayal.

15

I
N
OCTOBER
,
I
LEARNED
THAT
STEVE
JOBS
HAD
died and that Qaddafi had been killed in Libya. Newspapers around the world were buzzing about the Arab Spring, about a new order in which civil discontent could no longer be so easily suppressed. In the DPRK, however, life continued exactly as it had for the past sixty some years, with no news that did not concern the Great Leader.

Lessons also continued much as they had during the summer, but because of the more demanding fall curriculum there was no time for activity hours or a weekly personal letter, so I could not be as creative. A new system of team teaching had been introduced to ensure that we kept each other in check, just as the students did with each other. This was a different thing altogether from my arrangement with Katie, who had been a TA and followed my lead. Katie had not returned for the fall semester, and neither had Sarah. Now I had to check every lesson with Martha, the other team teacher—a twenty-four-year-old Brit who taught Classes 2 and 3—and I felt the small freedom I had in teaching evaporate.

Still, using the excuse of teaching students the difference between casual and formal language, I came up with a lesson involving a job application letter, and it was approved. I hoped to find out more about how employment decisions were made there, and also to show them that we
chose
our jobs outside. The assignment was to write a letter applying for a dream job. Many simply followed the example on the board, which was a letter applying for a job as a translator. Only a few came up with their own job possibilities. One wrote a letter to Manchester United asking for a position, offering to provide a résumé, as though this was a reasonable way to prove one’s worth to a professional soccer team. Others said they wanted to apply to the NBA but did not want to ask a Western person for a job, so I told them that they could give the person they were addressing a Korean name. Another student told me that he wanted to ask Bill Gates for a job but had no address for him. I told him just to make up an address for the moment, but since he had never seen a foreign address, he was still baffled. Without access to the Internet, even simple tasks caused them great stress.

Almost no one understood the fundamental idea behind writing such a letter. They would write sentences such as “I have no job and would like a job” or “I am bored and want a job.” The entire concept of making oneself marketable in the eyes of a prospective employer did not exist.

Since this was a lesson on comparing formal and informal, I insisted to Martha that I needed to check up on their informal letter-writing skills. Then I asked them to write me a personal letter to remind me who they were. The resulting letters were far more emotional than I had expected. Many filled both sides of the page. Instead of writing their names at the end, some described themselves and asked me to guess who they were, and one of them signed his letter with “Shy boy (only in English).” Another tried to be funny and wrote, “My brain is bad, and my appearance is ugly. My head looks like a pumpkin and my body looks like a potato. Now can you name who I am?” They talked about Sports Day and the spelling bee and missing Katie. One of them mentioned how touched he had been when gardening duty lasted longer than usual one evening, and Katie and I waited for them so we could all have dinner together. Another wrote, “In the summer semester, you were our good professor, but you were also like our familiar sister. We regretted not to see you off when you left for the airport.” Yet another wrote, “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.”

Many recalled the last evening of the summer semester when I sang their country’s song with them. One wrote, “Your singing struck a deep impression on us because you sang this song happily, and sadly, and your eyes were drained in tears. If you thought about the days you spent with us, you would have been happy and if you thought about separating from us, you would have been sad.” Most of them had remained stone-faced then, but another wrote, “On that day, teacher, you cried, and of course we cried in our minds too.” This might be as far as I could go in reaching them, I thought.

Or maybe I could go further. Since technology in North Korea was so dated and they were exposed to so little of it, I wanted them to see what was out there. I could have starred in a commercial for Apple the way I made sure to always keep my brand-new MacBook open on the lectern during lessons. I also pulled out my Kindle whenever I could. I kept thinking of the ways to make them aware of the world of modern technology. For our next writing exercise, I decided to use obituaries of Steve Jobs to teach them about the art of biography. The catch was that I had to run the material by my team teacher before getting it approved by the counterparts.

Martha came into my office, holding up the printout of the nine obituaries I had selected, shaking her head. “Most of these won’t work. We’d have to delete all the interesting parts. In this Cuban blogger one, for example, about how she came from a repressed society and felt personally touched by Steve Jobs, we’d have to cut out her discussion of politics. And this article about the Chinese reaction is no good. The Chinese are laying down flowers at his memorial tribute as though he were Mao. The counterparts will never go for that.”

Martha was a good Christian girl and firmly believed in rules, but she was also young, so I put my foot down. “Why don’t we just cut a paragraph or two? “

So we sat in my office, butchering perfectly well-written newspaper articles. In the end we narrowed it down to three: CNN,
Forbes,
MTV. The one that worried Martha was the obituary from the MTV website, which listed devices the students had never seen, like iPods and iPads. “These mean nothing to them,” Martha insisted. Although the counterparts approved the lesson, none of the students, some of whom were computer science majors, had ever heard of Steve Jobs. They showed little interest, not even when I told them he had helped mastermind the machine they saw sitting in front of me.

It seemed odd that they had all heard of Bill Gates but drew a blank on Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs. The only two English-language writers I ever heard them mention were Sidney Sheldon and Margaret Mitchell. Several students told me they had read “
Disappeared with the Wind”
and quoted passages from it. In 2002, I had visited Kim Il Sung University, and students there had told me the same thing. Perhaps it was the conflict between North and South, in which the North wins, that appealed to them. “Do you know the words to ‘Aloha Hawaii’?” the two youngest counterparts in my class, both in their late thirties, asked, referring to the “very famous” American pop song. When I told them that I did not, they were surprised. I later looked it up and discovered that in 1973 there had been a concert and album by Elvis Presley called
Aloha from Hawaii
. What washed ashore or found its way into North Korea had a random feeling to it; there seemed to be no pattern, no rhyme or reason to what aspects of Western culture—whether an icon like Michael Jordan or the detritus of the culture—might be allowed in.

THIS
SEMESTER
ALREADY
felt different. The students were used to me now, and we were all less cautious. Many of them now told me openly that they were not allowed cell phones at PUST; however, a few sometimes borrowed them from campus workers to call home. They had very powerful parents, so it made sense that they could wield some influence with the workers. Although these parents were not allowed on campus, they could, on rare occasions, stop at the gate to see their children briefly or drop off things. One day, a student could not make it to lunch with me as scheduled. Later, he explained that his mother had come to the gate with rice cake and roast chicken because it was his birthday. He was an only child, and she wept during their twenty-minute meeting, so he told her, “If you keep crying, I am going to go back inside.” He was laughing as he said this before his friends, but his eyes watered.

The students asked me the meaning of the word
exclusive
, so I gave as an example a very well-known Pyongyang restaurant, Okryu-Gwan. One student brightened and told me that his friend from middle school was a waitress there. She had not passed the university exam, so she had been assigned a waitress job. I asked if she gave him extra
naengmyun
, and he said never, but that she served him fast. Clearly, even residents experienced long waits at restaurants, just as visitors did. In any case, the class all shook their heads at my example and said, “No, that is not exclusive, that is popular!” Then they said perhaps I meant the Koryo Hotel restaurant. At Okryu-Gwan, they explained, they paid for a meal with a government-issued food ration ticket. At Koryo Hotel, however, they were expected to pay with money, which excluded some customers.

“Are the same number of ration tickets given to everyone?” I asked.

They answered yes, although some added that the number of ration tickets depended on the person’s loyalty to the party. This ration ticket versus cash system was confusing. I knew that the State distributed some things for free while others had to be paid for, but I could never get an answer as to where they got money.

One student surprised me by giving Samsung as an example of an exclusive label or company. They were not supposed to praise anything South Korean, and moreover, Samsung was not as big a presence there as Hyundai, whose founder, Jung Ju-yong, hailed from North Korea and had once led a hundred trucks containing 1,001 cows across the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) into the North, among other inter-Korean projects.

Another change was that they now asked things about America. At dinner, one student cautiously asked, “In America, among college students, is it a secret to have a girlfriend?” I said, “No, it’s pretty natural for us, but I come from a different kind of society. What about here? Is it a secret?” He nodded, but another student shook his head. They were hesitant, yet it was a step forward that they trusted me enough to ask such a thing.

Since they liked sports, I decided to give them a short article to read on why baseball and basketball were more TV-friendly than soccer in the United States, and the counterparts approved it. The author’s main argument was that soccer was less well suited to commercial breaks, which made networks less enthusiastic about airing soccer matches. There was no such thing as a commercial in the DPRK, so I explained that a commercial was a very brief movie made by a company to sell a product. I used as an example one of the few locally produced products, a bottled spring water called Shinduk Saemul.

“Okay,” I said. “During a basketball game, let’s say there’s an interruption for a commercial featuring Michael Jordan.” They smiled at this reference. Then I pretended to be Michael Jordan dribbling a ball and dunking it, turning around, wiping sweat off his forehead, taking a sip from the bottle of Shinduk Saemul, and saying, “Wow, Shinduk Saemul
is
the best!” They all burst out laughing, and I explained that that would be a typical commercial in my country. I told them that if the company that made Shinduk Saemul were owned by a person, rather than a government, the company would “target” the basketball audience by hiring Michael Jordan and paying the television station for airtime. The company’s goal was for viewers around the world to watch the commercial and want to drink the same water Michael Jordan drinks and buy it. They liked the notion of a famous American basketball star drinking their water, and, amazingly, they seemed to understand the general concept of marketing. Their curiosity grew.

“How many TV channels do you have in America?” a student asked at dinner one night.

“A lot,” I said.

“A hundred?” A hundred television channels was like a joke to them when they only had three government channels, so he was probably just guessing wildly. But in fact my cable TV provider offered nearly a thousand channels.

“More,” I said, shrugging. “We have about thirty free channels, but hundreds of ones through cable TV, which we pay for. These are very specific. There are movie channels, cartoon channels, news channels, sports channels. For example, children’s programming might be divided into cartoons and live-action shows, but there might also be different channels with cartoons for three-year-olds, five-year-olds, and ten-year-olds. Same for sports. There are channels that show only basketball, golf, baseball, American football, and more, throughout the day.”

Some gawked at me, and some just lowered their gazes. I could not tell if they believed me, but my detailed answer seemed to bother them. I was being bolder than ever, but by that time I trusted them not to report me. I also knew that I could somehow connect it to the lesson on TV commercials if I were questioned by counterparts. For weeks afterward, several students asked me the same question about the number of TV channels in America, and my answer always had the same effect: a look of disbelief and something else I could not quite grasp—something between envy and self-doubt. I was not boasting about American television, since much of it was junk, but I wanted them to see that we had choices, many choices, and that what their leaders had told them about them being powerful and prosperous was pure fantasy. They were behind, farther behind than almost everyone else in the world, and if they wanted to truly become a powerful and prosperous nation that produced much more than spring water, it was important for them to rise up.

But I could not tell them any of this, so instead I kept repeating that we had a
choice
of hundreds of television channels.

Another time, they talked about exchange programs, and one student said that his roommate wanted to go Stuttgart, Germany. I told them I had been there and they asked when.

“Oh, when I was living in London many years ago. Germany is close to England. Europe is small. For example, it only takes two hours and fifteen minutes by train to get from London to Paris.”