Without You, There Is No Us (23 page)

I nodded and said, “Yes, the prettiest girls from Seoul, as handsome as my gentlemen from Pyongyang.”

This did not make up for hurting their feelings earlier, but it made them all break into giggles. One asked, “Do they have a monitor too?” The idea was so preposterous that I had to stop myself from laughing. I could not tell them that at South Korean universities there were no monitors, and certainly no platoon leaders, and that students did not march to classes or the cafeteria. So I just answered, “Well, most of them don’t live on campus. Ehwa girls just come and go individually, so no monitor.”

NOW
THAT
WE
were heading straight into winter, gardening duty became harder because the ground was often muddy, and then frozen. When I expressed concern about them having to work despite the weather conditions, a student matter-of-factly said they had boots, so it was not a problem. He told me that all of them had grown up tending to trees and plants. All DPRK citizens planted trees in October, which was “tree planting” month, and all Pyongyang citizens were ordered to do gardening work throughout the winter. Gardening was just a fancy word for manual labor that often included digging and hauling water. Now it made sense why, on our weekly grocery run through the city, I always saw people in scarves and gloves tending to the grass and bushes on the streets and riverbanks. My student recalled carrying buckets of water when he was as young as five. He said it so proudly that I realized he considered it a patriotic act. Besides, he added, gardening duty lasted only three or four hours, which allowed them to squeeze in some sports time, but cleaning floors or toilets took longer and left no extra time. So they preferred gardening duties.

That week, the students spent three hours digging a hole in the freezing cold. The previous week, it had been four hours. The students continued to assure me that the work was good for them, but some now admitted how tired they were. One said he had never labored this hard before coming to PUST.

On nights when the winds howled outside the window, I thought of the students out there on guard duty all night. None of them had the kind of heavy-duty coats that would have protected them properly. Their Great Leaders were always compared to the sun—Kim Il-sung’s birthday was Sun’s Day and Kim Jong-il was called “the Sun of the 21st century”—but there was no warmth from that sun. I finally brought up my concern about the cold at dinner one night, and they explained, reluctantly at first.

“It is very difficult for us … yes … but we are so happy to do it because it is a great honor that will help our Party and build a powerful and prosperous nation.”

Each student at the table nodded, so I asked if they had ever done this before getting to PUST.

“Yes, we did this at our former universities too.”

I then asked what about before university.

“Yes, since we were thirteen or fourteen. Everyone in our country grew up doing it.”

The frequency of guard duty depended on a man’s professional position, but they all performed this duty throughout their lives. Women, too, though they did not have to continue doing it once they gave birth.

As I had suspected, such duty existed in every one of the villages I had seen alongside the roads on our field trips. Those shrine-like buildings, known as Kimilsungism Study Halls, existed in every hamlet of their country, like churches or McDonald’s all over the world.

22

E
SSAY
WAS
A
MUCH
-
DREADED
WORD
AMONG
MY
STUDENTS
that fall. They were very stressed about having to write one, since it would be as important as exams in calculating their final grade. They were supposed to come up with their own topic and hand in a thesis and outline. When I asked them how it was going, they would sigh and say, “Disaster.”

I emphasized the importance of essays since, as scientists, they would one day have to write papers to prove their theories. But in reality, nothing was ever proven in their world, since everything was at the whim of the Great Leader. Their writing skills were as stunted as their research skills. Writing inevitably consisted of an endless repetition of his achievements, none of which was ever verified, since they lacked the concept of backing up a claim with evidence. A quick look at the articles in the daily paper revealed the exact same tone from start to finish, with neither progression nor pacing. There was no beginning and no end.

So the basic three- or five-paragraph essay—with a thesis, an introduction, a body paragraph with supporting details, and a conclusion—was entirely foreign to them. The idea they had the most difficulty comprehending was the introduction. I would tell them that it was like waving hello. How do you say hello in an interesting way, so that the reader is “hooked”? I offered many different examples, but still they would show up during office hours, shaking their heads and asking, “So this
hook
 … what is it?”

ONE
MORNING
,
THEY
shouted, “We beat Japan!” in unison as I walked into the classroom. Their national team, Chollima, had just beaten Japan’s Samurai Blue team for the World Cup qualifying match. The match had taken place at Kim Il-sung Stadium and had been televised live.

Here, the rage against Japan remained as vivid as when Japan had colonized Korea more than half a century before. The students were exuberant, proudly telling me about Jong Tae-se, their national team’s striker, and another one of their players who had been scouted by Manchester United. They did not acknowledge the fact that Jong was in fact a third-generation Zainichi Korean, a term used for ethnic Koreans born, raised, and living in Japan whose loyalty lies with North Korea. In their eyes, Zainichi Koreans were Japanese, their sworn enemy, and yet at opportune moments they considered them North Koreans.
*5
I knew better than to comment on that.

“How exciting!” I said brightly. “Wouldn’t it be great if Chollima makes it to Brazil for the World Cup?” They all nodded, smiling.

It was not until later that day that I looked on the Internet and learned that North Korea had already been knocked out, and the results had been announced some time ago. The match against Japan had to be played simply because it was a game owed. Either the students would not admit this, or they did not know the truth. Not only that, I learned that the game had not actually been televised live. Rather, it had been broadcast as soon as it ended, when the regime could be certain that their team had won. One student told me that it was very boring to watch only winning games. Moreover, no matter how hard I searched online, there was no mention of a North Korean footballer playing for Manchester United. As always, their government had sown misinformation, and my students’ claims lacked any basis in reality, so I could hardly expect them to back up their theses.

YET
NOW
THAT
the graduate students had begun using the Internet—for about three or four hours a day, they told me—my students had become aware that they were missing out on something. At meals, I took out my laptop to show them the photos I had taken on Sports Day. They liked looking at photos of themselves and always wanted me to zoom in on their faces. “Okay, most handsome!” a cheeky student might declare. “You can print that one!” I changed my screen saver to a shot of the Manhattan skyline so that they would inadvertently get a glimpse of it. Sometimes I would open up a cute program called Photo Booth and take pictures of us sitting together while tiny pink hearts scrolled across the screen. “What are they? Why are those small pink things moving like that?” they would exclaim and then burst out laughing. Maybe it was because they had been taught since birth that they were soldiers that I liked to see them express simple joy.

They had also begun to express their admiration more openly. “I never saw a computer so thin!” said one student, regarding my laptop. Another said that he had never heard of a Mac until now and asked if it was the same as Windows. I reminded them about our previous lesson on obituaries and Steve Jobs. Some also remarked that my dictionary was unusual, to which I responded that a Kindle was not a dictionary but an electronic device that could contain thousands of books, the way an electronic dictionary holds thousands of words.

A student told me that he was very curious about my computer because his major was software. At his former university, he had been in charge of the intranet, and he hoped that after graduation he would be assigned to work for Chosun Computer Center. He added that he would have learned “hacking” in his junior year had he not been transferred to PUST. When I asked him if there was an actual course on hacking, he told me a story about a notoriously smart second-year student at his former university. One day the student hacked into the government system and improved all his grades. Government officials found out but decided that since the student was so brilliant, they would let him keep the high grades. The moral of this story seemed to be that hacking is a crime, but permissible if done well.

The student then asked if my MacBook connects to the Internet. I had recently been asked by another student if I could connect to the Internet using my iPod, which they had seen me listening to while running. They did not understand that it was not enough to have a device capable of connecting to the Internet; you had to have access to a signal. I explained it as well as I could and added that I could connect to the Internet with any computer, virtually anywhere, including parks and cafés, except in his country. I knew I should not be talking about this, but I could not keep silent.

Soon, one by one, my students began asking questions.

“Did you watch movies on the Internet today?”

“How long could you watch movies for?

“How many movies can you watch?”

“Well, imagine infinity,” I said, struggling to explain. “The Internet is a little like infinity. There are hundreds of thousands of websites that can be visited, tens of thousands of movies to choose from.” They nodded, but then again, they always nodded.

One of my most sophisticated students, Song Seung-jin, asked me if I could help him find information about alcohol. He wanted to write about its advantages and disadvantages, but he had never drunk alcohol and did not know how to go about researching it. He was a son of a doctor who had been surrounded by medical information all his life, with the ambition of becoming a doctor himself, and yet he did not have a clue as to the effects of alcohol. What he was suggesting, I realized, was that I look it up for him on the Internet.

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.

But misinformation and lack of information were not the only problems in teaching them how to write an essay. In their storytelling, a conclusion was always predetermined. For example, we had organized a competition, just like in the summer, for which the students were supposed to come up with brief, original skits, and Ruth, who was advising some of them, poked her head into my office one afternoon with a question. I had avoided her for some time now, but I was relieved that, apparently, my cover had not really been blown, since she assumed that I was Christian, but just not as devout as her.

“Do they sell organs in America?” she asked.

I shook my head and said, “No, that’s illegal.”

She explained that one of her students had an idea for a skit about a man who is horrified by organ buying and selling in America, and amazed when he comes to North Korea and finds out that hospitals are free, due to the solicitude of the Great Leader.

Class 4 performed a skit about a group of firemen rescuing a couple caught in a fire, before breaking into a song about the Great Leader. The winning skit was about a landowner’s brutality against farmers, and was set during the era before the Korean liberation, which, the narrator explained, had been heroically conducted by their Eternal President Kim Il-sung. At the end, the whole cast again burst into a song about their gratitude to the Workers’ Party. The exact reason why they suddenly thanked their Party was unclear, but all of the skits ended, regardless of plot, with a song of gratitude to either their Leader or their Party.

INSTEAD
OF
A
lesson on sources, which was not possible here, I asked that they read a simple essay from 1997 that quoted President Bill Clinton on how important it was to make all schools wired. I got it approved by the counterparts because it related it to our current textbook theme of college education. I hoped that they would grasp how behind they were. I also gave them four recent articles—from the
Princeton Review,
the
New York Times,
the
Financial Times,
and
Harvard Magazine
—that mentioned Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, and Twitter. None of the pieces evoked a response. Not even the sentence about Zuckerberg earning $100 billion from something he dreamed up in his college dorm seemed to interest them. It was possible that they viewed the reading as lies. Or perhaps the capitalist angle repelled them.

The next day, several students stopped by during office hours. They all wanted to change their essay topics. Curiously, the new topics they proposed all had to do with the ills of American society. One said he wanted to write about corporal punishment in American and Japanese middle schools. Another wanted to argue that the American government’s policy of deciding a baby’s future based on IQ tests should be forbidden. A third student wanted to write about the evils of allowing people to own guns so freely, in America. A fourth student said biofuel was toxic and America was the biggest producer of it. A fifth wanted to change his topic to divorce. There was no divorce in the DPRK, but in America the rate was more than 50 percent, and divorce led to crime and mental illness, according to him. “So what happens when people are unhappy here after being married for a while?” I asked. The student looked at me blankly. Still another student wanted to write about how McDonald’s was horrible. The same student then asked me, “So what kind of food does McDonald’s make?”

One student asked me which country produced the most computer hackers; he had been taught that it was America. This question stumped me, especially since I had just seen a news item on CNN Asia about cybercrime by North Korea. Instead, I told him that computer crimes could be committed anywhere, by anyone, even a visitor, so it would be hard to pinpoint one country as the source.

When their thesis sentences came in, I saw that one student had written: “Despite the harmful effect of nuclear weapons, some countries such as the U.S. keep developing nuclear weapons.” It seemed he had no idea that North Korea’s development and testing of nuclear weapons was an international concern. Another wrote that starvation was an impossible problem to solve, especially in Africa, and especially since even rich countries, such as England and America, had starvation problems. Another chose the topic of money and how it made some societies do unethical things.

One thing was clear. Their collective decision to switch their essay topics to condemn America seemed to have been compelled by the articles about Zuckerberg. What I had intended as inspirational, they must have viewed as boasting and felt slighted. 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.

My efforts to expand their awareness kept backfiring. The paragraph about
kimjang
I had assigned led to a pile of preachy, self-righteous tirades. Almost half the students claimed that kimchi was the most famous food in the world, and that all other nations were envious of it. One student wrote that the American government had named it the official food of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. When I questioned him, he said everyone knew this fact, and that he could even prove it since his Korean textbook said so. A quick Internet search revealed that a Japanese manufacturer had claimed that kimchi was a Japanese dish and proposed it as an official Olympic food, but had been denied. Somehow this news item had been relayed to them in twisted form and was now treated as general knowledge.

To correct my students on each bit of misinformation was taxing and sometimes meant straying into dangerous territory. Martha said, “No way. Don’t touch that. If their book said it was true, you can’t tell them that it’s a lie.”

Sometimes they would ask why I never ate much white rice. They piled their trays with huge heaps of it at every meal, whereas I always put just a little on my tray. I explained that I liked white rice but did not care for it all the time. 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.” 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 returned the paper to him with a comment: “Why is it not possible to like both spaghetti and kimchi?”