Suki Kim - Undercover in North Korea with its Future Leaders

 

So, I was packing my suitcase when there was a knock at the door. I knew it was there, so I ignored it and I kept packing. And she kept knocking. So, finally, I gave up and I opened the door. So, there she was, 24, British, one of the evangelical Christians that I had been working with for the past six months. She said, “He's dead.” For a moment, I was confused. I thought she meant God. [audience laughter] This was a Christmas time and [audience laughter] there had been a lot of these Bible study meetings lately, which is why I didn't want to open the door. It was exhausting pretending to be one of them for months. This was my last day teaching, I just wanted to get out of there. 

 

Then she said, pointing at the ceiling, and now whispering, she said, “He died.” Then I knew she meant the other God in that world, Kim Jong-il, the then great leader of North Korea. So, the place was Pyongyang. The time was December 2011. I had been teaching at an all-male university in Pyongyang. I was University of Science and Technology that was funded, founded and operated by a group of evangelical Christians from around the world. 

 

Now, religion is not allowed in North Korea. And proselytizing is a capital crime. This group of evangelical Christians, however, had struck a deal with the North Korean regime, an unofficial one, to fund the education of the sons of elite in exchange for access. They promised to not proselytize, but they were getting a footing in a country of 25 million devout followers of the Great Leader. And if he were to fall, then they would need another God to replace him. 

 

So, I pretended to be one of them, to be there. But I only got away with it, because the real missionaries were pretending to not be missionaries. [audience laughter] So, why did I go through such an extreme to be there? Writing about North Korea with any depth or meaning is impossible, unless you are embedded there. A full immersion was the only way. I had been to North Korea since 2002, and returned there repeatedly. And if I were to just write whatever they showed me, then I would be the regime's publicist, not a writer. I didn't want to wait for North Korea's permission to tell North Korea's truth according to North Korean regime's agenda. But this was also personal. 

 

I was born and raised in South Korea into a family that was torn apart by the Korean War. In 1950, when North Korea bombed South Korea, my grandmother, who was living in Seoul, packed her five children, including my mother, who was then four years old, to flee. All the southbound trains were jam packed. So, the family secured seats in the back of a truck. It's when the truck was about to pull off, somebody shouted, “Young men should give up seats for women and children.” So, my grandmother's first child, my uncle who was then 17, got up and said, “I get a ride and I'll join you in the next town.” He never arrived. And later the neighbors reported seeing him with his hands tied, being dragged away by North Korean soldiers. 

 

In 1953, after millions of Koreans died and families got separated, an armistice was signed and the Korean War paused. Along the 38th parallel, which is an artificial division originally drawn by the United States with the help of the allies, the 5,000-year-old kingdom of Korea was split in half. From that point, my grandmother waited for her son to come home. Like, millions of Korean mothers on both sides of Korea. Over 70 years have passed, and that border which Koreans thought was temporary is still there. 

 

Even though I moved to America when I was 13 years old, this family history haunted me. Later, as a writer, I became obsessed with North Korea, and to find out what is really going on there. So, I went undercover as a teacher and a missionary. When I got there in 2011, they were preparing for Year 100. The North Korean calendar system begins at the birth of the original Great Leader. To celebrate the occasion, the regime had shut down all universities and put all university students into construction field to build Great Leader monuments. 

 

In actuality, however, the then Great Leader was dying and his young son was about to take over. They put older youth scatter them to prevent any possible revolt. Outside, this was the time of the Arab Spring and they didn't want a North Korean Spring. The only ones who did not get sent to construction fields were my students. The campus was a five-star prison. None of us were allowed out. The students were never allowed out. The teachers were allowed out in group outings with minders to visit Great Leader monuments. Every class was reported on and recorded. Every conversation was overheard. Every room was bugged. Every lesson plans had to be pre-approved. 

 

I ate meals with three students every meal. They never veered from the script. They went everywhere in campus in pairs and groups and watched each other. In order to get to know them better, I assigned letter writing and essay writing. Although many of them were computer majors, they didn't know the existence of the internet. Although many were science majors, they didn't know when a man first walked on the moon. The vacuum of knowledge about anything other than their Great Leader was shocking. But I was under a strict set of rules to never tell them anything about the outside world. 

 

Once a student said, he listens to rock and roll on the birthday. And usually, they all said, they only listen to songs about the Great Leader. When he blurted this out, he looked around to check who might have heard him, and he froze. And the fear that I saw on his face was so palpable that I knew that whatever punishment that would go with this slip was something beyond my imagination. So, I changed the topic. What really disturbed me about that was that I had been waiting for that slip in order to understand their world better. But when that slip happened, I became nervous and worried, and I began to question what it was that I was doing there. Then I began to notice something strange about my students. They lied very often, very easily. The lies came in different tiers. Sometimes they lied to protect their system. 

 

There was a building on campus called Kim Il Sung-ism Study Hall, which means Great Leaderism Study Hall, where they went to study Great Leader studies every day and they had to guard this building 24/7. So, I would see them guarding the building all night. But if I ask them, how was your night? They'll say they slept really well and felt really rested. Sometimes they would just regurgitate lies that they'd been taught. They'll say the scientists in their country changed blood types from A to B. Sometimes they lie for no apparent reason, as if the line between truth and lie just wasn't clear to them. 

 

Initially, I was really upset and repulsed by these rampant lies. But as I spent months and months there with them, in that locked compound, I began to really understand their predicament. I felt such empathy and love. They were so easy to love, but impossible to trust. They were sincere, but they lied. But if all you've ever known were lies, then how can you expect them to be any other way, it's as if their great humanity was in constant conflict with the inhumanity of their system. But then I was there, pretending to be something I'm not, in order to get to the truth of the place. 

 

In that world, lies were necessary for survival. But then one day, a student asked me about a national assembly. There was no way I could explain that without bringing up democracy and the outside world. But I was nervous, you know, the other students at the table were watching this conversation. So, I answered as honestly as I could and as vaguely as I could. That night, I couldn't fall asleep. I was afraid that the student was trying to trick me into saying something, so he could report on me. I was in fact writing a book in secret. I had pages and pages of notes hidden on USB sticks which I kept on my body at all times and I thought, if those were discovered, then would I disappear the way my uncle had and would my mother then have to repeat the life of heartbreak that my grandmother lived through. 

 

Being in North Korea, if you tap into that fear that's beneath the propaganda is bone chillingly depressing. That night, I felt more alone and more afraid than ever. But then the next day, I ran into a friend of his, and he said, “He thinks like you.” Then I realized the student was not making reports on me. The student was, in fact, genuinely curious. Now, this was even worse. I was now afraid of the consequence of that curiosity, that I might have inspired. My role there was to plant a seed of doubt. But then, what would happen to the student that I might have reached? Would he then be punished for questioning the regime, or would he be doomed to a life of unhappiness? 

 

I was no longer sure if our truth, the truth of the outside world, would in fact help them. I adored my students. I called them my young gentlemen. They opened up to me little by little through those letters that I signed. And in those letters, they talked about missing their mothers, their girlfriends and also being fed up with the sameness of everything, because their lives were only about the great leader. The only break they ever got was playing group sports. Some evenings, I would watch them play soccer and basketball, and I would marvel at the beauty and this exuberant energy and joy and grace of their youth. I wanted to show them, tell them about this incredible world outside, filled with infinite possibilities that they so deserved. But I knew that I couldn't. All I was capable of doing was to observe that while their bodies bounce, their mind remains stuck in that timeless vacuum that had nothing but their Great Leader. 

 

On my last day, Kim Jong-il's death was announced to the world. Everything came to a sudden end. I saw my students from the distance as they were hauled away to a special meeting. Their faces looked at me, but their eyes didn't see me, it's as if their souls had been sucked out of them. They had just lost their God, their parent and the reason for everything in their world. I never got to say goodbye to them. The horror of North Korea goes beyond famine and gulags. To survive there, real human beings have to not only believe in the lies of the Great Leader, but also perpetuate them, which is a mental torture. It's a world where every citizen is complicit in the deprivation of their own humanity. 

 

Towards the end of my stay, a student said to me, “We always think of you as being the same. Our circumstances are different, but we think of you as the same as us. We really want you to know that we truly think of you as being the same.” But are we really the same? Maybe we were at some point. But three generations of the Great Leader have now happened. And for 70 years, the world sat back and just watched, which to me, that silence is indefensible. Lies run so deep there, because the center is rotten, and that rottenness is irrevocable. What would happen to my students, my young gentlemen, as they become the soldiers and slaves of their Great Leader, Kim Jong Un. If my uncle had managed to survive, would it be the same boy that had jumped off that truck? Thank you.