Without You, There Is No Us by Suki Kim

had engineered it. And when the slip came, the truth was so pathetic, just the revelation of a nineteen-year-old boy singing songs in his dorm room, yet for admitting that in public, he might now be in serious trouble. I did my own nervous check to see who might have witnessed the slip and, just as quickly, I changed the topic of the conversation.
    We were always wary of one another. And this incessant circling around the boundary and our efforts not to breach it were exhausting. We wanted to discover things about one another, yet if we stumbled across such information, we both froze.
    It was a fine dance. I wanted to push them but not too much; to expose them to the outside world, but so subtly that no one would notice. The missionaries wanted to convert them, but not in any obvious way. (During a previous semester, one of the teachers had been expelled from the DPRK for leaving Christian texts in the men’s bathroom, and we had all been warned never to say anything about Jesus. As far as I could tell, the missionaries contented themselves with showing North Koreans the love of Christ simply by being kind to them. Theirs was a long-term project, so that when North Korea did one day open up, they would already have a foothold here.)
    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.
    NOT ALL OF us knew it then, but it was a time of upheaval in North Korea. During my first week, at a staff meeting, President Kim told us that every university in the entire country had shut down, except PUST. The reason PUST had been spared, he said, was that the Great Leader “believed” in him personally. This bit of news was related to us with no further explanation, but it was consistent with outside reports that Kim Jong-un, the “Precious Leader,” was being positioned to take over for the sixty-nine-year-old Kim Jong-il, who had suffered a stroke in 2008, and that every university student had been taken out of school and sent to do construction work until April 2012, when the entire nation would celebrate Kim Il-sung’s one hundredth birthday.
    I was not sure what to think. Western news reports about the DPRK were often unreliable, and the closing of all universities other than PUST seemed an extreme measure, even for North Korea.
    It seemed strange that in a country where organized religion was not permitted, and where anyone who did not believe in the Great Leader was considered a heretic, only this school—the “embassy from the kingdom of heaven,” according to President Kim— would be permitted to operate. Perhaps the Great Leader believed not in Kim, but in the cash the Christians raised to fund this free, relatively posh school for the North Korean elite. Moreover, I knew of no science teachers at the school, despite the fact that it was called the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology. I wanted to know why my students had not been sent to do construction like the others, but there was no one I could ask.
    WITH EACH PASSING day, we, the teachers, wondered why we were so tired. Sarah, a teacher from New Zealand, said that she slept for hours in the middle of the day. Ruth, another New Zealander, but of Korean origin, said that she felt as though she were still jet-lagged although she had flown in from Yanji, China, which was only one hour behind. I would fall into such a heavy sleep that my body felt almost numb. Katie said that it was because we were all so cautious all the time. Every evening, I thought back to the conversations that had taken place earlier that day during