Without You, There Is No Us by Suki Kim Page A

each meal, trying to determine whether I had said something I should not have. It takes tremendous energy to censor yourself all the time, to have to, in a sense, continually lie.
    There were mornings when I looked out my window and stared at the wall that separated PUST from the outside. Some teachers whispered that this was a five-star prison. We knew that we could never pass through the gate except on trips to go grocery shopping at the diplomatic compound or on organized sightseeing tours at designated times, when minders planned our outings down to the minute and accompanied us.
    On weekends, there were trips outside when teachers could stock up on groceries. The school van took teachers to Pyongyang Shop, a Japanese-owned grocery, and an Argentinian grocery. All of them carried canned products, cheese, fruit, cereal, and long-lasting milk. The Japanese shop sold Japanese-made pancake mix for about five dollars, as well as wheat germ, which cost twice what it did in the United States. The Argentinian shop sold a variety of 100 percent fruit juice concentrates and some canned pasta from France. These stores took euros, Chinese renminbi, and U.S. dollars, but not North Korean won. As per the rules, we were only allowed to use the local currency in places where the locals shopped alongside us. The newly constructed Potonggang Department Store carried every kind of import, from refrigerators and cosmetics to groceries, laid out on two floors connected by an escalator, a rare sight in North Korea. The people who shopped there looked wealthier than those on streets.
    On those outings, we were escorted out and brought back in as a unit. We never crossed the boundary on our own. Would I be shot if I were to run out the gate while jogging? Was there a watch post from which someone surveyed us at all times? Even in my room, I never felt free. This vigilance was so exhausting that I welcomed it when Sarah came over one night and said, “Let’s see if the students would invite us to play soccer with them!”
    Basketball and soccer, and sometimes volleyball, were the sports of choice among the students, for the obvious reason that the only equipment required was a ball. After dinner, they gathered and played either in the cement basketball court by their dormitory or in the grass field in the center of the campus. They did not have jerseys, so the teams were divided between those students with shirts and those without. On hot July evenings, they played with a zeal I had not seen them show anywhere else. They shouted at each other in jest, burst into laughter, sweated profusely, and moved with the unique grace and beauty of youth. I often sat on a rock nearby and watched them. The sun would be setting in the distance, so slowly that sometimes it appeared as though even the sun moved at a different speed there, like the slow smoke billowing from the distant tower. That smoke, on such evenings, looked as ethereal as those moving bodies, and in that moment, I forgot all of it, the taboo subjects we never spoke of and the secrets hidden all over campus. Instead all I saw was their heartbreaking youth and energy, and I wished then that they could have the whole world, all of it, that which had been denied to them for twenty years of their lives, because none of them had any idea that as their bodies bounced, their minds stood so very still within that field in that campus locked away from time.
    On that particular evening, Sarah and I walked past them and lingered, hoping for an invitation, until one of them asked, “Professor, would you like to play with us?” Sarah broke into a huge smile and said, “Yes!” and it was as easy as that. Surprisingly, the counterparts, who must have been informed, never intercepted her. Before we knew it, it became a ritual for Sarah to play with the students in the evenings. Sarah had played back in college, just a few years ago. At about five foot two, with bright blue eyes, sandy hair always in a