Free Without You, There Is No Us by Suki Kim Page B

Korea. It was entirely possible that my elite students had eaten this very beef, especially since that was soon after their great famine. I looked around the classroom and wondered what else they might have experienced as children, and how it had shaped them. So many of them already had at least a few gray hairs. Perhaps it was the lack of nutrition, even for these privileged young men.
    At times my students revealed a cluelessness that surprised me. Once a student asked me if it was true that everyone in the world spoke Korean. He had heard the Korean language was so superior that they spoke it in England, China, and America. I did not know what to say. Perhaps he was testing me to see if I would contradict all he had learned thus far and would later report me. Or maybe he was just curious. So I took the safe road: “Well, let me see, in China, they speak Chinese, and in England and the United States, they speak English, the way we speak Korean in Korea. However, I live in America and I speak Korean when I speak to my parents, so one might say that the Korean language does get spoken in America.” That took some very quick thinking. Even the simplest question could be a minefield.
    They emphatically insisted that Juche Tower was the tallest in the world; that their Arch of Triumph was the highest, certainly higher than the one in Paris (true); that their amusement park was the best in the world. They were always comparing themselves to the outside world, which none of them had ever seen, declaring themselves the best. This insistence on “best” seemed strangely childlike, and the words best and greatest were used so frequently that they gradually lost their meaning.
    Another time, a student asked me what my favorite food was. They often asked about my favorite flower, favorite sport, or favorite musical instrument. I wondered sometimes whether they had been given a list of safe questions. I soon learned to answer in the way I thought they expected. I liked tennis. I played piano. I enjoyed naengmyun, the Korean cold noodle that was popular in both Koreas but happened to be the regional specialty of Pyongyang. I did like naengmyun, but I could not tell them that I preferred pasta or soba noodles. Although I had seen one hamburger restaurant in Pyongyang, I did not know if any of my students had been there, and they certainly did not talk about international cuisine. So when asked about my favorite food, I stuck to naengmyun , which always brought smiles of approval as they inevitably said, “Yes, I hear naengmyun is enjoyed all over the world and is hailed as the best food.” I felt unable to break it to them that that particular noodle dish had never taken off abroad the way spaghetti had.
    Sometimes a meal felt like an interrogation, either vocal or silent. Once, a student, who turned out to be a class secretary, motioned to another student to ask me a question. “Why must we write those letters?” the student asked. “We never learned them at our former university.” His tone was suspicious. I had been expecting such a question for some time, since I had turned the letter writing into a weekly exercise. I told them that a paragraph was the basis of any writing in English and that they must learn how to write it, and letters were a good place to practice them. I knew that the questions came from the counterparts.
    There were only a handful of times any student veered from the script. During our conversation about Park Jun-ho’s birthday party, one of the boys blurted out that he liked singing rock ’n’ roll, and then he turned red, quickly checking to see who might be listening. I had never seen anyone scan the room so fast, and the other students went quiet and looked down at their food. There was no explanation for such an instinctive reaction except for a sort of ingrained fear that I could never fathom. In that fleeting moment, I realized that I had been waiting for that slip. It was even possible that I