higher calling? But no real believer would be interested in a nonbeliever for a mate.
Life was about serving a purpose, and yet there was a chasm between us. Her life’s purpose was to serve God. Without him, life would lose its meaning and she might as well not exist.
What I did not tell Sarah was that during the first ten days, I had received just one email from the man in Brooklyn. When are you coming home? he asked. That’s all he wrote. He was a man of few words to begin with, and perhaps he felt nervous sending emails to this forbidden place on the other side of the world. For newly connected lovers, two months apart was an interminably long time, especially when our lives were moving at such vastly different speeds. Since I had arrived in Pyongyang, England’s News of the World had shut down after the phone hacking scandal exploded. The final Harry Potter movie had come and gone. Mumbai had suffered another bombing. A new nation had been born in Sudan. Amazon had just announced a new tablet to rival the iPad. I knew all this because I was one of the very few in all of North Korea who had access to global news. In my room, I always had CNN Asia on, often with the sound muted. In the past I had never watched much TV news, but here it felt comforting, a window to the outside world.
One evening, I was grading papers when I happened to look up and see the Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building on the screen. I burst into tears, seized by such a profound longing for home that I could not stand it. I paced back and forth, wanting to pick up the phone and call home, but of course we had no phones that could call outside. Nothing went in or out. It felt so stationary that it was sometimes hard to put dates to things.
I had asked my students when their favorite drama, The Nation of the Sun , was made, and they had no idea. Ten years ago? Twenty? They seemed to think it was about twenty, which made me realize that even their favorite TV program was not currently produced. Both Great Leaders always looked to be in late middle age. No one knew the exact age of the Precious Leader; it was not until later, after he came to power, that various media confirmed his age as twenty-nine. Their newspaper was filled with vague events with nonspecific dates, and on the one trip we had taken outside the gate, I had seen store signs with words such as namse (a word for vegetables no longer used in South Korea) that harkened back to decades ago. The entire country was like a linguistic and cultural Galápagos.
So time moved on—or didn’t—on this strange campus that seemed even stranger than the strange country beyond its walls, and, to find an anchor, I hung on to my lover’s email. When are you coming home? Those five words carried me as I woke up at 5 a.m. and opened the curtain to face each new day.
“So are you a writer?”
Sarah’s question shook me out of my reverie.
For a moment I was caught off guard, but then I said yes, I was a fiction writer, but I was there as a teacher. To my relief, she seemed satisfied with my answer and never brought the subject up again.
Shortly after my conversation with Sarah, I discovered that one of the teachers, a man from a Christian university in Mississippi, had Googled everyone from the group. Some of the missionaries seemed oblivious to their surroundings, even naïve, often forgetting that our Internet connection was constantly monitored. A teacher from Texas told me that he got on the Internet and tried to pay for something with PayPal, but it was denied because the company blocked usage from countries under international economic sanction. Another teacher seemed surprised to learn that this country had gulags.
When Katie heard about the teacher who had Googled everyone, she panicked. She had done some NGO work helping defectors. Though I did not say anything to Katie, I was afraid that my cover had been blown. So far, no one in our group had asked me directly whether or
Life was about serving a purpose, and yet there was a chasm between us. Her life’s purpose was to serve God. Without him, life would lose its meaning and she might as well not exist.
What I did not tell Sarah was that during the first ten days, I had received just one email from the man in Brooklyn. When are you coming home? he asked. That’s all he wrote. He was a man of few words to begin with, and perhaps he felt nervous sending emails to this forbidden place on the other side of the world. For newly connected lovers, two months apart was an interminably long time, especially when our lives were moving at such vastly different speeds. Since I had arrived in Pyongyang, England’s News of the World had shut down after the phone hacking scandal exploded. The final Harry Potter movie had come and gone. Mumbai had suffered another bombing. A new nation had been born in Sudan. Amazon had just announced a new tablet to rival the iPad. I knew all this because I was one of the very few in all of North Korea who had access to global news. In my room, I always had CNN Asia on, often with the sound muted. In the past I had never watched much TV news, but here it felt comforting, a window to the outside world.
One evening, I was grading papers when I happened to look up and see the Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building on the screen. I burst into tears, seized by such a profound longing for home that I could not stand it. I paced back and forth, wanting to pick up the phone and call home, but of course we had no phones that could call outside. Nothing went in or out. It felt so stationary that it was sometimes hard to put dates to things.
I had asked my students when their favorite drama, The Nation of the Sun , was made, and they had no idea. Ten years ago? Twenty? They seemed to think it was about twenty, which made me realize that even their favorite TV program was not currently produced. Both Great Leaders always looked to be in late middle age. No one knew the exact age of the Precious Leader; it was not until later, after he came to power, that various media confirmed his age as twenty-nine. Their newspaper was filled with vague events with nonspecific dates, and on the one trip we had taken outside the gate, I had seen store signs with words such as namse (a word for vegetables no longer used in South Korea) that harkened back to decades ago. The entire country was like a linguistic and cultural Galápagos.
So time moved on—or didn’t—on this strange campus that seemed even stranger than the strange country beyond its walls, and, to find an anchor, I hung on to my lover’s email. When are you coming home? Those five words carried me as I woke up at 5 a.m. and opened the curtain to face each new day.
“So are you a writer?”
Sarah’s question shook me out of my reverie.
For a moment I was caught off guard, but then I said yes, I was a fiction writer, but I was there as a teacher. To my relief, she seemed satisfied with my answer and never brought the subject up again.
Shortly after my conversation with Sarah, I discovered that one of the teachers, a man from a Christian university in Mississippi, had Googled everyone from the group. Some of the missionaries seemed oblivious to their surroundings, even naïve, often forgetting that our Internet connection was constantly monitored. A teacher from Texas told me that he got on the Internet and tried to pay for something with PayPal, but it was denied because the company blocked usage from countries under international economic sanction. Another teacher seemed surprised to learn that this country had gulags.
When Katie heard about the teacher who had Googled everyone, she panicked. She had done some NGO work helping defectors. Though I did not say anything to Katie, I was afraid that my cover had been blown. So far, no one in our group had asked me directly whether or
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