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

not I was Christian, perhaps because they kept a low profile themselves. All I could hope was that the counterparts did not learn the truth.
    It was understandable that we would sometimes forget to be careful, since we had not been raised in an atmosphere of hypervigilance. With each day, I found myself slipping, usually at meals, where our conversations were more informal. Sometimes after teaching all morning, I became clumsy from fatigue. Other times I slipped on purpose.
    Once, we were discussing sports—the students were uniformly passionate about sports—and they were curious about the NBA, but the only player they knew was Michael Jordan. Their knowledge was never up to date. Even the North Korean basketball superstar they talked about—Ri Myung-hoon, the tallest player in the world, according to them—had played little since the 1990s. They all claimed that they had never seen an NBA game, but some of them seemed more aware than they let on. One student asked, “Who is the best player now?” So he knew that Jordan had retired. I told him that it was Miami Heat’s LeBron James, but then was afraid I had said too much, so I changed the topic to tennis and told a story about seeing two top-ranked players, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer, play at the U.S. Open a few years before.
    “You saw them in person?” one of the students asked, incredulous.
    We were not supposed to say things that could be seen as boasting about America, but I wanted them to know that seeing professional sports in person was very much a reality in the rest of the world, and that it was perfectly normal for players from Spain and Switzerland to travel to New York, and vice versa. I wanted them to know that no one told us where we could go and where we could not. So I just shrugged and said, “Of course, the stadium is only about forty-five minutes from my apartment by subway, so I go to the U.S. Open every year.” They said nothing, and I was not sure if they believed me.
    Other times I would say things like “Yes, I learned to play pool when I did an exchange program in London during college.” Or “I backpacked across Europe when I was your age,” or “I was born in Seoul and still have family there, so I visit Seoul often.” They never asked, “How was it?” or “What is London like?” but I knew they noticed the fact that, unlike them, we teachers were able to travel freely. Their only response would be to suddenly go quiet, and I would pick up the conversation, saying something about Pyongyang instead, at which their faces would brighten.
    They would ask me what I had seen in Pyongyang, and they would describe other worthy sites. There was a place called Golden Lane, they said, which was a bowling alley as well as a billiard hall. There was Changgangwon, a “service” place with a swimming pool and barbershop. Pyongyang Indoor Stadium was another place they were quite proud of. But none of them offered the phrases that usually accompany locals’ advice to visitors: You must go there next week , or Let me show you . No one here was allowed to go anywhere of his own accord, without permission.
    The teachers had been talking about a possible trip to Kaesung next semester, so I asked the students how many had been there. Kaesung had been an ancient Korean capital as well as a bargaining chip during the Korean War, when both sides postponed signing the armistice in hopes of securing it. Because of its proximity to the 38th parallel, the city had served as an inter-Korean trade zone since 2002. It was possibly the second most important city in the nation, only a couple of hours from Pyongyang, yet only one student had been there. During their time at PUST, they weren’t even allowed to visit their parents in downtown Pyongyang, only ten or fifteen minutes away by a car.
    Not only were the teachers’ movements similarly restricted, but communication was heavily constrained. Joan said that her daughter was mining her regular