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

emails back home and has promised to tell her about anything urgent. Katie said that she was in contact with no one but her parents, and she generally wrote only one sentence to tell them she was okay. Sarah also kept things very short and to the point. I never emailed my parents from PUST. My mother was so upset and worried about my being there that she could barely look at me before I left. I sent a weekly email saying “I am safe” to my brother-in-law as a way of checking in on my sister, as well as letting the rest of the family know that I was alive.
    We were always obedient. If any one of us had been wild and rebellious, that person could have tried to slip past the guards or climb the walls that surrounded PUST, but nobody ever dared. The constant surveillance by the counterparts and the minders evoked fear in us. We knew that the consequences were unthinkable, so we did what we were told.
    We accepted our situation meekly. How quickly we became prisoners, how quickly we gave up our freedom, how quickly we tolerated the loss of that freedom, like a child being abused, in silence. In this world, there were no individual demands, and asking permission for everything was infantilizing. So we began to understand our students, who had never been able to do anything on their own. The notion of following your heart’s desire, of going wherever you chose, did not exist here, and I did not see any way to let them know what it felt like, especially since, after so little time in their system, I had lost my own sense of freedom.
    BY THE MIDDLE of the second week, the students seemed to have gotten used to the idea of office hours. Now that they had been commanded to come, they arrived in swarms. One afternoon, as Katie and I were getting ready for the students, Mr. Ri appeared at our door. Until then, no counterpart or minder had randomly turned up at my office. He made small talk and told us not to be nervous, which of course only made us more so. He then sat down in one of the spare chairs and began to page through the textbook on my desk. The book had already won the counterparts’ approval, so there was no need for us to be worried, and yet his behavior was vaguely threatening. Katie sat in one corner and began reading through student compositions, which made me panic slightly in case any of them revealed too much. So while exchanging pleasantries with Mr. Ri, I casually took a notebook and flung it over the pile of papers in front of Katie. Luckily, she caught on right away and pretended to be rearranging the desk, efficiently hiding the pile. Mr. Ri seemed not to notice. Continuing to skim the textbook, he remarked how hard English was. I told him in simple Korean, so that Katie could understand, that he should join our class if he wanted to learn more, but I joked that he would have to do his homework, and my invitation seemed to please him. It was hard to believe that only three years before we had shared tears at the airport. If he remembered it, he did not show it, and I certainly never mentioned it. In this world, sentimental reflection on a shared history was not a thing we could afford.
    I then noticed several students at the door, who swiftly recoiled when they saw Mr. Ri. These were the most garrulous ones from the group, so it was eerie to see how they stiffened at the sight of him. Even Park Jun-ho, the student with perpetually smiling eyes and devilish charm, looked nervous. Mr. Ri seemed to want to stick around, but I put my foot down. “My students can’t really focus with you around,” I said with a smile, and he laughed awkwardly and left. Immediately, the boys visibly relaxed. Soon more boys arrived, and before we knew it, we had an office full of students. Some had questions about the textbook, but mostly they wanted just to talk. “Free talking in English!” they insisted.
    While Katie told them a story about setting her kitchen on fire in China while trying to roast a chicken, I thought about