Read Without You, There Is No Us for Free Online

as though everything went silent, and there I was stepping onto a field of white, untrodden snow. They were young, and I remember them as beautiful, although on this point I cannot be certain as I soon began to delight in looking at them like they were my children, and can no longer recall a time when I didn’t.
    THE NIGHT BEFORE , Katie had come to my room to help me with the lesson plan. “I’ve got blisters from wearing heels,” she said, throwing off her dress shoes and plopping onto my sofa. Then she squinted her eyes, rubbing the sole of her foot with the brusqueness of a much younger girl. “Wow, you’ve got TV!” she exclaimed and pressed the remote, but when she saw that it tuned into only a few Chinese channels and CNN Asia, she quickly lost interest and turned it off. Her room did not have a TV, she said, not that she ever watched much TV. In China, where she had taught at YUST, she usually went to bed by 8 p.m. after reading the Bible, and her focus would be much the same here. There were Bible studies most evenings, and Sunday services in the third-floor meeting room at the teachers’ dormitory—all permitted by the counterparts. Since the school had been built and would be maintained with money from the evangelical Christian community, the missionaries could practice their religion as long as they kept it from the students and didn’t proselytize. Missionaries were not paid salaries from the school but were individually funded by their churches back home.
    “I never waited to come here my whole life or anything like all those other people … I’m just twenty-three,” she shrugged. There was nothing in the rules about whispering, but now that the conversation had turned to religion, we lowered our voices. We also turned the TV back on, hoping it would muffle our voices if we were being recorded. She explained that some of the YUST faculty had been waiting to come to PUST for as long as a decade, but most were South Korean nationals and not allowed a visa. North Korea was the evangelical Christian Holy Grail, the hardest place to crack in the whole world, and converting its people would guarantee the missionaries a spot in heaven. Katie’s path to PUST had been easier. She had a job waiting at a Christian NGO in the Middle East, but it did not start until September. “Joan asked if I wanted to come here for the summer, so I said okay,” she told me, “because the Lord has his ways!” She spoke with the ease of one for whom the future was brimming with possibilities. She added that she might apply to law school at the end of the year although she wasn’t quite sure, and she cocked her head just slightly as she lingered on the word might .
    For a moment, I felt a pang of envy. I remembered those few drifting years after college, taking off alone with a backpack to explore the world. I thought I was playing a dare with life then, challenging my limits, but I was scared most of the time and wept for no clear reason in dingy hostel rooms across Europe and Central America. But the years had worked their magic, and that scared girl I had been in that remote place in time had dissolved into infinite invisible threads, so thin and delicate that I could almost touch her and then lose her the next minute. Now, almost two decades later, it felt as though she had reappeared, still uncertain, still afraid.
    Katie began telling me her life story with youthful exuberance, taking for granted that I would be interested, which in fact I was. It was in college that her American father met her mother, an exchange student from South Korea. They now lived in Maryland, where he worked as an engineer. He was worried, she said with a laugh, that she might catch the eye of some high-level Workers’ Party guy. But she told him that the worst thing that could happen to her would be getting kicked out, and her mother said, “What do you mean, the worst thing? That would be the best thing! The worst thing would be if they