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were to detain you!”
    I empathized with her father and worried for her sake. Katie was tall, about five foot nine, and enigmatically beautiful, with chestnut, shoulder-length hair, a creamy complexion, and hazel eyes that sometimes appeared green. Her father thought that North Korean men might whisk her off in the middle of the night, and I felt nervous about her taking off to the Middle East alone. When I voiced this concern, she suddenly became quiet.
    “I stay away from men,” she said. It wasn’t always easy being half Korean, she told me. She did not know much Korean, but she knew the word twiggy, a derogatory term for people of mixed parentage. In college, she had a Korean American boyfriend she loved. She knew that, as the eldest son of the eldest line of his family clan, he could not marry a woman of mixed blood, and she told him this worried her. But he said that by the time they married, his grandparents would be dead and it wouldn’t matter. Still, the relationship ended badly, leaving her heartbroken. Soon afterward, she found refuge in God. She had been raised Christian, but until then she did not have true faith. She swore then that she would never entrust her heart to anyone except God. God would not disappoint her the way men had.
    It occurred to me then that everyone’s threshold for pain is different. For some, the end of a romance is devastating enough to make them turn to religion for refuge. For others, it is simply a cautionary tale, something to keep in mind for future loves. Like Katie, I could not shake off the hurt of a bad relationship, and instead sat brooding with that pain for years. Yet, now that I found myself so far from home, it was hard to understand why I had stayed unhappy for so long. Sometimes the longer you are inside a prison, the harder it is to fathom what is possible beyond its walls.
    That night, however, we had a job to do. The first lesson was on letter writing, and Katie and I decided that we would ask the students to write to us about anything they wanted and would use the letters to gauge their proficiency in English. We wanted to keep it simple, because Beth had warned us that many of the students did not know even the basics of how a letter is written, and that we must explain it to them. After all, it was not clear how functional North Korea’s postal system was. There did not seem to be any mailboxes, and letters took a long time to be delivered; besides, when you suspect that the contents will be monitored, letters lose their meaning.
    What if you forget me? I had asked my lover from the JFK airport before heading off. At the other end of the phone, he remained silent. I imagined he did not know how he would feel months later, or perhaps my question struck him as childlike. Ever since I was thirteen years old, whenever I went away, I had always feared that I would be forgotten. Since we were dealing with North Korea, there was no guarantee as to when I would return, and he did not want to make any promises. Even if we swore by them, they would have been just words. But I was a writer. I believed in words, even if they only masked the uncertainty of time passing.
    From this side of the border, however, there was no way of reaching out to him. In a few days, I was told, the school would connect Internet service to the faculty dormitory, and I would be able to email him. But I already knew from the rules that whoever was in charge would be able to see everything on screen. I had set up a new email address specifically for my stay there, as recommended by Joan, so that there would be as little as possible for them to monitor.
    I imagined the lovers of the past who ended up on either side of the border after the war. Neither letters nor phone calls since. I imagined them waiting, waiting for a sign of their beloved. I had never experienced the desperate longing of a mother for her child—the loss and yearning my grandmother and my great-aunt must have felt. But I