A haunting account of teaching English to the sons of North Korea's ruling class during the last six months of Kim Jong-il's reign
Every day, three times a day, the students march in two straight lines, singing praises to Kim Jong-il and North Korea: Without you, there is no motherland. Without you, there is no us. It is a chilling scene, but gradually Suki Kim, too, learns the tune and, without noticing, begins to hum it. It is 2011, and all universities in North Korea have been shut down for an entire year, the students sent to construction fields—except for the 270 students at the all-male Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST), a walled compound where portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il look on impassively from the walls of every room, and where Suki has gone undercover as a missionary and a teacher. Over the next six months, she will eat three meals a day with her young charges and struggle to teach them English, all under the watchful eye of the regime.
Life at PUST is lonely and claustrophobic, especially for Suki, whose letters are read by censors and who must hide her notes and photographs not only from her minders but from her colleagues—evangelical Christian missionaries who don't know or choose to ignore that Suki doesn't share their faith. As the weeks pass, she is mystified by how easily her students lie, unnerved by their obedience to the regime. At the same time, they offer Suki tantalizing glimpses of their private selves—their boyish enthusiasm, their eagerness to please, the flashes of curiosity that have not yet been extinguished. She in turn begins to hint at the existence of a world beyond their own—at such exotic activities as surfing the Internet or traveling freely and, more dangerously, at electoral democracy and other ideas forbidden in a country where defectors risk torture and execution. But when Kim Jong-il dies, and the boys she has come to love appear devastated, she wonders whether the gulf between her world and theirs can ever be bridged.
Without You, There Is No Us offers a moving and incalculably rare glimpse of life in the world's most unknowable country, and at the privileged young men she calls "soldiers and slaves."
Traveling internationally, even the small amount I've been able to do, is wonderful but alienating. The language is different (even when it's the same), the food is different, the entire pattern of life is different. And that's in first world, Western countries. I can't even imagine what it must be like to go to North Korea. It must be like going to the moon.
Suki Kim, author of Without You, There Is No Us, emigrated to the United States from South Korea with her parents when she was about 13 years old. She became a writer and a habitual wanderer, ending up on a few news trips to North Korea. When an opportunity came up to go there on an extended sojourn by joining the teaching staff of a missionary group running a university, she jumped at the chance. And so she found herself at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST), teaching English to upper-class North Korean young men for about six months before returning to the U.S. and writing a book about her experiences there.
This is a memoir, so Kim's family history and personal struggles during her tenure at PUST are recounted along with what it's like to be one of very, very few foreigners living in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. The teachers (all missionaries apart from Kim) are effectively imprisoned on campus, only allowed off the grounds for carefully arranged and supervised outings. They are constantly wondering if revealing even small details about life outside the DPRK to their students will lead to their deportation (in the best case) or imprisonment (in the worst). They know their use of limited internet is being constantly monitored, so they have little contact with the outside world. Kim cares for her students, who are eager and obedient learners, while simultaneously being horrified by how easily and often they lie to her. She wonders if they are informing on her for even the smallest line-crossing. She loves them, but she can't trust them or anyone else.
I'm not usually drawn to memoirs, but information about how the hermit kingdom works on the inside, even on the limited scale Kim was able to experience, is fascinating. I'm honestly boggled that a country in our hyperconnected day and age manages to be so isolated from the world around it. You have to think that it'll end one day, that either reunification will happen or it will re-enter the global community as its own country. And when it does, what will North Korean citizens think? Kim's students, the best and brightest the country has to offer, struggle to write essays because the concept of supporting a thesis with facts is so foreign to them. How will the North Korean populace cope with an outside so different than they had been led to believe?
