Suki Kim

Traces the author's experiences as an English teacher to the sons of North Korea's elite during the last six months of Kim Jong Il's reign, an effort complicated by oppressive regime enforcers, propaganda, and evangelical missionaries.

My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

Without You, There Is No Us

I was shocked at both the extreme poverty and unexpected luxuries to be found in North Korea. A real insight into a land most people will never know anything of.

Christina Rae Lu

2

I would’ve given this a 3 star but the author just kept saying “my lover”, “my lover”... it made me cringe and wince. Just say boyfriend or a pseudo name. *smh

Before reading this book, I read this article, and if you're looking to see whether you'd want to read this book/if you're planning on reading this book, I would suggest reading this article as foregrounding first:

https://newrepublic.com/article/133893/reluctant-memoirist

"There are only two kinds of books on North Korea: those by white journalists who visited the country under the regime’s supervision, and “as told to” memoirs by defectors. The intellectual hierarchy is clear—authority belongs to the white gaze. Orientalism reigns."

--

So you can imagine how refreshing it was to read a book that was neither of those. 

Just to start out with some facts, Suki Kim is a masterful writer, great at livening prose that would otherwise just report dull drudgery or otherwise boring day to day events. 

 “This feeling was akin to heartbreak, and it took me a while to make sense of it—until one evening after dinner, looking at the students dotted across the schoolyard with their buckets, on gardening duty, which seemed to happen more frequently as we neared Victory Day, July 27, it occurred to me that it was all futile, the fantasy of Korean unity, the five thousand years of Korean identity, because the unified nation was broken, irreparably, in 1945 when a group of politicians drew a random line across the map, separating families who would die without ever meeting again, with all their sorrow and anger and regret unrequited, their bodies turning to earth, becoming part of this land. On that evening, as a sun the color of mournful pomegranate fell behind the Forever Tower, behind the smoke stack, behind this city, this school, behind the children of the elite who were now my children for a brief time, these lovely, lying children, I saw very clearly that there was no redemption here.”

It's refreshing to read an account of life in North Korea without the usual Orientalist rhetoric or editorializing, which usually goes along with documentation of places like NK conducted by foreigners (as mentioned above). I'm glad to have gotten a chance to read an important piece like this one written by a WOC, particularly a person with ties to both the world inside North Korea as well as outside, and particularly with such a grasp of Korean and English that there would be no doctoring of her words by other white Westerners as there is with defectors and the like. No disrespect to defectors, but this account is unique in that sense.

Kim's dedication to her students is inspiring. She describes having to censor the very act of living in North Korea, and how she would often find herself sleeping upward of twelve hours a night simply because that constant act was so tiring and draining throughout the day, even when she kept normal teaching hours and had a lot of free time. I really admire her as an educator and a journalist.

If you're looking to see how North Korea is without the artifice of clickbaity editorialization belonging to a lot of mainstream news networks, this book is a great place to start.

Nadine 

#Korea (North) #education
Tough read about a year spent in a N-Korean university teaching elite. The extent of the lack of freedom is actually quite mind boggling until you hear it blow by blow. As it the fact that a nation can continue to eliminates itself from the rest of the world. 
 written about events in 2011 it would be very interesting to have an update (impossible) but I would also have appreciated a little bit of retrospective background as to why the students left the normal universities at that time.

Sahi K

I didn’t even know about this book until a couple weeks ago when I saw someone’s review of it on their blog. And as someone who has never read any book on this subject, I thought why not. But now I’m having trouble articulating what I feel. 

This is a memoir of the author who worked as an English teacher in a university in North Korea. I have no clue about the DKRK at all because I’ve never read books on the subject, except listening to the sensational news items about its current leader. So I definitely went in to this to understand how the country works, from the perspective of someone who got to experience it atleast for a time. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but the narrative is pretty bleak. The constraints on freedom, being completely cutoff from the world, being scared to even email family members who live in other countries, the same exact routine everyday - I could feel in the author’s words her despair over what was happening and how helpless she was feeling. At the same time, she is also surrounded by evangelical Christian professors whose aim is completely different, and I thought there were quite a few parallels between the DPRK regime and the religious professors, especially in the way they tried to control what could be taught and what couldn’t, how to manipulate the thinking of other people, and how they believed in their own made up reality which had nothing to do with the real world. 

It’s a world unto itself and just like the author, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to pity her students who were so brainwashed about the greatness of their country that they couldn’t accept anything else from their professor, or if I should be angry that they were just being willfully bling to all the faults. It’s hard to judge them by our moras and standards, because the consequences for them even asking a question about the outside world can be too much and their living in denial (willfully or not) is probably their best survival mechanism. 

I don’t know if it was the nature of the book or the writing style, but I felt like the author’s despair permeated my head too and I have only felt dreary day after day since I started it. It obviously doesn’t help that the outside world is currently scary as hell because the pandemic is wreaking havoc in my country, and I’m trying to live in denial so that I may keep my sanity. But I have to mention that the author does get very repetitive at times, which might bore us as a reader, but I also thought it reflected the kind of repetitive life she had to live there. The audiobook helped in making me want to continue reading, because I’m pretty sure I would have ditched it if it was a physical copy. 

In the end, I think this is a unique perspective because we see how the life and education of the children of the elite in NK is, and how insular and manipulative their lives are. I just think you need to be in the right mood to read it, because it’s not very engaging and it’s bleak nature can put off a reader, despite the bleakness being a major feature of life in the country and the feeling is completely unavoidable.

It is 2011, and all universities in North Korea have been shut down for an entire year, except for the all-male Pyongyang University of Science and Technology. This is where Suki Kim has accepted a job teaching English. Over the next six months she will eat three meals a day with her young charges and struggle to teach them to write, all under the watchful eye of the regime. Life at the university is lonely and claustrophobic. Her letters are read by censors and she must hide her notes and photographs not only from her minders but also from her colleagues, evangelical Christian missionaries, whose faith she does not share. As the weeks pass she discovers how easily her students lie, and how total is their obedience to Kim Jong-il. She also, bravely, hints at the existence of a world beyond their own: the internet, free travel, democracy, and other ideas forbidden in a country where torture and execution are commonplace. Yet her pupils are also full of boyish enthusiasm, with flashes of curiosity not yet extinguished. Without You, There Is No Us offers a moving and incalculably rare glimpse of life inside the world's most inscrutable country.

My Secret Life Teaching the Sons of North Korea's Elite

Without You, There is No Us

Jade Flynn

What I've come to expect with literature surrounding North Korea is that it always seems to bring forth some sort of an emotive response from me and whilst this was a great and insightful piece of journalism it lacked a writing style I could connect with.

Andrea McGuffey

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."

Without You, There Is No Us My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

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