Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite
Suki Kim
Language: English
Pages: 304
ISBN: 0307720659
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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."
inquisitive. But there was something else, too: a part of me, a very insistent voice inside, did not want to know those details. For those of us who grew up in 1970s South Korea, anything to do with North Korea is accompanied by a certain foreboding. And for those of us whose family members were abducted into North Korea, this fear runs still deeper. If I had known as much as I do now, more than a decade later, I doubt I would have made that first, fateful trip. But I did get on a flight from
Clearly, even residents experienced long waits at restaurants, just as visitors did. In any case, the class all shook their heads at my example and said, “No, that is not exclusive, that is popular!” Then they said perhaps I meant the Koryo Hotel restaurant. At Okryu-gwan, they explained, they paid for a meal with a government-issued food ration ticket. At Koryo Hotel, however, they were expected to pay with money, which excluded some customers. “Are the same number of ration tickets given to
day’s trip and my students’ mention of going to a construction site to watch, not work. “What is there to watch at a construction site?” one of the teachers asked. “If you are called to those places, you do the labor, you don’t watch. In any case, the kitchen was ordered to pack two hundred lunches.” All day long, I worried about my students. I imagined them being driven to a construction site and told to do manual labor, and I was afraid that it would become a regular occurrence. Maybe they
Class 1, and dinner for Class 4. WHEN I CAME down to the cafeteria at 11:30 a.m., I saw that most of them had finished lunch earlier than usual and were already leaving. A few students from Class 1 waved at me, however, and said, “Professor, please sit here. We will wait for you to finish your meal.” One of them then explained that the entire student body had been summoned for a special meeting at noon. I did not ask what the meeting was about since they often had mysterious meetings in the
Neither of us was aware that back at the special meeting in the IT building, the entire student body was watching the news announcement of Kim Jong-il’s death. It was about twenty minutes later when Martha knocked on my door and said, “You must come to the meeting right now.” When I opened it she dropped her voice and whispered, pointing at the ceiling, “He’s dead.” I ran to the special room where all the teachers were being given the news, and I learned that the students, upon hearing of the