There is no free flow of news letters and phone calls are censored classrooms and every movement are monitored around the clock Kim and her fellow teachers cannot travel beyond the school except on scheduled outings in the company of “minders.”Ī note of brightness in the bleak prison-like existence is the rapport Kim develops with her students over meals in the dining hall. The repressive measures of daily life are much as expected. She stores her typed notes on a thumb drive she can keep with her at all times. Kim recognizes from the outset the constraints she faced: “I had traded my voice to be there.” Nor is she even a teacher, but rather a “writer disguised as a missionary disguised as a teacher.” That she was hired at all Kim attributes to the school’s disorganization in its first year of operation. She doesn’t share their faith, a fact her colleagues seem mysteriously not to acknowledge.
She teaches at a university founded and staffed by evangelical Christian missionaries under a regime hostile to religion.
Here they begin with the assignment that takes Kim to Pyongyang in the first place. “Even ‘we’ did not exist without the permission of their Great Leader.” Teaching in such a place seems absurd, for “the true sealed border was in hearts and minds.”Īny book on North Korea is bound to be layered in absurdities. Without you, there is no us.Īfter a few weeks in the classroom, Kim understands, with chilling clarity, the cult-like group identity embodied in the anthem. Kim soon discovers that the young men are nonetheless faithful “soldiers and slaves.” The book takes its title from their thrice-a-day ritual of marching in a double line around the school’s walled compound singing praises to then-ruler Kim Jong Il: Without you, there is no motherland. She went in 2011, when all universities in North Korea had been shut down for a year and the students sent to work in construction fields - except for the 270 students at PUST. Wanting a more sustained look at life inside the country, she took a job teaching English at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology ( PUST), which caters to the privileged sons of the country’s ruling elite. Around that time, she began traveling to North Korea on magazine assignments. Kim won acclaim a decade ago for her debut novel, The Interpreter. In Without You, There Is No Us, an account of her six-month teaching stint in North Korea, Kim has skillfully combined journalism with graceful language and the thoughtfulness of an essayist to create a work that resonates far beyond her personal experience.
At a time when the memoir often struggles for literary respect, Suki Kim demonstrates just how powerful the genre can be in the hands of an abundantly talented writer.
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