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

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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."

Review: the “You” is the Great Leader Kim Jong-Il and the “Us” is the North ... - I posted this review on my website. It can be accessed here: http://arthurreber.com/home/suki-kims-book-on-teaching-in-north-korea.html along with views on a host of topics. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The book chronicles her months teaching at a college in North Korea run (and financed) by fundamentalist Christians. While this seems wildly implausible there’s a strange logic behind it. Their church paid for the construction of the campus and provides the operating budget, the equipment and the teachers. They do not proselytize (or they would be quickly removed). They teach. They believe that North Korea is the next country that God plans to free from state-imposed atheism and they want to be there to be ready to spread the word of Jesus when this happens. They run a similar school in China. They are patient. Kim was hired to teach English by gently disguising her agnosticism. The title is from a song sung repeatedly by her students, the “You” is the Great Leader Kim Jong-Il and the “Us” is the North Korean people. Kim gives a remarkable, chilling insight into the black collectivist pit that is North Korea. It’s important to step back from Kim’s descriptions of her months teaching English there and appreciate, fully and depressingly, that her students and the stunted, impoverished, intellectually diminished lives they lead are, in fact, the sons of the elite. These are the future leaders of this backward land and, as she deftly chronicles, will come into positions of power and influence knowing virtually nothing. It isn’t possible to convey the complex interlocking relationships Kim forms with her students in a simple essay. They’re marked by efforts to reach out constrained by a self-censoring. She cannot tell them too much about the outside world, it could be dangerous — to them. If they were to learn that they live as virtual prisoners in the most backward, impoverished country on the planet it would not go well for them. She cannot let them know that their “Intranet” which only links to local servers, is not the real “Internet.” They do not know and must not learn that the highways in other countries actually have many cars travelling on them, that markets are filled with fresh vegetables and fruits, that libraries exist where you can choose which book you wish to read. She also must protect herself from prying eyes. She is accompanied by “monitors” wherever she goes. Her emails are read. All her letters are opened before posting. All the rooms have bugs. All her lessons must be cleared by “counterparts.” And, of course, she must also take care not to let her devout, occasionally fanatical Christian colleagues know of her true beliefs. The stress is crushing. Kim is vulnerable in an oddly charming way. Some of her revelations about her insecurities and longings and unfulfilled relationships are cringe-worthy but ultimately they complete the picture: complex person, strong and resilient when she needs to be and, at other times, anything but. But at the core is the very existence of North Korea and the life its citizens not only cannot escape from but do not, cannot, fully grasp what it is they live in. The focus is on her students all of whom are young men nineteen and twenty years old who have been sent to this college to learn — in her classes, English. They are the sons of the elite and are taking advantage of the largess of the Christian fundamentalists who are paying for everything, a significant factor in a land of crushing poverty. A couple of things popped out at me. For one, there was an intriguing, almost paradoxical self-centered element that emerged around exam time when several of her students did not do well. Suddenly the collectivist ideals, the group mentality that marked everything they did vanished and in swept a singular focus on themselves, on the impact these grades might have on their future, what university they might be admitted to, what level of Party involvement they may be offered. Earlier they were one, a collective fully conscious of and part of an oddly functional homo Gestalt. They dressed alike, sang, marched and ran in groups, worked together and, as Kim discovered to her surprise, would never even come to office hours without a least one friend in tow. Yet they were, at the same time, intensely competitive and when exam time arrived, they became individuals. Oddly, neither they nor Kim seem to appreciate this disconnect. There’s also an odd acceptance of Americans as teachers, revered for their knowledge, treated with great respect and almost always referred to as “Professor.” Yet they are raised to view America as the Great Satan, the obscene embodiment of capitalism, the nurturer of wars and their eternal enemy. Daily they are bombarded with speeches, songs, news programs all repeating a litany of the evilness of America and its values, which they dutifully parrot back. Yet, they welcome Americans as respected teachers whose opinions they probe for, whose language they strive to learn, whose knowledge they seek and whose trust they long for. Kim also describes her students as inveterate liars. They lie about everything. They tell tales of spending the weekend with their parents when she knows they are never permitted to leave the college grounds. They talk of having visited other cities when they clearly reveal that they do not know where they are. They tell of trips to China or London which are not possible. A favorite prevarication is the claim that they had been offered a scholarship to a famous university (in Singapore, Beijing or even Oxford) but they turned it down to stay at their current school in Pyongyang. When she pushes at these little fibs they use a device they’re quite fond of — they say, “let’s change the topic now and talk about something else.” Kim wonders if this repeated twisting of the truth might not come from being raised in a society where they are lied to all the time by everyone, especially the government. This might be part of it but more likely it’s just a feeble effort at self-aggrandizing. Her young charges seem astonishingly credulous. They appear to accept at face value the most preposterous stories about their “powerful and prosperous” country which is the envy of the rest of the world and whose “Great Leader” accomplishes near miracles on a daily basis. If they do question this touted magnificence they cover themselves well. When the Great Leader Kim Jong-Il dies they are stricken speechless. They weep uncontrollably and stare hopelessly at the horizons. Their pain feels real. The picture painted of North Korea is depressing beyond imagining. All of Kim’s experiences are with the favored elite in a select college but it is nightmarish — no heat, blackouts constantly, thin soups and wilted vegetables for meals, total control of all movements, forced labor at duties like guarding shrines, cleaning, weeding, construction, regular indoctrination sessions and endless hours at Juche, the virtual religion based on the life and deeds of godheads Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il. Her only glimpses of the typical citizens are on road trips outside Pongyang. Though these are tightly scripted and controlled she cannot be kept from seeing the shrunken, wizened, starving poor trudging along empty highways, carrying empty bags and looking like the damned in a cheap horror movie. On these trips they often come upon small groups of people sitting in the middle of a highway sharing food. There is so little traffic that these wide, smooth roads have become a place to gather. The photo shows the Korean peninsula at night. The single dot of light is the capital Pongyang. The row of lights to the north are in China, along the border. At one point Kim decides to bake her students a chocolate cake and finds that she cannot find the ingredients even at the most upscale markets (which she is only allowed to enter when on an official trip with “minders” alongside her every step). There is no cake flour, no fresh currants or raisins and, of course, no chocolate to be had. If nothing else the powers that run North Korea have found the way to keep a totalitarian state from being overthrown from within. There can be no revolution if the people truly believe that they are living in the most prosperous and successful country in the world, that their land is the envy of every other, that their Leader is revered and worshipped everywhere, that their kimchi is better than any other food and that in every country around the globe people strive to try to make a kimchi like that they are served every day — along with a watery soup, a few rancid vegetables and, perhaps once a week, a few slices of gristle and fat that once sat on the hind quarters of a pig. Kim comes to love her charges and she should. They are fascinating, engaging, smart, caring and loving. But the gap between where they are, what they know, what they believe, what they hope for and the reality that lies beyond the borders of this strange country where some twenty-seven million souls live in a beautiful, mountainous land is so vast that it cannot be bridged. Every once in a while a glimmer in a student’s eye tells her that he has grasped a sliver of truth about their fate and a tiny flicker of understanding about what is out there but it fades quickly, to be replaced by a robotic assurance that their lives are the best that could ever be hoped for. If these walls ever come down, if this government ever collapses the rubble that the world will find strewn across the land will be terrible. It could take a generation to recover from it.
Review: Mind and Body Control in a Closed System - There Is No Us Without You by Suki Kim is a memoir of an author looking for her own self- identity. Some may consider it a novel of betrayal as the author admits that she took on a false identity to get access to a closed society in order to get the information presented here. She apologizes for that. I am in agreement that in some situations the end justifies the means; there was no other way to get the information presented here. This book shares a theme with The Girl With Seven Names by Hyeon Seo Lee. Both authors left Korea in their teenage years, both spent a lot of time in other countries and both had feelings of “coming home” when they were able to spend time upon their return to Korea (both North and South). Lee’s book is reviewed elsewhere in this blog. I read and reviewed both in preparation for meeting this author at the UBUD writers and readers conference in Bali, Indonesia from 27 to 31 October 2016. Both authors offer similar observations of daily existence in North Korea under the rule of three generations of the “Kim” family: Kim Il-Sung, Kim Jong-il, and Kim Jong-un. It is difficult for a westerner to appreciate the acceptance of conditions of life described by Suki Kim that the population of North Korea endures. But when nothing else is known, what is the alternative? Suki Kim deplores and is saddened by the conditions under which creative, intelligent minds are diverted from creativity and critical analysis to a creativity that is targeted to better ways to conform to the demands of an autocratic system. From a background of Korean pride, she makes several important observations on daily life at a school for elite youth in North Korea. In order to get into North Korea, in order to accept a job as a teacher while gathering material for this book, Kim had to agree to alter her behavior so as not to offend a student population that she would face. By following the rules, and there were many, she would also be able to avoid sanctions from bosses, political minders, and possible government spies who would be checking on her compliance and motivation for being in North Korea. Although saddened by the unthinking compliance of her students, she writes of herself “We accepted our situation meekly. How quickly we became prisoners, how quickly we gave up our freedom, how quickly we tolerated the loss of that freedom.” (p. 88). Accepting the teaching job, Kim was a part of a missionary group. They had frequent motivational meetings to keep strong in a faith that found conditions in North Korea unacceptable. In one meeting Kim made this observation. “I could not help noticing that if you replaced the word Jesus with Great Leader, the content was not so different from some of the North Korean songs my students chanted several times each day. In both groups, singing was a joyful, collective ritual from which they took strength.” (p. 110). In the current political environment of the US, replacing Jesus or Great Leader with “Trump” might explain some of the mindless reactions reported by the US press. Kim again makes a connection between governmental mind control and religion when she writes of Rachel, a colleague, searching for evidence of a bell which supposedly formed the basis for the establishment of an early church in Pyongyang. “Rachel found the students strangely gullible, yet it was she who roamed the ditch beside the teachers’ dormitory, searching for the spot where the sacred bell from the first church of Pyongyang had “accidentally” been found on the PUST campus. We believe what we want to believe. If these sad people wanted so desperately to hold on to the myth of their Great Leader as the rightful heir to Dangun, who could blame them? The blame really lay with those who perpetuated these stories to control the masses.” (p. 133-134). Control of the masses? How can we control the masses? Perhaps through the manipulation of mass media. Again, we have modern day relevance of Kim’s observations. Throughout the book, I read to find instances of mind control and how the population related to and dealt with it. How could there be so much loyalty in the face of constant hunger? How can there be a population-wide acceptance of and knowledge about the existence of a group of attractive women kept for the service of top leadership? How can an entire population be ignorant of the existence of the internet thinking instead that an intranet communication network was a satisfactory substitute? There is much to recommend in this book. The big thing to watch is the way Kim’s thinking changes over time. Out of a sense of Korean pride, she is at first proud to see the progress and dedication of her students. At the same time, she is depressed about the paucity resources available to her during her employment. But she returned for a second term of teaching. Then she writes of her growing dissatisfaction with the ease that some students found it easy to lie. She became increasingly uncomfortable with the student defensiveness that allowed a student to claim that he had cloned a rabbit while still in the 8th grade Suki Kim wrote a valuable memoir. It is a psychological study in the ways to enforce compliance with absurd conditions in a surreal environment. She had to accept a lot, she had to conform, but she had the luxury of a time limit. She could call a time-out. She could escape. She could, and did, report her experiences to the world that, in my case, held an incredulous audience.

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #1,721,603 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #22 in North Korean History #197 in Asian Politics #4,748 in Memoirs (Books) |
| Customer Reviews | 4.2 out of 5 stars 4,197 Reviews |

## Images

![Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51Vqx8QISAL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ the “You” is the Great Leader Kim Jong-Il and the “Us” is the North ...
*by A***R on February 19, 2015*

I posted this review on my website. It can be accessed here: http://arthurreber.com/home/suki-kims-book-on-teaching-in-north-korea.html along with views on a host of topics. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The book chronicles her months teaching at a college in North Korea run (and financed) by fundamentalist Christians. While this seems wildly implausible there’s a strange logic behind it. Their church paid for the construction of the campus and provides the operating budget, the equipment and the teachers. They do not proselytize (or they would be quickly removed). They teach. They believe that North Korea is the next country that God plans to free from state-imposed atheism and they want to be there to be ready to spread the word of Jesus when this happens. They run a similar school in China. They are patient. Kim was hired to teach English by gently disguising her agnosticism. The title is from a song sung repeatedly by her students, the “You” is the Great Leader Kim Jong-Il and the “Us” is the North Korean people. Kim gives a remarkable, chilling insight into the black collectivist pit that is North Korea. It’s important to step back from Kim’s descriptions of her months teaching English there and appreciate, fully and depressingly, that her students and the stunted, impoverished, intellectually diminished lives they lead are, in fact, the sons of the elite. These are the future leaders of this backward land and, as she deftly chronicles, will come into positions of power and influence knowing virtually nothing. It isn’t possible to convey the complex interlocking relationships Kim forms with her students in a simple essay. They’re marked by efforts to reach out constrained by a self-censoring. She cannot tell them too much about the outside world, it could be dangerous — to them. If they were to learn that they live as virtual prisoners in the most backward, impoverished country on the planet it would not go well for them. She cannot let them know that their “Intranet” which only links to local servers, is not the real “Internet.” They do not know and must not learn that the highways in other countries actually have many cars travelling on them, that markets are filled with fresh vegetables and fruits, that libraries exist where you can choose which book you wish to read. She also must protect herself from prying eyes. She is accompanied by “monitors” wherever she goes. Her emails are read. All her letters are opened before posting. All the rooms have bugs. All her lessons must be cleared by “counterparts.” And, of course, she must also take care not to let her devout, occasionally fanatical Christian colleagues know of her true beliefs. The stress is crushing. Kim is vulnerable in an oddly charming way. Some of her revelations about her insecurities and longings and unfulfilled relationships are cringe-worthy but ultimately they complete the picture: complex person, strong and resilient when she needs to be and, at other times, anything but. But at the core is the very existence of North Korea and the life its citizens not only cannot escape from but do not, cannot, fully grasp what it is they live in. The focus is on her students all of whom are young men nineteen and twenty years old who have been sent to this college to learn — in her classes, English. They are the sons of the elite and are taking advantage of the largess of the Christian fundamentalists who are paying for everything, a significant factor in a land of crushing poverty. A couple of things popped out at me. For one, there was an intriguing, almost paradoxical self-centered element that emerged around exam time when several of her students did not do well. Suddenly the collectivist ideals, the group mentality that marked everything they did vanished and in swept a singular focus on themselves, on the impact these grades might have on their future, what university they might be admitted to, what level of Party involvement they may be offered. Earlier they were one, a collective fully conscious of and part of an oddly functional homo Gestalt. They dressed alike, sang, marched and ran in groups, worked together and, as Kim discovered to her surprise, would never even come to office hours without a least one friend in tow. Yet they were, at the same time, intensely competitive and when exam time arrived, they became individuals. Oddly, neither they nor Kim seem to appreciate this disconnect. There’s also an odd acceptance of Americans as teachers, revered for their knowledge, treated with great respect and almost always referred to as “Professor.” Yet they are raised to view America as the Great Satan, the obscene embodiment of capitalism, the nurturer of wars and their eternal enemy. Daily they are bombarded with speeches, songs, news programs all repeating a litany of the evilness of America and its values, which they dutifully parrot back. Yet, they welcome Americans as respected teachers whose opinions they probe for, whose language they strive to learn, whose knowledge they seek and whose trust they long for. Kim also describes her students as inveterate liars. They lie about everything. They tell tales of spending the weekend with their parents when she knows they are never permitted to leave the college grounds. They talk of having visited other cities when they clearly reveal that they do not know where they are. They tell of trips to China or London which are not possible. A favorite prevarication is the claim that they had been offered a scholarship to a famous university (in Singapore, Beijing or even Oxford) but they turned it down to stay at their current school in Pyongyang. When she pushes at these little fibs they use a device they’re quite fond of — they say, “let’s change the topic now and talk about something else.” Kim wonders if this repeated twisting of the truth might not come from being raised in a society where they are lied to all the time by everyone, especially the government. This might be part of it but more likely it’s just a feeble effort at self-aggrandizing. Her young charges seem astonishingly credulous. They appear to accept at face value the most preposterous stories about their “powerful and prosperous” country which is the envy of the rest of the world and whose “Great Leader” accomplishes near miracles on a daily basis. If they do question this touted magnificence they cover themselves well. When the Great Leader Kim Jong-Il dies they are stricken speechless. They weep uncontrollably and stare hopelessly at the horizons. Their pain feels real. The picture painted of North Korea is depressing beyond imagining. All of Kim’s experiences are with the favored elite in a select college but it is nightmarish — no heat, blackouts constantly, thin soups and wilted vegetables for meals, total control of all movements, forced labor at duties like guarding shrines, cleaning, weeding, construction, regular indoctrination sessions and endless hours at Juche, the virtual religion based on the life and deeds of godheads Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il. Her only glimpses of the typical citizens are on road trips outside Pongyang. Though these are tightly scripted and controlled she cannot be kept from seeing the shrunken, wizened, starving poor trudging along empty highways, carrying empty bags and looking like the damned in a cheap horror movie. On these trips they often come upon small groups of people sitting in the middle of a highway sharing food. There is so little traffic that these wide, smooth roads have become a place to gather. The photo shows the Korean peninsula at night. The single dot of light is the capital Pongyang. The row of lights to the north are in China, along the border. At one point Kim decides to bake her students a chocolate cake and finds that she cannot find the ingredients even at the most upscale markets (which she is only allowed to enter when on an official trip with “minders” alongside her every step). There is no cake flour, no fresh currants or raisins and, of course, no chocolate to be had. If nothing else the powers that run North Korea have found the way to keep a totalitarian state from being overthrown from within. There can be no revolution if the people truly believe that they are living in the most prosperous and successful country in the world, that their land is the envy of every other, that their Leader is revered and worshipped everywhere, that their kimchi is better than any other food and that in every country around the globe people strive to try to make a kimchi like that they are served every day — along with a watery soup, a few rancid vegetables and, perhaps once a week, a few slices of gristle and fat that once sat on the hind quarters of a pig. Kim comes to love her charges and she should. They are fascinating, engaging, smart, caring and loving. But the gap between where they are, what they know, what they believe, what they hope for and the reality that lies beyond the borders of this strange country where some twenty-seven million souls live in a beautiful, mountainous land is so vast that it cannot be bridged. Every once in a while a glimmer in a student’s eye tells her that he has grasped a sliver of truth about their fate and a tiny flicker of understanding about what is out there but it fades quickly, to be replaced by a robotic assurance that their lives are the best that could ever be hoped for. If these walls ever come down, if this government ever collapses the rubble that the world will find strewn across the land will be terrible. It could take a generation to recover from it.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Mind and Body Control in a Closed System
*by R***K on October 18, 2016*

There Is No Us Without You by Suki Kim is a memoir of an author looking for her own self- identity. Some may consider it a novel of betrayal as the author admits that she took on a false identity to get access to a closed society in order to get the information presented here. She apologizes for that. I am in agreement that in some situations the end justifies the means; there was no other way to get the information presented here. This book shares a theme with The Girl With Seven Names by Hyeon Seo Lee. Both authors left Korea in their teenage years, both spent a lot of time in other countries and both had feelings of “coming home” when they were able to spend time upon their return to Korea (both North and South). Lee’s book is reviewed elsewhere in this blog. I read and reviewed both in preparation for meeting this author at the UBUD writers and readers conference in Bali, Indonesia from 27 to 31 October 2016. Both authors offer similar observations of daily existence in North Korea under the rule of three generations of the “Kim” family: Kim Il-Sung, Kim Jong-il, and Kim Jong-un. It is difficult for a westerner to appreciate the acceptance of conditions of life described by Suki Kim that the population of North Korea endures. But when nothing else is known, what is the alternative? Suki Kim deplores and is saddened by the conditions under which creative, intelligent minds are diverted from creativity and critical analysis to a creativity that is targeted to better ways to conform to the demands of an autocratic system. From a background of Korean pride, she makes several important observations on daily life at a school for elite youth in North Korea. In order to get into North Korea, in order to accept a job as a teacher while gathering material for this book, Kim had to agree to alter her behavior so as not to offend a student population that she would face. By following the rules, and there were many, she would also be able to avoid sanctions from bosses, political minders, and possible government spies who would be checking on her compliance and motivation for being in North Korea. Although saddened by the unthinking compliance of her students, she writes of herself “We accepted our situation meekly. How quickly we became prisoners, how quickly we gave up our freedom, how quickly we tolerated the loss of that freedom.” (p. 88). Accepting the teaching job, Kim was a part of a missionary group. They had frequent motivational meetings to keep strong in a faith that found conditions in North Korea unacceptable. In one meeting Kim made this observation. “I could not help noticing that if you replaced the word Jesus with Great Leader, the content was not so different from some of the North Korean songs my students chanted several times each day. In both groups, singing was a joyful, collective ritual from which they took strength.” (p. 110). In the current political environment of the US, replacing Jesus or Great Leader with “Trump” might explain some of the mindless reactions reported by the US press. Kim again makes a connection between governmental mind control and religion when she writes of Rachel, a colleague, searching for evidence of a bell which supposedly formed the basis for the establishment of an early church in Pyongyang. “Rachel found the students strangely gullible, yet it was she who roamed the ditch beside the teachers’ dormitory, searching for the spot where the sacred bell from the first church of Pyongyang had “accidentally” been found on the PUST campus. We believe what we want to believe. If these sad people wanted so desperately to hold on to the myth of their Great Leader as the rightful heir to Dangun, who could blame them? The blame really lay with those who perpetuated these stories to control the masses.” (p. 133-134). Control of the masses? How can we control the masses? Perhaps through the manipulation of mass media. Again, we have modern day relevance of Kim’s observations. Throughout the book, I read to find instances of mind control and how the population related to and dealt with it. How could there be so much loyalty in the face of constant hunger? How can there be a population-wide acceptance of and knowledge about the existence of a group of attractive women kept for the service of top leadership? How can an entire population be ignorant of the existence of the internet thinking instead that an intranet communication network was a satisfactory substitute? There is much to recommend in this book. The big thing to watch is the way Kim’s thinking changes over time. Out of a sense of Korean pride, she is at first proud to see the progress and dedication of her students. At the same time, she is depressed about the paucity resources available to her during her employment. But she returned for a second term of teaching. Then she writes of her growing dissatisfaction with the ease that some students found it easy to lie. She became increasingly uncomfortable with the student defensiveness that allowed a student to claim that he had cloned a rabbit while still in the 8th grade Suki Kim wrote a valuable memoir. It is a psychological study in the ways to enforce compliance with absurd conditions in a surreal environment. She had to accept a lot, she had to conform, but she had the luxury of a time limit. She could call a time-out. She could escape. She could, and did, report her experiences to the world that, in my case, held an incredulous audience.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Very Interesting Memoir of the Author's Few Months at a North Korean College
*by C***Y on December 30, 2014*

This book gives a fascinating bit of insight, although the view is very narrow, into the lives of People in North Korea. I acknowledge the criticisms given in the review from "laughingbull," -- the beginning of the book is very autobiographical, she doesn't explain why they're learning English, and her perspective is limited. These are correct, but since this book is up-front about essentially being the author's memoir of her time in North Korea, this should be expected. To address each of those points: 1) Autobiographical - It's a memoir, so references to her background are not only expected, but helpful in explaining her interactions. Her Korean-American background is something that made her more accessible to her students. I do agree, though, that the frequent references to her "lover" got a bit tedious and unnecessary. 2) Doesn't answer questions - First, I think one point of the whole book is that neither the author, her North Korean students, nor the other teachers are given explanations for the regime's or the school's actions. For the most part, I think Kim does a good job of providing her observations with some background to help lead the reader to form their own ideas of why the regime does certain things. "Laughingbull" also mentioned that she did not explain the regime's hypocrisy in simultaneously condemning all things American while teaching its most elite students English. Again, a continuing theme throughout the book is that the regime often contradicts itself - I did not feel this point needed to be explained. They have a practical need for their elite to learn English -- knowing your enemy -- that I think is something that they can easily explain in their propaganda. It makes perfect sense that they would like their scientists to understand English. I'm sure the recent Sony hackers had a pretty good working knowledge of English.... 3) Narrow view - Again, no kidding. This is a memoir, not a research book. The author is very up-front about the fact that she gained a very limited, but rare, exposure. However, a major difference in the perspective that she describes in this book, compared to other books about life in NK, is the type of people that she was exposed to. Other books I've read are mostly accounts of defectors, who were generally from more impoverished backgrounds. Kim's students give a insight to the lives of the "privileged" class. Bottom line though: very interesting and well-written, I had a hard time putting the book down once I got started. I also recommend the book "Nothing to Envy" for an account of the lives of "ordinary" North Korean citizens.

---

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*Product available on Desertcart Tunisia*
*Store origin: TN*
*Last updated: 2026-07-06*