Without You, There Is No Us: My Time With The Sons of North Korea's Elite

Born and raised in Seoul, Suki Kim began traveling to North Korea in 2002, and she wrote articles that appeared in important publications in the U.S. Then by disguising her identity as a missionary teacher, she landed a job as a teacher of North Korea’s elite children during 2011. Had her real identity been discovered, she could easily have disappeared into one of the country’s infamous gulags. She taught English at PUST (Pyongyang University of Science and Technology), but everything she taught or said to the children was closely watched by the students, the minders, the administrators, and her fellow teachers, most of whom where true Christian missionaries. This was a short and easy read, but Kim’s writing left a powerful impression.

Having reviewed several fiction and nonfiction books which are about or take place in the country, I admit to having a certain morbid fascination with North Korea, and Kim has captured a slice of life there which I had not fully appreciated. After several generations of growing up with fear of the realm and specifically fear/love for “Dear Leader,” and when information about their country and the world at large is so carefully controlled, it should be no wonder that the best students have little  usable knowledge. Furthermore, like experiments on “learned helplessness” in behaviorism, the students have a dramatically stunted curiosity about their lives, their country, and the world. All knowledge gets distorted through the lens of “Dear Leader,” who is now Kim Jong-un. Given that these children about whom Suki Kim writes are the best and the brightest in the country, it is hard to see how there is any hope of this regime being brought into the modern world without more tragedy being heaped on their already miserable lives. If the reunification of Germany was difficult, an attempt at reunification of the Koreas surely would be catastrophic over the course of several generations. Kim’s writing helps one understand the impact of such total propaganda on a society, and of course, it makes one reflect upon the information that we in the Western world are exposed to and the effect it has on our thinking about the world around us. The author may have cured my wish to travel to North Korea – it would be just so utterly depressing to do so.