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    Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea's Elite
    Unavailable
    Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea's Elite
    Unavailable
    Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea's Elite
    Audiobook8 hours

    Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea's Elite

    Written by Suki Kim

    Narrated by Janet Song

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    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."

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateOct 14, 2014
    ISBN9781101912751
    Unavailable
    Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea's Elite
    Author

    Suki Kim

    Suki Kim was born and raised in South Korea and came to New York at the age of thirteen. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Review of Books and The New York Times. She is a graduate of Barnard College and lives in Manhattan.

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    Reviews for Without You, There Is No Us

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    • 3/5
      Interesting glimpse into the lives of North Korean students from elite families. Were the author's actions posing as a Christian in order to surreptitiously observe students & write her book (possibly exposing them to serious problems with the North Korean government) ethical? I would think book clubs will be debating that question.
    • 3/5
      Kim's memoir regarding her 3 stints in the Pyonyang area of North Korea, first as a journalist and twice as an impostor school teacher is a repetitive observance of the young men she taught. I'm not entirely sure what the author's objectives/motives were in impersonating a Christian English teacher at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology or if she had achieved what she set out to do. Of course, as a journalist, she observed some things which are consistent with a country ruled with an iron fist but it's certainly not investigative reporting. That said, she and other teachers were watched constantly by the Christian church, which helped in building the school and employed them, as well as the students and the government. Without the opportunity or permission to question those outside the community, there's just nothing new here.Thanks to Early Reviewer for sending this to me. Sorry it took so long to write a review.
    • 2/5
      What a wonderfully rare first-hand account of life in North Korea. What's scary is that even though Suki Kim's teacher group worked in an austere environment, with limited communication, always under guarded watch, etc. this is all within the world of the elite's children. How bad must it be for the commoner?Suki Kim is part of a small univeristy-level group of teachers that get to help the children of the top 1% of Korea better understand the West. Kim and crew use everything from scavenger hunts, essay classes to Harry Potter to try and educate these kids.The whole time the author is living in fear because she is hiding USB drives of all her notes, etc. as she is there planning to write this book. If the North Koreans find out then they either kick her out or simply make her disappear for being "a spy".While I really enjoyed following Kim on the supervised excursions outside of PUST and her growing realization of what life in North Korea is like. Much ink was spent on her longings for "lovers" back home. So the book lacked the laser focus on North Korea that I was looking for. I also wish that they book was about 100 pages longer. Kim does a good job exploring her feelings and attitudes for her North Korean students, I just wish Kim possessed the same compassion for the other teachers in her group. She seems open to exploring and supporting every relationship in her life except those she's living with over there. It's a shame to have missed those opportunities as, again, many pages was spent explaining these 'missionaries' and 'teachers'. Maybe if Kim had more pages she could share more. Of course, in the Author Notes, the author states she knows all of her compatriots will be mad at her for deceiving them and writing the book. It feels like she went through the whole North Korea experience with this chip of knowledge on her shoulder. So maybe she couldn't have better relationships with those around her.I'm giving this book 2/5 stars and recommend it to folks looking for a glimpse of what is going on in North Korea.
    • 3/5
      Very mixed feelings about this book. I found it dull, repetitive, and inelegant. Yet the structure and quality of the writing seems well matched to the subject. Teaching North Korean students gave the author insight to their peculiar and warped world of poverty, coercion, and blind obedience. Kim tries to paint the big picture but her skills aren't up to the task. Her intent from the beginning was to work "undercover" and produce an expose -- I felt sorry for her students for trusting her.
    • 4/5
      Because so few Westerners are allowed into North Korea, very few people know much about what life is actually like in North Korea. Suki Kim was born in South Korea, and her family emigrated to the U.S. when she was 13. She grew up with stories of family members who disappeared during and since the Korean conflict. These disappearances haunt her. She hopes to gain insight into what kind of world made this happen as she takes a position as a teacher in a school for elite young men in North Korea. She's eager to learn about the country and its people, and at the same time she is terrified. Strict warnings were passed down about what she could and couldn't do, and what she could and couldn't say. They include... "Never hint that there is anything wrong with their country."Living in Pyongyang is like living in a fishbowl. Everything you say and do will be watched. Even your dorm room might not be secure. They could go through your things. If you keep a journal and if you say something in it that is not complimentary, please do not leave it in your room. Even in your room, whatever you say could be recorded. Just get in a habit of not saying everything that is on your mind, not criticizing the government and things of that sort, so you won't slip."Do not make comparisons. For example, do not say that their food is different from yours because that could be construed as critical."Be careful with your terminology: Great Leader, Dear Leader, Precious Leader. Those names have to be carefully used, or better yet, just stay away from discussing them at all. Be careful about how to handle images too. For example, Air Koryo offers in-flight magazines. You take one to your office and it has a picture of Kim Jong-il, and let's say you end up sitting on it by mistake. Then you are in big trouble, because the photo is like the person. It is the same with the portrait of Kim Il-sung on the pins every North Korea wears. These men are regarded as deities, at least officially. Make sure you do not throw away, fold, tear, or damage any visual representation of them. Do not point at such images either. It would be considered an act of disrespect and you would be punished.It is hard for us to imagine living under this kind of restriction and oppression. Kim, by living it herself, and dangerously taking notes to be able to write this book on her return to the U.S., unveils harsh political, social, and economic realities faced by North Korean citizens. Illuminating. Definitely worth a read.
    • 4/5
      No books can be as chilling as factual reports about life and conditions in North Korea. Adam Johnson's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Orphan Master's Son must be noted as conveying the schizophrenic tyranny of that country's government that makes continuity of daily life a forbidden dream. In this memoir, Kim describes the exterior and interior experiences of being in an Alice in Wonderland reality where there is no such thing as "I," personal opinion, privacy, free time, normal family interaction, choice, decent food, ambition, life goals, or factual knowledge about one's own country or anywhere in the world.Kim leads a doubly disguised life, pretending to be a Christian missionary and not to be a journalist or writer of any kind. Her duties are to teach English to young college age men using a curriculum overseen by "counterparts" and "minders." Nothing can be undertaken in the classroom that is not pre-approved by both PDRK officials, school administration, and missionary zealots. The essence of any educational experience is feeding natural curiosity and leading students to question their personal frames of reference in order to increase their cache of knowledge and to encourage them to expand their values beyond those acquired in the home in the hopes of enabling young people to become skilled life-long learners, eager to face the unknown with the confidence of expected success.This is impossible in North Korea, consequently the dictatorial government has assured that this country will remain isolated, ignorant, and steadily fall further and further behind as the rest of the world forges eagerly into the future.Kim has written a book accessible to readers 14 and older, but it is not without its faults. Too often it is repetitive, too much focus is on Kim's personal love of her students, her personal loneliness and despair, and there is no really compelling insights offered about her interlude in the "university prison." It is a reportorial account but not a study, which tends to make it an easy and average read.However, it is probably too demanding of the reader to ask for much more from a book covering a shortish period of time and about a thoroughly closed society wherein living a life of lies and deceit is all that's permissible.
    • 4/5
      Suki Kim is a journalist who was born in South Korea and emigrated to the United States when she was thirteen. Like many South Koreans, both her grandparents and parents suffered the trauma of losing loved ones during the Korean War because of abductions to the North. Their families were ripped apart and the hurt continued on to Suki's generation. It is not surprising that she developed a fascination with North Korea. In 2011, Suki Kim posed as a missionary teacher and went to teach English in a college for elite North Korean boys. Surrounded by "minders" and under constant survailance, she clandestinely recorded her experiences and observations for this memoir. I found Suki Kim's book fascinating. She grew to love her students and was torn between giving them a glimpse of a forbidden world and keeping her knowledge to herself in order to protect them. Besides the danger to both herself and her students, learning about the rest of the world had the potential to sadden these boys, who had no hope of ever having the freedom to be part of the rest of the world. Educated, but naive, the boys wholeheartedly believed that North Korea's conditions are among the best in the world and that they are the envy of all other nations. Kim felt as though she were in a temporary prison during her time there, but knew that it was worse for her students. There would be no escape for the boys. Added to the constraints imposed on her by the school and North Korean government, she also had to hide her true purpose from her fellow missionary teachers. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It would be a great read for a book club.
    • 3/5
      "Without You There Is No Us" by Suki Kim is subtitled "My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite." She is a South Korean now living in New York.This book came to me in October 2015, as an ER copy. This is its second appearance here at LibraryThing. I have just read the 39 posted reviews. (There are twenty-one excerpts from major reviews quoted by its publisher in the book itself.)As many have said, it is a highly personal account of an insider's look at a very closed and highly controlled society. I found it interesting and odd. Probably not much has changed since its author left there in 2011 when she daily closely self-monitored much of what she taught her students and even what she said to her fellow teachers.For people interested in this complicated country I heartily recommend its Reader's Guide and the 7-page "Conversation With Suki Kim."
    • 4/5
      Suki Kim, who is of Korean ancestry, took a job teaching at a missionary school in North Korea in order to learn more about life in North Korea so that she could write this book. I'm glad she did. She starts out telling about the history of the north and the south and how families were separated and how the two Koreas grew apart. This added humanity to the history and allowed me to get a better understanding of the issues facing the Korean people today. Then she got around to talking about life in North Korea as she saw it.I don't know that I can explain life in North Korea in the format of a short review, and one should really read the book to get an appreciation of it. It is a world where the leader really is everything and must be thanked for everything. Free and even critical thought are not only discouraged but have been almost eradicated from the people, at least openly. Their entire lives are lies perpetrated by institutions of the state, and they have been taught a warped view of the outside world. It is harrowing. I highly recommend this memoir for a better picture of it, at least as experienced by the children of the elite. It's hard to imagine how bad life must be for everyone else.
    • 3/5
      Suki Kim, a Korean born US citizen, goes undercover as an English teacher at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, to teach the sons of the elite. It is 2011, a year of change in the DPRK, as all the other universities are closed. Kim Jong-Il dies the day before she leaves, and I wondered how much that had to do with the uncertainty in the universities. The overwhelming takeaway from this book is how the complete control of information offers the regime the ability to completely control its people. I was left wondering if this control can continue indefinitely. North Korea is both fascinating and frightening, and ultimately unknowable.
    • 5/5
      Big Brother is alive and well, and lives an especially sweet life in the Democratic People's Republic of (North) Korea (hereinafter DPRK). Suki Kim, a Korean-American writer and author, spent the 2011 academic year teaching English to the young sons of the DPRK's elite families. It is not far from surreal, reading of her daily experiences: the self-contained, almost quarantined campus, for example, where teachers and students share not only hours in the classroom, but sharing three (meager, and with little variety at that) meals each day. What is most fascinating -- and troubling -- is what the aura of isolation can accomplish. The Boston Globe review says it succinctly: " ...paranoia is contagious -- and become chillingly routine." This is an almost unbelievable story. A story of censorship, and yet also a narration of affection and yearning. "Without You, There Is No Us" is a remarkable book, highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      Suki Kim is from South Korea but moved to the United States with her family when she was 13. Her mother and grandmother and, by extension, Suki have been desperate to know what became of her uncle when North Korean soldiers prevented him from fleeing south with his family. For that reason and because Suki, as a writer, wanted to write about life in North Korea, she accepted a teaching assignment with Christian missionaries who taught sons of the North Korean elite. Of course, North Korea did not know they were missionaries, and the missionaries did not know Suki was a writer.This book describes how the boys, who Suki came to love, and she were forced to live. It is interesting to read that even the elite in North Korea have a terrible life.While not a page turner, WITHOUT YOU, THERE IS NO US is interesting enough that it made me want to read all about Suki's daring when she wrote about life in North Korea while she was in North Korea with North Koreans watching her every move, monitoring her email, and listening to her telephone conversations. She could have been imprisoned.
    • 5/5
      I heard Suki Kim on an NPR interveiw about a year ago and I was intrigued. She went undercover as a missionary teacher to North Korea to a university to teach English. Suki is a journalist and had been to North Korea once previously and is South Korean American. This memoir is fascinating. The extento to which the citizens of North Korea are isolated from knowing anything or having any contact with the outside world is frightening. Suki Kim paints a picture of the prison-like existance so well that I felt suffocated with her. At the same time, her depth of feeling and connection with these young men is so hopeful and genuine, it balances the despair. Kim is a gifted journalist and storyteller.
    • 4/5
      I've experienced a wide range of emotions with this book. Last year, when the hardcover version came out, I saw a televised interview with author Suki Kim about her time spent posing as a missionary teacher at an elite English language university program in North Korea. My initial thoughts were that her story must be fabricated, surely the regime of Escape from Camp 44 would not allow Americans access to impressionable young college students, but indeed they did - at least to a point. Suki and her colleagues were very closely monitored and lived almost as if imprisoned themselves. I think we are attracted to North Korean stories as we are to scary movies, so we can recoil in horror and feel a little better about our own circumstances. While it does illustrate the far reach and total control of the Kim dynasty, this memoir also shows the humanity of the North Korean people. Suki Kim grows to care deeply for the young men she teaches. She also adeptly expresses the dilemma faced by those trying to help. If she tells her students the truth about the outside world, she could well be signing their death warrants. This was different from anything else I've read about North Korea. It wasn't told through the eyes of a labor camp escapee or the rhetoric of a leader, but offered a glimpse of life for the sons of Pyongyang's elite. Well written and very readable - highly recommended!
    • 5/5
      Wow. I read a lot of different books every month, and seem pretty immune to being blown away by most books, but this one was rather unsettling. The very first person I knew from Korea, a gal I met in college, was a refugee from North Korea, a woman who escaped somehow as a child and was scarred deeply by her experiences in North Korea and in the course of her escape. So, I have had some idea as to how bad it is inside North Korea even before reading this book. I've read a bit of an English translation of some of the Juche texts, too, but it is difficult to imagine the bizarre world North Korea has become just from reading those texts. Without reading a book like this memoir, it would be difficult to fathom how completely isolated the people of North Korea are from the rest of humanity, not just in terms of physical separation, but also in terms of technology, culture, and basic knowledge. Even after reading this book, I still can't quite imagine how it would feel to live in such a world, where there are no facts, just information passed down from god-like authorities, information that can change on a whim, and that need not correspond to reality in any way in order to be treated as true.

      The world of Suki Kim's book is that of North Korea just before Kim Jong-Il died and his son Kim Jong-Un took power, and the world has been watching, puzzled and vaguely hopeful, waiting for some sign that the new leader has more sane intentions for his country than his father had. So far, though, the veil across North Korea remains as intact as ever, and after reading this book, I wonder how much we can ever really believe of whatever we think we know of North Korean intentions and of their understanding of the world. Somehow I doubt this is a problem that will just fade quietly away in my lifetime, but at least brave writers like Suki Kim can occasionally obtain for us a glimpse at life inside this decidedly insane country, even if the impact their books have on North Koreans remains entirely undetectable from the outside.
    • 5/5
      A very touching account of the writer's teaching experience in North Korea.
    • 4/5
      This was a fascinating look at the elite of North Korea, or, more specifically, the sons of the elite that Suki Kim taught over the course of two semesters at a quirky institution run by evangelical missionaries (really...) in Pyongyang. Forbidden from evangelizing or even talking about things like the Internet or how life really works in their own countries, Kim alternates between hinting at the reality of the world outside the closed universe of North Korea and then feeling guilty at the potential consequences of causing these 20-year olds from questioning their own regime: they are fated to live in this parallel universe, completely insulated from anything that might challenge the Dear/Great Leader's view of the universe. (For instance, when Japan and North Korea face off in soccer, the game isn't aired until after it's clear that the North Koreans have won -- and even then, it isn't made clear that the game is essentially irrelevant, because it's only to finalize rankings among those who have failed to qualify for the World Cup in Brazil.) This wasn't flawless, however. I found it surprising that Kim was as surprised as she was by her students' naivete: for someone who had traveled to North Korea, who had interviewed defectors, who was familiar with the region, even a leap of imagination should have brought her to realize some of the stuff that seems to astonish her so greatly? Nor does Kim's style impress me all that much. The reason to read this is precisely the reason it found a publisher: it's a unique glimpse at a part of the world it's safe to say we'll otherwise never see. It should have contained far more background on the Kims, on what Juche is, on the historical context (beyond her family's personal history) and given us a greater sense of what is happening in North Korea today -- the story there is important enough to warrant it, and I certainly cared far more about that than I did about Kim's fussing about the fate of the casual relationship that she had left behind in the US to take up the post. The latter were irrelevant to the narrative and distracting; we care about Kim only insofar as she provides us with a window into this closed world. Ultimately, the book's value lies in the fact that first-hand accounts of North Korea are so very, very rare. If it weren't for that, I'd be less prone to recommend it, and even now would say this comes in as a distant second to Barbara Demick's "Nothing to Envy".
    • 5/5
      I have a few different shelves for books, ranging from cubby holes in my office for "meh - maybe someday", to on top of the living room credenza, with the black marble cat bookends. This book is on the credenza with about a dozen other selections that will NEVER leave this house and will be loaned only on the threat of death or dismemberment if it doesn't get returned.
    • 4/5
      Suki Kim was born in Seoul, South Korea, and moved to the United States with her family as a teen-ager. She had made several short visits to North Korea during her career as a writer and journalist, but even she wasn't prepared for the mental and physical strains of living in the severely authoritarian country for a period of several months. Her reason for being there was ostensibly to teach English to the college-age sons of North Korea's political elites, but her Christian missionary cover story was just that, a plausible way to collect information to write this book.I found parts of this account very compelling. It's always interesting to see repression from the inside, and the extent to which even these scions of the country's leaders were essentially imprisoned and controlled gives a taste of what life must be like for ordinary North Koreans. But only the slightest taste, because Kim is never given a chance to speak to any of those ordinary Koreans to get the full story. The closest she comes is glimpses of North Koreans as the missionaries pass by on a bus to the next highly orchestrated tourist activity on their designated "days out". It's probably unsurprising, given how tightly circumscribed her movements were, that the accounts of her days teaching the young men have a bit of sameness about them. Throughout the book, Kim repeatedly asserts her love and affection for her students but I never understood why she felt that way, given that all of her interactions with them seemed so artificial and she admits that she knows they lied to her constantly about pretty much everything. I don't doubt that she felt the emotions; I just don't think she effectively demonstrated where her feelings came from. The brightest spots in this narrative for me had nothing to do with modern North Korea. They were the sections where Kim explained the history of the Korean peninsula and in particular her family's history before, during, and after the war that split the country in two. In the end, I'm not sure I learned much that I didn't already know about North Korea from news reports or other books. But Kim's writing is very easy to read, and I enjoyed the historical segments as I knew little about Korean history before reading this.
    • 4/5
      A stunning book that gives us a glimpse of a world we know nothing about. I particolare liked the fact that the author was Korean and spent time explaining things and traditions
    • 5/5
      This is a memoir/investigative piece by Kim, who spends two semesters in North Korea teaching English to elite college men. The tension this entire book is under is sometimes dizzying. Kim walks a careful line between winding to find out as much about North Korea as she an and not wanting to arouse suspicion. She wants to tell these young men as much about the outside world as she can, but is held back both by restrictions on what she is allowed to teach/discuss, as well as the fear that she might make them more miserable in the end, as they currently seem to buy into the myths of North Korea's superiority over the rest of the world. (As for what current means in the context of this book, it ends shortly after the death of Kim Jong-il in 2011.) Add in that the school is run by Evangelical Christians (which she is not), and that all of her emails, phone calls, and most conversations are monitored, and the levels of secrecy, self-censorship, and faked opinions/identity/facts, quickly become suffocating.I wish I hadn't left this on my shelves so long before reading it, but I am glad to have read it now. Reading it right after my Scientology binge was interesting, as there were a lot of unexpected parallels in the cult of personality and some of the mind/reality control. (Obviously, there are a lot of differences, too. But maybe only because LRH was never successful in taking over an entire country.)An intriguing counterpart to all of the memoirs of defectors and refugees.
    • 5/5
      Despite the sinister topic, Suki's experience in North Korea captivated me. While I'm sad to put this book down, I wish it was one that had never been written, I wish that the people of North Korea will one day experience freedom but after reading this that wish seems impossible.

      North Korea is Orwell's 1984 brought to life.

      This book offers a rare insiders perspective of the Hermit Kingdom, specifically of the young 'gentlemen' being groomed to continue the dictatorship.

      I only wish that Suki will one day be able to reconnect with her students and find that they have better lives filled with the opportunities that they deserve.

      Scary, devastating and heartbreaking. I couldn't put it down.
    • 5/5
      I've read several books about North Korea now, fiction and non-fiction, but this is the first memoir I've read, and I have to say it is the saddest book about that enigmatic place that I have read. Suki Kim takes us inside the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, where she taught English to the sons of North Korea's elites for two terms in 2011. More so than any other book, Kim's tale demonstrates how the North Korean people are trapped by their imposed Juche culture, which makes it nearly impossible to even comprehend a world where there is more to life than the Great Leader and his works.
    • 4/5
      nonfiction (life in North Korea for the upper classes). It's no gulag, but it is still interesting.
    • 3/5
      I am not by any means anti-memoir, but I think that this book would have worked better as a more objective work of journalism. Part of the problem here is that the author is simply not that interesting. Certainly not in comparison to the goings-on in North Korea! Every time she returned to her feelings of loneliness or her life in New York, I rolled my eyes. I didn't buy this book to read about Suki Kim eating rice alone in her room. Kim comes across as self-absorbed and naive; maybe that's a little unfair since this is a memoir, but by the end of the book she was on my last nerve.

      I felt that there were so many questions about the school that were never answered. How exactly did the boys get admitted to it? The book is entitled "My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite," but at other times she eludes to less wealthy boys attending. How do these boys catch the eye of whoever is in charge of school admissions? What kinds of work were these boys expecting to go into? What were their futures expected to be? I also wanted to know more about the school itself, partially staffed with teachers from a Christian missionary program. How on earth did that happen? Did the school know the teachers were also missionaries? Did the teachers ever try to proselytize the students, or were they really content with just "spreading seeds"? (A "seed," for example, would be the viewing of the Narnia movie, which was scrapped anyway.) Why was a school for the "sons of North Korea's elite" using teachers who were also Christian missionaries?

      Maybe Kim couldn't get the answers to all these questions. But a more structured, less impressionistic account would have been far less frustrating.
    • 4/5
      A valuable look into an isolationist country told from an up close and personal perspective. Kim's discussion of the dual forms of censorship experienced by sequestered North Korean science and technology students (both by their own government and by the world's evangelist teachers volunteering to instruct them) is especially interesting.
    • 5/5
      This is an utterly fascinating memoir of a journalist going undercover as a Christian missionary teacher at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, an elite university in North Korea. Her job is to teach English to Korea's next generation of leaders.I've always been interested in North Korea, but my interest is heightened this year after reading Nothing to Envy, by Barbara Demick. That book gives a thorough overview of North Korea, with vivid salient details. Without You, There is No Us also gives vivid detail, but where Nothing to Envy was broad and encompassing, this book has a tight, narrow focus. And where Nothing to Envy exposes the difficult lives of average North Koreans, Without You, There is No Us shows the lives of a exclusive group--young men who believe themselves to be the best in the world, but who in reality live such excessively restricted lives that it boggles minds of the rest of us. These students believe they are attending one of the top five technical universities in the world, yet don't know about the internet, and when they start learning about it, can't comprehend it.Through her six months of teaching these students, Kim walks several tightropes. The first is the cultural balance. The North Korean government expects the school to make these students fluent English speakers without exposing them to any non-North Korean information. Kim herself wants to plant seeds of doubt, and widen the mental horizons of her students. But in doing so, she has to be careful not just to keep herself out of trouble (deportation, gulag, execution), but also to not endanger the lives of the students. She also realizes that in damaging their world view too extensively, she can inflict mental trauma. As a western reader looking for a good story, part of me wanted her to really let them know what's going on, but of course Kim was wiser and showed better sense.She also had to balance staying true to herself and fitting in with her fellow teachers, some who were extremest fundamentalist Christians. They were not allowed to show any signs of their Christianity, which usually helped her blend in. Still, she had to be constantly on guard on that front as well.Another area where she struggled for balance was with her students, who on one hand were enthusiastic, hardworking, and friendly, and on the other hand were amazingly adept liars.I was engaged by this whole book, but Chapter 22 stood out. This is where she tries to teach essay writing, but it's incomprehensible to people who have been taught since birth not to question, and that "the great leader says" is all the evidence one needs.BTW: the "You" in the title refers to the regime leader.Recommended for: everyone, unless you're just not interesting in North Korea.If you're only going to read one book about North Korea, it should probably be Nothing to Envy. However, I don't think that takes anything away from Without You, There is No Us, which will go on my top five list of most interesting and most readable books for 2014. Also, if you don't know much about the country, or why it is the way it is, this isn't the place to start.
    • 5/5
      North Korea is probably the most completely closed society on Earth. Few outsiders are allowed in, and those caught trying to leave are executed. First-hand reports about the country's internal conditions are rare, but usually involve horrific stories of starvation, brutality and oppression. South Korean-born American journalist Suki Kim found a way to gain admittance into North Korea. From July to December 2011 she taught Reading and Writing of English at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST), an elite males-only North Korean college. Her students, all young men in their late teens or early twenties, were among their country's most privileged citizens, but even they lived in a bleak world of inadequate food, pointless, physically exhausting labor, constant propaganda, and single-minded devotion to Great Leader Kim Il-sung (d. 1994) and his son, Supreme Leader Kim Jong-il (d. 2011). Ms. Kim quickly found that all communication was monitored and no one was ever allowed to speak freely or act independently. Even computer science majors at this college of "technology" were not allowed to use the Internet the rest of the world users (a heavily-censored intranet passes for "the Internet" in North Korea). Foreign teachers, in particular, were under heavy surveillance. They could not go off campus without their "minders" and had to have every lesson plan approved by shadowy officials called "counterparts". Ms. Kim writes movingly and well about her genuine love for her students and her attempts, however subtle, to introduce them to the world outside their country's borders. She found the students innocent and charming at first, but soon discovered that they lied easily, even when there was no real reason not to tell the truth. She attributes this habit to the paranoid mindset that develops in totalitarian societies. Nonetheless, she recognizes that her students are North Korea's future leaders, and her hope is that someday one of them will bring freedom to this oppressed land.This book offers a unique, if sobering, perspective on a country that if present conditions continue, few will ever visit. I highly recommend this book.*I received this ARC through my place of employment with no expectation that I would review it, let alone give it a positive review.
    • 4/5
      Suki Kim is a journalist, not a teacher, and an atheist, not an evangelical Christian -- but she went to great lengths to secure a teaching position at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST), a school funded and staffed primarily by Evangelical Christians from the USA. Born in Seoul but a US resident since the age of 13, Kim's deep roots in the region sparked a longtime interest in the sequestered North. She had been on a few carefully choreographed tours, where a minder was always present and she and her fellow tourists saw only what the government of North Korea wanted them to see, but teaching English at PUST would give her an unrivaled level of access to North Korean citizens -- and not just any North Korean citizens, but the young men being groomed for positions of influence in the nation's capitol. During her six months at PUST, Kim secretly accumulated notes, stored on USB drives worn on her person, that would later become the basis for this book. Kim, her fellow teachers, and their students were isolated on the grounds of the university, unable to freely communicate with their families, whether those families were in the USA (as was the case with the teachers) or just across town (as was the case with the students). Kim formed bonds with both her fellow teachers and her students, but all along, she knew that she would inevitably betray both groups.Kim's firsthand look at how the restrictive regime affects the lives of even its more privileged citizens is absolutely fascinating. I picked this up after reading an excerpt online, and read it in just a day or two because I was so engrossed in the narrative. Kim's biases are clear from the beginning: she feels strongly about the topic of Korean reunification (an issue that she was absolutely not allowed to discuss or even mention during her time in Pyongyang) and has a great deal of tenderness for the people of both Koreas, and she feels disdainful towards her Evangelical colleagues, seeing them as nearly as deluded as her regime-worshiping students. I found the latter attitude rather troubling; I thought she was harder than she needed to be on the missionaries, who had walked a very fine line themselves in establishing the school and building relationships to the point that they were entrusted with the education of these elite young men. Still, I thought this was an engaging and informative read on a topic that's sure to be of interest to many.
    • 4/5
      It isn't 1984, it's 2011. It isn't Great Britain (or Airstrip 1), it's North Korea. It isn't Big Brother, it's Great Leader. It isn't fiction, it is astonishingly real. In the twenty-first century, the sons of the elite are sent to the new Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, where no science is taught, and the technology they learn misleads them into thinking they "have" the internet when virtually no communication with the outside world is possible. These students, bright and eager as they are, have grown up believing that their country, due to the wisdom and leadership of Kim Jong Il, their Great Leader, excels in all things---education, agriculture, engineering--- while the rest of the world is pathetically far behind. Nothing suggestive of the contrary is allowed to penetrate their borders. And yet, the entire faculty of PUST has been recruited by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea from foreign countries, many of the teachers Christian missionaries who have taken on the job knowing full well that any attempt to disseminate their faith in a country where organized religion is banned will result in their immediate dismissal and deportation, at the very least. All classes are taught in English, because despite its isolationism and its hatred of America, North Korea's future leadership must come from young people who will need to know English to engage with the outside as it becomes increasingly necessary. Without You There Is No Us is the memoir of South Korean-born Suki Kim, a journalist who spent a year teaching at PUST with a group of evangelical Christians who never questioned her religious beliefs before accepting her application to join them, and with whom she was almost as much at odds as she was with the totalitarian DPRK. Naturally, as a native speaker of Korean, she had opportunities to interact more fully with the students than many of the other teachers, and she grew fond of particular members of her classes, as all teachers will do. Against all the rules, the author kept detailed notes on USB drives, knowing that what she was doing would be considered a betrayal by her colleagues, and that by publishing this book she would burn several bridges, assuring that she would never be allowed into North Korea again. It's a fascinating glimpse into a bewildering closed society.