Library's review
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.
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Biography & Autobiography. History. Politics. Nonfiction. HTML: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 a… (more)