Without you there is no us
Suki Kim is a South Korean investigative journalist, novelist and essayist with American citizenship and living in New York. She first traveled to Pyongyang in 2002, joining a group loyal to Kim Jong-Il and writing about it for a cover story in the New York Review of Books.
In 2011, she lived in North Korea undercover among the country's future leaders during the final year of Kim Jong-Il’s reign. Her book Without You, There is No Us: Undercover among North Korea's Elite Children is unprecedented literary documentation of the world's most secretive gulag nation. Gulag was a system of concentration camps in the Soviet Union where political prisoners suffered violence, torture and abuse of all kinds, as well as being forced to work in a subhuman regime. This system had its heyday during the dictatorial government of Joseph Stalin.
She got a job at the newly opened Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST), North Korea's only private university attended by the sons of North Korean leaders. Evangelical groups from several countries founded PUST. Its staff are mainly American teachers who are there as volunteers, funded by their churches. Kim was hired to teach English for a period of six months. North Korea is full of paradoxes. This university is one of them.
What country is this?
North Korea is a country with a population of about 25 million people, located in the north of the Korean Peninsula between the East Sea (Sea of Japan) and the Yellow Sea. A highly secret communist state remains isolated from most of the world.
In 1910, Japan formally annexed the Korean Peninsula, which it had occupied five years after the Russo-Japanese War, between 1904 and 1905. During 35 years of colonial rule the Koreans suffered brutal repression at the hands of Japan's military regime. During World War II, Japan sent many Koreans to the front as soldiers or forced them to work in war equipment factories. Thousands of young Korean women became "comfort women", providing sexual services to Japanese soldiers.
After Japan's defeat in 1945, the United States and the Soviet Union divided the peninsula into two zones of influence along the 38th Parallel, or 38 degrees north latitude. In 1948, pro-US South Korea was established in Seoul, led by the strongly anti-communist Syngman Rhee. At the end of World War II, Kim II Sung was chosen by Stalin to lead North Korea.
The Korean War
In 1950, with the support of the Soviet Union and China, North Korean forces invaded South Korea, starting the Korean War. The United States entered the war with an army of about 340,000 United Nations troops. In July 1953, with over 2.5 million military and civilian casualties, both sides signed an armistice.
The agreement left the borders of North and South Korea essentially unchanged, with a heavily guarded demilitarized zone about 4 kilometers wide along the 38th Parallel. A formal peace treaty, however, was never signed.
The Kim Dynasty
Kim Il Sung - After the Korean War, Kim Il Sung shaped his country according to the nationalist ideology of Juche (self-reliance). The state took tight control over the economy, collectivized agricultural land, and established private property. State-controlled media and restrictions on all travel in and out of the country have helped preserve the veil of secrecy surrounding North Korea's political and economic operations. With Soviet support, Kim built his military into one of the strongest in the world, even as economic growth stagnated during the 1980s.
Kim Jong-Il - the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc damaged North Korea's economy and China became its only ally. In 1994, Kim Il Sung died of a heart attack and was succeeded by his son, Kim Jong-Il. The new leader instituted a new policy, establishing the Korean People's Army as the main political and economic force in the country. The new policy widened existing inequalities between the military and elite classes and the vast majority of ordinary North Korean citizens. During the 1990s, widespread flooding, poor agricultural policies and economic mismanagement led to a prolonged famine, with hundreds of thousands dead and many crippled by malnutrition. The emergence of a robust black market to meet this shortage would force the government to take steps to liberalize the state economy.
Kim Jong Un - In December 2011, the position of supreme leader went to Kim Jong Un, the second youngest of Kim Jong Il's seven children who died of a heart attack. Kim Jong Un took steps to consolidate power, ordering the execution of his own uncle and other political and military rivals. Kim's government also continued to work on its nuclear arsenal, further damaging his country's relations with the West.
War against the United States?
In 2013, a third nuclear test resulted in UN Security Council travel and trade sanctions, as well as a formal protest by China, North Korea's only major ally and main trading partner. In 2017, tensions between North Korea and the United States reached an unprecedented level. North Korea launched its first intercontinental ballistic missile with force to hit the mainland of the United States. It threatened to launch missiles near the US territory of Guam and tested a bomb seven times the size of those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Such actions prompted even tougher sanctions from the UN Security Council and an aggressive response from US President Donald Trump, leaving the global community fearful of the possibility of nuclear war.
Undercover in North Korea
Suki Kim told BBC World what her experience was like, something few foreigners have been able to experience in the last 70 years of North Korea's isolation.
My interest in North Korea comes from a combination of two reasons. As a journalist, I was frustrated by not knowing the truth about what was happening in that place, which is a huge tragedy. The second is that the Korean War separated my family in 1950. That war and the subsequent division of the peninsula separated millions of Koreans. My uncle, my mother's brother, stayed up north, and my grandmother never saw him again. The same thing happened with my father's cousins.
What do North Koreans think about what lies beyond their borders?
For a decade, she carried out extensive research on the country. She spoke to nearly 100 defectors in China, Mongolia, Thailand and Laos. She entered North Korea for short periods, but what she was looking for was the possibility of being able to live there, incognito.
Suki Kim assures that these young people are not allowed to express any curiosity about the outside world. This, for her, is a type of psychological abuse that conditions citizens to accept what surrounds them without question. All the routine and entertainment of the people work to honor the regime and the philosophy of the system.
Books
Without You there is no Us - a haunting account of teaching English to the children of North Korea's ruling class during the last six months of Kim Jong-Il’s reign. Every day, three times a day, students march in two straight lines, singing praises to Kim Jong-Il and North Korea: Without you, there is no homeland. Without you, there is no us. It is a chilling scene, but gradually Suki Kim also learns the melody and, without realizing it, starts humming it.
It is 2011, and every university in North Korea has been closed for an entire year, students sent to construction camps — except for the 270 students at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST), a walled complex where portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong-Il stare impassively from the walls of each room. Suki has taken a job teaching English, and for the next six months, she will eat three meals a day with her young proteges and fight to teach them how to write, all under the regime's watchful eye. The book offers a moving and incalculably rare glimpse into life in the world's most unknown country, and into the privileged young people, she calls "soldiers and slaves."
The interpreter - Suzy Park is a 29-year-old Korean-American interpreter who works for the New York City justice system. She makes a frightening and sinister discovery about her family history that will send her on a terrifying quest. Five years earlier, her parents, workers who had lost personal happiness for the gain of their children, were brutally murdered in an apparent robbery of their store. But the glow of a new lead draws Suzy into the dangerous Korean underworld and ultimately unravels the mystery of her parents' murder.
Essays
One of her most acclaimed essays, The Reluctant Memoirist (The New Republic, 2016), exposed racism and Orientalism in publishing, as well as the systematic undermining of the female experience, and featured publishing giant Penguin Random House, its publisher itself, to formally correct the mislabeling of their book. Her essay on fear for Lapham's Quarterly was selected for The Best American Essays 2018 (Houghton Mifflin Hartcourt).
Reports
Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Slate, Atlantic, New Yorker and New Republic, where she is a contributing editor. Kim's investigation into sexual harassment on WNYC public radio for The Cut was named the "Best Investigative Report of 2017" by Longreads, resulting in the firing of some of her older show hosts and the eventual departure of its president.
In 2018, the Best American Essays series ran her essay on fear, and in 2020, for a New Yorker feature, Kim did an interview with Adrian Hong, the elusive leader of the first North Korean opposition who spoke to her as she fled the country. United States Department of Justice.
Scholarships and Awards
Kim received the following fellowships: Guggenheim, George Soros Open Society, Fulbright Senior Scholar, and Nova América. She also received the Berlin Prize at the American Academy, in addition to serving as Ferris Professor of Creative Nonfiction at Princeton University. Her TED Talk drew nearly 6 million viewers, and she was the keynote speaker at the 2020 call-up of Barnard College, Columbia University. She has been featured in media all over the world, from CNN, BBC, and MSNBC, including shows ranging from CBS This Morning, Christian Amanpour Show and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study 2021-2022 Scholar at the University from Harvard. She is working on a non-fiction book (to be published by WW Norton), which was a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award.
His first novel, The Interpreter (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) was the winner of the PEN Open Book Award and finalist for the PEN Hemingway Prize, and his non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Washington Post, Harper's, Atlantic, The New Yorker and The New Republic, where she is a contributing editor.
