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929 reviews for:
Without You, There Is No Us: My secret life teaching the sons of North Korea’s elite
Suki Kim
3.96 AVERAGE
929 reviews for:
Without You, There Is No Us: My secret life teaching the sons of North Korea’s elite
Suki Kim
3.96 AVERAGE
I wasn't sure I would like this book because it sounded like a memoir of a missionary trying to convert people in North Korea, but I was wrong. It's an emotional recollection of a journalist's time teaching the upper crust's college-aged sons. It was enlightening to see that even the upper class people in North Korea don't really have it that good, although they're a lot better off than those working in the gulags.
Reading about North Korea is definitely not pleasant though, since every time I read something like this, I'm frustrated with why countries like ours haven't done something more drastic to help the people there.
Reading about North Korea is definitely not pleasant though, since every time I read something like this, I'm frustrated with why countries like ours haven't done something more drastic to help the people there.
dark
emotional
informative
sad
slow-paced
Favourite quotes:
“When you are shut off from the world, every day is exactly the same as the one before. This sameness has a way of wearing down your soul until you become nothing but a breathing, toiling, consuming thing that awakes to the sun and sleeps at the dawning of the dark.”
“The years I lived there remain unnervingly still, pristinely intact in my mind. As I get older, the memory of those years grows bigger, each nook casting a longer shadow. Such is the condition of a first-generation immigrant for whom everything is separated into now and then, into before the move and after. The ocean that separates the adoptive home and the old country also divides time.”
“It was a place whose awe-inspiring beauty so oddly failed to touch me that for years afterward I would look for an opportunity to drop the word Liguria in conversations…Some experiences are like that. You live through them, and yet you aren’t quite there.”
“When you lose your home at a young age, you spend your life looking for its replacement.”
“Over the years, I have never considered any apartment more than temporary. Each one remains spare, with bare walls and no personal touches—as though I might need to grab everything in a few seconds and run. People often ask me where my things are. The question always brings me back to South Korea; in my mind, I finally return. I put down my suitcase at the base of the incredibly long flight of steps I have never forgotten and look up at my childhood home, towering above.”
“If this were the sort of story that invites readers to nod with empathy and walk away both satisfied and educated, I would say that I traveled full circle. But in truth my journey was barely half a circle, a sad one that could never be completed, because those who were at the center of the harrowing history are almost certainly long dead, or old and dying, and time is running out before their stories are lost in the dust of the past.”
“Separation haunts the affected long after the actual incident. It is a perpetual act of violation.”
“Waiting for news of my visa, I often thought about those who had gone missing, my mother’s brother and my father’s cousins. How their mothers must have waited, and waited, not moving houses after the war for as long as possible so that their sons and daughters could be sure of finding their way back home. Every day, the mothers must have hoped that this would be the day. They must have looked up expectantly each time a doorbell rang. Perhaps that is my child. Please let it be my child. Yes, it has to be. Because it is nonsensical, the idea that you would never see your baby again. Because in our world nothing is ever lost without a trace.”
“Everything has been so hushed for decades that if you press your ear to the stillness, you can almost hear the muted cries.”
“I thought I was playing a dare with life then, challenging my limits, but I was scared most of the time and wept for no clear reason in dingy hostel rooms across Europe and Central America. But the years had worked their magic, and that scared girl I had been in that remote place in time had dissolved into infinite invisible threads, so thin and delicate that I could almost touch her and then lose her the next minute.”
“Yet, now that I found myself so far from home, it was hard to understand why I had stayed unhappy for so long. Sometimes the longer you are inside a prison, the harder it is to fathom what is possible beyond its walls.”
“Cold War politics knows no bounds, and the people had no say in its dreadful consequences. Resignation is a habit, and it is contagious.”
“But later I came to see it was also a sort of therapy, the way my mother kept on telling it over and over, as her mother had done for years. And the storytelling continues as I type these words here in New York, in a language alien to those who lived through the division, a language that shields me from the worst of my grief. For even now, decades after I first adopted it, English does not pierce my heart the same way that my mother tongue does. The word division weighs less than bundan, and war is easier to say than junjeng.”
“At such moments, it was as though we were sitting in any school cafeteria anywhere. They were simply college students who were interested in the one thing most boys their age were interested in: girls. At moments like those, I forgot where I was. Or if I did remember, I quickly made myself forget. And my guard came down, and I felt a sudden freedom from the constraints that wound all of us so tight, and I looked across at their mischievous faces and felt such tenderness for them, and I became a momentary confidante for their gossip about girls and a well-wisher on the twentieth birthday of my charming student, and I felt pleased and relaxed until my eyes would catch the shining metal pins on their chests, the eternally present face of their Eternal President, there on each of their hearts, marking his territory, although they were just badges, and these young men could easily pull them off and throw them into the trash along with the uneaten grub on their trays, but then it would dawn on me that such a thing would never happen, and that this glimmer of hope was only a mirage.”
“We were always wary of one another. And this incessant circling around the boundary and our efforts not to breach it were exhausting. We wanted to discover things about one another, yet if we stumbled across such information, we both froze.”
“It takes tremendous energy to censor yourself all the time, to have to, in a sense, continually lie.”
“On hot July evenings, they played with a zeal I had not seen them show anywhere else. They shouted at each other in jest, burst into laughter, sweated profusely, and moved with the unique grace and beauty of youth. I often sat on a rock nearby and watched them. The sun would be setting in the distance, so slowly that sometimes it appeared as though even the sun moved at a different speed there, like the slow smoke billowing from the distant tower. That smoke, on such evenings, looked as ethereal as those moving bodies, and in that moment, I forgot all of it, the taboo subjects we never spoke of and the secrets hidden all over campus. Instead all I saw was their heartbreaking youth and energy, and I wished then that they could have the whole world, all of it, that which had been denied to them for twenty years of their lives, because none of them had any idea that as their bodies bounced, their minds stood so very still within that field in that campus locked away from time.”
“Without having experienced the World Wide Web, could I have imagined it? Even if someone had described it to me, I would never have been able to fathom it.”
“More than one described his ideal girl as one who would obey him, listen to him, and be a good mother to his son. After all, this was a country where the most important thing a woman had ever done was to give birth to the Great Leader—not unlike the Virgin Mary.”
“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, like a child being abused, in silence. In this world, there were no individual demands, and asking permission for everything was infantilizing. So we began to understand our students, who had never been able to do anything on their own. The notion of following your heart’s desire, of going wherever you chose, did not exist here, and I did not see any way to let them know what it felt like, especially since, after so little time in their system, I had lost my own sense of freedom.”
“Until then I had hoped that perhaps I could change one student, open up one path of understanding. But what kind of a future did I envision for the one student I reached? Opening up this country would mean sacrificing these lives. Opening up this country would mean the blood of my beautiful students.”
“It was at moments like these that I could not help but think that they—my beloved students—were insane. Either they were so terrified that they felt compelled to lie and boast of the greatness of their Leader, or they sincerely believed everything they were telling me. I could not decide which was worse.”
“It was hardly surprising, then, that there were no noteworthy historical artifacts left on this famed mountain, since history itself was an obstacle in bolstering the myth of the Great Leader.”
“But I had never experienced a scene so entirely devoid of noise. By ‘noise,’ I do not mean literal sound, but the noise of life, the evidence of life lived behind closed doors. I saw no running dogs or children, no chimney smoke, no flash of color from a TV set, and this greatly disturbed me, and yet what troubled me more was the fact that I did not know and would never know the truth of what I was seeing.”
“For the first time in my life, thinking was dangerous to my survival.”
“There was something touching about such fraternity, but at the same time, the speed with which they lied was unnerving. It came too naturally to them… I was not sure if, having been told such lies as children, they could not differentiate between truth and lies, or whether it was a survival method they had mastered.”
“They could sense when tides turned because perhaps tides always turned, and no one spoke his mind, and so the only way to survive was to try to outdo one another at mind games.”
“…it occurred to me that it was all futile, the fantasy of Korean unity, the five thousand years of Korean identity, because the unified nation was broken, irreparably, in 1945 when a group of politicians drew a random line across the map, separating families who would die without ever meeting again, with all their sorrow and anger and regret unrequited, their bodies turning to earth, becoming part of this land. On that evening, as a sun the color of mournful pomegranate fell behind the Forever Tower, behind the smoke stack, behind this city, this school, behind the children of the elite who were now my children for a brief time, these lovely, lying children, I saw very clearly that there was no redemption here.”
“That was how we parted, our gazes locked, the students watching from behind glass as we were driven to freedom.”
“Yet another wrote, “During the vacation, I missed your catchword, ‘gentleman,’ and it used to make us amazed but we could read your mind that you wanted us to be gentle in life.””
“Of course, the DPRK purposely infantilized its citizens, making everyone helpless and powerless so that they depended on the state.”
“When I visited either of the two Koreas I always imagined that I was traveling back to my roots and would discover new truths about my past. Now it occurred to me that the past I was seeking had for many years been buried under and overtaken by American and Chinese influences. The Korea of my imagination existed only in paintings, history books, the memories of older generations, and in the remnants that I glimpsed, every now and then, like shards of glass poking out from the buried past.”
“There was really no point in holding a discussion about different kinds of love, since they all agreed that the only real love was the love of the motherland.”
“She popped one in her mouth and said, looking seriously troubled, ‘They say that they want to learn English, but they don’t like us. Their attitude is like ‘Just give us the English we need but don’t step over this way.’ But you can’t expect everything when you give nothing.’ That was the inherent contradiction. This was a nation backed into a corner. They did not want to open up, and yet they had no choice but to move toward engagement if they wanted to survive. They had built the entire foundation of their country on isolationism and wanting to kill Americans and South Koreans, yet they needed to learn English and feed their children with foreign money.”
“A border existed here too. Perhaps here was our greatest fear, the fear of the other.”
“Maybe it was because they had been taught since birth that they were soldiers that I liked to see them express simple joy.”
“I stared across at him and felt a familiar sick feeling. Perhaps this was only the beginning. The questions they would have. The questions they should be asking. The questions they would realize they had not been asking because they did not imagine they could, or because asking meant that they could no longer exist in their system.”
“I vomited up the images of the silent villages alongside the roads, the gaunt faces outside the van window, the Great Leader slogans and the Great Leader songs and the Great Leader portraits that marked every building, every living creature, every hushed breath like a branding iron.”
“I looked and looked at each one of my beautiful boys, whom I knew I would not be able to see again. I watched them raise their spoons to their mouths. I watched them pick up their trays, and cast their eyes in my direction with no recognition, as though I no longer existed for them in this world that was now missing their Great Leader. Yet I continued facing them, just in case one of them looked up and noticed that their world had now changed, perhaps for the better.”
“When you are shut off from the world, every day is exactly the same as the one before. This sameness has a way of wearing down your soul until you become nothing but a breathing, toiling, consuming thing that awakes to the sun and sleeps at the dawning of the dark.”
“The years I lived there remain unnervingly still, pristinely intact in my mind. As I get older, the memory of those years grows bigger, each nook casting a longer shadow. Such is the condition of a first-generation immigrant for whom everything is separated into now and then, into before the move and after. The ocean that separates the adoptive home and the old country also divides time.”
“It was a place whose awe-inspiring beauty so oddly failed to touch me that for years afterward I would look for an opportunity to drop the word Liguria in conversations…Some experiences are like that. You live through them, and yet you aren’t quite there.”
“When you lose your home at a young age, you spend your life looking for its replacement.”
“Over the years, I have never considered any apartment more than temporary. Each one remains spare, with bare walls and no personal touches—as though I might need to grab everything in a few seconds and run. People often ask me where my things are. The question always brings me back to South Korea; in my mind, I finally return. I put down my suitcase at the base of the incredibly long flight of steps I have never forgotten and look up at my childhood home, towering above.”
“If this were the sort of story that invites readers to nod with empathy and walk away both satisfied and educated, I would say that I traveled full circle. But in truth my journey was barely half a circle, a sad one that could never be completed, because those who were at the center of the harrowing history are almost certainly long dead, or old and dying, and time is running out before their stories are lost in the dust of the past.”
“Separation haunts the affected long after the actual incident. It is a perpetual act of violation.”
“Waiting for news of my visa, I often thought about those who had gone missing, my mother’s brother and my father’s cousins. How their mothers must have waited, and waited, not moving houses after the war for as long as possible so that their sons and daughters could be sure of finding their way back home. Every day, the mothers must have hoped that this would be the day. They must have looked up expectantly each time a doorbell rang. Perhaps that is my child. Please let it be my child. Yes, it has to be. Because it is nonsensical, the idea that you would never see your baby again. Because in our world nothing is ever lost without a trace.”
“Everything has been so hushed for decades that if you press your ear to the stillness, you can almost hear the muted cries.”
“I thought I was playing a dare with life then, challenging my limits, but I was scared most of the time and wept for no clear reason in dingy hostel rooms across Europe and Central America. But the years had worked their magic, and that scared girl I had been in that remote place in time had dissolved into infinite invisible threads, so thin and delicate that I could almost touch her and then lose her the next minute.”
“Yet, now that I found myself so far from home, it was hard to understand why I had stayed unhappy for so long. Sometimes the longer you are inside a prison, the harder it is to fathom what is possible beyond its walls.”
“Cold War politics knows no bounds, and the people had no say in its dreadful consequences. Resignation is a habit, and it is contagious.”
“But later I came to see it was also a sort of therapy, the way my mother kept on telling it over and over, as her mother had done for years. And the storytelling continues as I type these words here in New York, in a language alien to those who lived through the division, a language that shields me from the worst of my grief. For even now, decades after I first adopted it, English does not pierce my heart the same way that my mother tongue does. The word division weighs less than bundan, and war is easier to say than junjeng.”
“At such moments, it was as though we were sitting in any school cafeteria anywhere. They were simply college students who were interested in the one thing most boys their age were interested in: girls. At moments like those, I forgot where I was. Or if I did remember, I quickly made myself forget. And my guard came down, and I felt a sudden freedom from the constraints that wound all of us so tight, and I looked across at their mischievous faces and felt such tenderness for them, and I became a momentary confidante for their gossip about girls and a well-wisher on the twentieth birthday of my charming student, and I felt pleased and relaxed until my eyes would catch the shining metal pins on their chests, the eternally present face of their Eternal President, there on each of their hearts, marking his territory, although they were just badges, and these young men could easily pull them off and throw them into the trash along with the uneaten grub on their trays, but then it would dawn on me that such a thing would never happen, and that this glimmer of hope was only a mirage.”
“We were always wary of one another. And this incessant circling around the boundary and our efforts not to breach it were exhausting. We wanted to discover things about one another, yet if we stumbled across such information, we both froze.”
“It takes tremendous energy to censor yourself all the time, to have to, in a sense, continually lie.”
“On hot July evenings, they played with a zeal I had not seen them show anywhere else. They shouted at each other in jest, burst into laughter, sweated profusely, and moved with the unique grace and beauty of youth. I often sat on a rock nearby and watched them. The sun would be setting in the distance, so slowly that sometimes it appeared as though even the sun moved at a different speed there, like the slow smoke billowing from the distant tower. That smoke, on such evenings, looked as ethereal as those moving bodies, and in that moment, I forgot all of it, the taboo subjects we never spoke of and the secrets hidden all over campus. Instead all I saw was their heartbreaking youth and energy, and I wished then that they could have the whole world, all of it, that which had been denied to them for twenty years of their lives, because none of them had any idea that as their bodies bounced, their minds stood so very still within that field in that campus locked away from time.”
“Without having experienced the World Wide Web, could I have imagined it? Even if someone had described it to me, I would never have been able to fathom it.”
“More than one described his ideal girl as one who would obey him, listen to him, and be a good mother to his son. After all, this was a country where the most important thing a woman had ever done was to give birth to the Great Leader—not unlike the Virgin Mary.”
“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, like a child being abused, in silence. In this world, there were no individual demands, and asking permission for everything was infantilizing. So we began to understand our students, who had never been able to do anything on their own. The notion of following your heart’s desire, of going wherever you chose, did not exist here, and I did not see any way to let them know what it felt like, especially since, after so little time in their system, I had lost my own sense of freedom.”
“Until then I had hoped that perhaps I could change one student, open up one path of understanding. But what kind of a future did I envision for the one student I reached? Opening up this country would mean sacrificing these lives. Opening up this country would mean the blood of my beautiful students.”
“It was at moments like these that I could not help but think that they—my beloved students—were insane. Either they were so terrified that they felt compelled to lie and boast of the greatness of their Leader, or they sincerely believed everything they were telling me. I could not decide which was worse.”
“It was hardly surprising, then, that there were no noteworthy historical artifacts left on this famed mountain, since history itself was an obstacle in bolstering the myth of the Great Leader.”
“But I had never experienced a scene so entirely devoid of noise. By ‘noise,’ I do not mean literal sound, but the noise of life, the evidence of life lived behind closed doors. I saw no running dogs or children, no chimney smoke, no flash of color from a TV set, and this greatly disturbed me, and yet what troubled me more was the fact that I did not know and would never know the truth of what I was seeing.”
“For the first time in my life, thinking was dangerous to my survival.”
“There was something touching about such fraternity, but at the same time, the speed with which they lied was unnerving. It came too naturally to them… I was not sure if, having been told such lies as children, they could not differentiate between truth and lies, or whether it was a survival method they had mastered.”
“They could sense when tides turned because perhaps tides always turned, and no one spoke his mind, and so the only way to survive was to try to outdo one another at mind games.”
“…it occurred to me that it was all futile, the fantasy of Korean unity, the five thousand years of Korean identity, because the unified nation was broken, irreparably, in 1945 when a group of politicians drew a random line across the map, separating families who would die without ever meeting again, with all their sorrow and anger and regret unrequited, their bodies turning to earth, becoming part of this land. On that evening, as a sun the color of mournful pomegranate fell behind the Forever Tower, behind the smoke stack, behind this city, this school, behind the children of the elite who were now my children for a brief time, these lovely, lying children, I saw very clearly that there was no redemption here.”
“That was how we parted, our gazes locked, the students watching from behind glass as we were driven to freedom.”
“Yet another wrote, “During the vacation, I missed your catchword, ‘gentleman,’ and it used to make us amazed but we could read your mind that you wanted us to be gentle in life.””
“Of course, the DPRK purposely infantilized its citizens, making everyone helpless and powerless so that they depended on the state.”
“When I visited either of the two Koreas I always imagined that I was traveling back to my roots and would discover new truths about my past. Now it occurred to me that the past I was seeking had for many years been buried under and overtaken by American and Chinese influences. The Korea of my imagination existed only in paintings, history books, the memories of older generations, and in the remnants that I glimpsed, every now and then, like shards of glass poking out from the buried past.”
“There was really no point in holding a discussion about different kinds of love, since they all agreed that the only real love was the love of the motherland.”
“She popped one in her mouth and said, looking seriously troubled, ‘They say that they want to learn English, but they don’t like us. Their attitude is like ‘Just give us the English we need but don’t step over this way.’ But you can’t expect everything when you give nothing.’ That was the inherent contradiction. This was a nation backed into a corner. They did not want to open up, and yet they had no choice but to move toward engagement if they wanted to survive. They had built the entire foundation of their country on isolationism and wanting to kill Americans and South Koreans, yet they needed to learn English and feed their children with foreign money.”
“A border existed here too. Perhaps here was our greatest fear, the fear of the other.”
“Maybe it was because they had been taught since birth that they were soldiers that I liked to see them express simple joy.”
“I stared across at him and felt a familiar sick feeling. Perhaps this was only the beginning. The questions they would have. The questions they should be asking. The questions they would realize they had not been asking because they did not imagine they could, or because asking meant that they could no longer exist in their system.”
“I vomited up the images of the silent villages alongside the roads, the gaunt faces outside the van window, the Great Leader slogans and the Great Leader songs and the Great Leader portraits that marked every building, every living creature, every hushed breath like a branding iron.”
It's not a perfect book which is sad, because it could have been, maybe by another author. I doubt someone else will get the chance to write about teaching English to North Korea's elite any time soon. The topic is super interesting, the style is solid (some parts are badly "poetic") most of the time, I just felt it was a bit... superficial? I wish it would have gone deeper. Anyway, it was still a fascinating read for anyone interested in North Korea. The last chapter made me cry.
And there is a part where North Korean workers are listening to Simon & Garfunkel in secret that was really great and memorable.
And there is a part where North Korean workers are listening to Simon & Garfunkel in secret that was really great and memorable.
challenging
emotional
tense
slow-paced
✨ Thrifted ✨
Definitely not my favourite book I think I’ve ever read; it was very bitty in parts and boring in others (not because of the content, but the way in which it was written). However, Suki Kim does note that this was to get a rare perspective of a Korean-American person having a teaching career in North Korea. The taboo element did feel thrilling in some parts as well, and so I applaud her effort! 👏🏼
The missionary presence at this university also shook me up 😳
3.5 out of 5 stars for me ✨ Thank you!
Definitely not my favourite book I think I’ve ever read; it was very bitty in parts and boring in others (not because of the content, but the way in which it was written). However, Suki Kim does note that this was to get a rare perspective of a Korean-American person having a teaching career in North Korea. The taboo element did feel thrilling in some parts as well, and so I applaud her effort! 👏🏼
The missionary presence at this university also shook me up 😳
3.5 out of 5 stars for me ✨ Thank you!
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racism, Violence, Religious bigotry
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Ver un k-drama sobre las relaciones entre las dos Coreas me ha traído hasta aquí. Aunque todo el relato es interesante, me ha faltado algo al final.
medium-paced
Super disappointed in this book. Too much memoir, not enough reportage. Cest la vie.
I met the author, Suki Kim, at an event in Seattle several years ago. After purchasing the book and having her sign it I was sure I'd run home and read it. I didn't. Then like books not immediately consumed it languished on my book shelf for many years waiting for me to finally get to it.
I surprised myself by how much I remembered about her North Korea story from the talk I attended. What I wasn't prepared for was how the details all ran together in their sameness. Kim commented several times that life in N. Korea is so bleak and every day is the same. I had thought that I would see a bit of hope for the poor people trapped living in the regime. But I fear that their brain-washing is complete and even if the country were to open up today, they would not be able to find their way out.
My review: https://headfullofbooks.blogspot.com/2021/11/nonfiction-review-without-you-there-is.html
I surprised myself by how much I remembered about her North Korea story from the talk I attended. What I wasn't prepared for was how the details all ran together in their sameness. Kim commented several times that life in N. Korea is so bleak and every day is the same. I had thought that I would see a bit of hope for the poor people trapped living in the regime. But I fear that their brain-washing is complete and even if the country were to open up today, they would not be able to find their way out.
My review: https://headfullofbooks.blogspot.com/2021/11/nonfiction-review-without-you-there-is.html
emotional
informative
sad
medium-paced
This is one of those books that I feel strange saying that I “enjoyed” it because the content is pretty heavy. The author writes about her time in North Korea, teaching English to students at an all-male school in Pyongyang. It’s a fairly straightforward account, as she writes about missing her life (and her freedom) in New York, the general cultural shock that she experiences, the tension between herself and fellow teachers, and of course, her time teaching students of the North Korean elite.
I think that she does a great job of focusing on each aspect of her story. One enormous challenge she had was with her coworkers who were evangelical missionaries and assumed and didn’t know or possibly didn’t care that she did not share their faith. Frequent conflicts arise that further complicate her already difficult work.
In addition to her somewhat isolated situation because she doesn’t share her coworkers’ faith/ideas, she struggles with what they all do: homesickness, cultural shock, fear and anxiety, and of course the frustrations that any teachers have. Yet she does make a genuine connection with her students and the care that she develops for them is heartwarming but also heartbreaking because of her inevitable departure.
I do feel that overall this was pretty surface level writing but I also think that it’s her story to tell and she gets to tell what she wants to and how deep she wants to go.
I think that she does a great job of focusing on each aspect of her story. One enormous challenge she had was with her coworkers who were evangelical missionaries and assumed and didn’t know or possibly didn’t care that she did not share their faith. Frequent conflicts arise that further complicate her already difficult work.
In addition to her somewhat isolated situation because she doesn’t share her coworkers’ faith/ideas, she struggles with what they all do: homesickness, cultural shock, fear and anxiety, and of course the frustrations that any teachers have. Yet she does make a genuine connection with her students and the care that she develops for them is heartwarming but also heartbreaking because of her inevitable departure.
I do feel that overall this was pretty surface level writing but I also think that it’s her story to tell and she gets to tell what she wants to and how deep she wants to go.