I had heard about Without You, There Is No Us (#495) by Suki Kim in my library book group. Her subtitle - My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite - A Memoir gives you an excellent idea of the topic of this non-fiction work. It is, in fact, a rare glimpse of how the future leaders of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea are being educated, as this time period covers the last remaining months of Kim Jong-Il's life when the students of Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST) are basically in a holding pattern, even though almost no-one on campus is aware of that fact.
Suki Kim was born in Korea and both sides of her family experienced great losses when the country was divided following the Korean War. Brought to the United States as a young girl, Ms. Kim seems to have never settled down completely anywhere, although she is constantly driven back to both North and South Korea. She seems to have fallen into the profession of journalism, and found herself in Pyongyang covering the New York Philharmonic's concert there some years ago. She had already been to Pyongyang a number of times herself, and she is amazed by what the Western journalists believe are "ordinary" North Korean families encountered in staged interviews, and that they cannot see that they are being fed a strict diet of DPRK propaganda. Of course, she does point out that she was the only journalist on this publicity junket who actually spoke Korean herself, so it was no wonder that all the other journalists were missing the big picture. It was at a reception on this trip that Ms. Kim met one of the benefactors who told her that PUST would be operating with an English-speaking faculty of Christian missionaries and that they were currently seeking teachers. Ms. Kim immediately applied for a job at PUST herself, with the idea of doing some clandestine journalistic reporting. After two semesters of teaching at PUST, Without You, There Is No Us is the result.
The cover blurbs mention, "haunting", "lyrical" writing and a vision of North Korean life unlike any other. That is certainly true, and much of it was both fascinating and appalling. Ms. Kim was assigned to teach both the highest-ranked English speakers at this new university, and the lowest-ranked group in a society that lives and dies by its ranking. She is disturbed by the ease with which these "beautiful" young "gentlemen" lie to her, to each and to themselves as they are deceived and manipulated by the DPRK infrastructure. What she fails to see is that she is every bit as deceiving, manipulative and lying to everyone around her. She obtains her post in a Christian college by omitting the fact that she has no faith herself, lest it eliminate her chances of landing the position. She is contemptuous of the very people who made her prolonged visit to North Korea possible, and mocks their zeal for what they perceive to be their mission. Worse, she cannot even recognize that she came with her own missionary agenda: to open her students' eyes to the world beyond North Korea by dropping ever more obvious heavy-handed hints about forbidden topics - the Internet, Google and Mark Zuckerberg, to mention just a few.
She knew that such references were dangerous not just for her, but for her students and the other teachers at PUST as well. With such a reliance on Google, you would have thought she would have bothered to do even the tiniest bit of research on the faculty at PUST so she would have an idea what these Christian missionaries' thoughts and beliefs were so she could blend in better and not stir up a dangerous brew. Instead, she explodes in righteous indignation when one of the other teachers approaches her about violating a taboo.
It made me angry that despite what she claimed was her love for her students, she regarded
their safety so little that she purposely created pitfalls for them in her teaching. But of course, only she understood them. I think this memoir would have been much more aptly named Without You, There Is No Me.
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