Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Review of Without You, There Is No Us by Suki Kim


Without You, There is No Us by Suki Kim
Publisher: Crown Publishers
Publication Date: October 14, 2014
Length: 285 pages
Source: My own copy

Without You, There Is No Us is journalist/novelist Suki Kim’s interesting memoir about the year she spent teaching at a college in North Korea. North Korea, of course, is one of the most closed societies of modern times, and Kim’s book sheds light on the strangeness of that world under dictator Kim Jong-il. Without You . . . is a fascinating and intensely personal account of life in an intimidating and repressive regime.

Kim, who was born in South Korea but moved to the US as a young teen, posed as a Christian missionary in order to get a job teaching at the all-male Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST). During most of the year 2011, Kim taught English to the privileged sons of the North Korean upper class—young men likely to become the future leaders of the country.

As a teacher at PUST, Kim had the deeply disorienting experience of giving up her own personal freedoms. She was kept a virtual prisoner on the university grounds, with her movement on and off campus tightly controlled, for example. Kim had to provide each lesson plan for review, and felt under constant surveillance by the “minders” provided by the regime. At the same time, Kim kept up the charade that she was an evangelical Christian, because PUST is funded, in large part, by Korean-American Christian churches. Kim operated, in a sense, like a spy, secretly taking notes for this book and hoping that no one—either the North Koreans or the missionaries at PUST—would unmask her true identity as a journalist.

Kim found her young North Korean students to be bright and enthusiastic, and yet oddly uninterested in learning about life outside of their own country. The students had been brainwashed all of their young lives into believing that North Korea was the best and most powerful nation in the world. At a university for science and technology, these students were unaware of the Internet—and Kim, frustratingly, was not allowed to tell them. It is sobering, indeed, to think of these young men as the future of North Korea. They seem quite unlikely to question the regime or stage protests for democracy, as young people have done in other regions of the world.

Kim’s book will no doubt anger the regime of Kim Jong Un, the son of Kim Jong-il and the current leader of North Korea, as well as the leadership of PUST. Kim changed the names of PUST staff and students so that they would not suffer reprisals from the regime. She notes that, although her book will cause waves in North Korea, she felt obligated “to tell the stark truth” about what she witnessed, “in the hopes that the lives of average North Koreans, including my beloved students, will one day improve.”

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Without You, There Is No Us. As a reader very interested in the topic, I would have appreciated a bit more background on PUST itself and its funders, as well as, perhaps, a chapter at the end of the book with Kim’s thoughts on the new leader of the North Korea, Kim Jong Un. Nevertheless, this is an unsettling and powerful account of life in a frightening and restrictive world, and I do recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about North Korea.

12 comments:

  1. This sounds fascinating! I've had another book about North Korea, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick, on my wish list for some time. The combination might make for an interesting nonfiction project.

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    1. I haven't read Demick's book, but it does sound like it would be a perfect complement to this one! Hmm . . . maybe a project to suggest for Nonfiction November.

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    2. Nothing to Envy is great; just disregard her summary of pre WWII/Korean War Korean history, because it's kind of.....not totally on the mark.

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    3. Thanks, Katherine! I'll keep that in mind.

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  2. I'm kicking myself for not remembering where I heard about this one recently but I'm glad you reviewed it as it's fresh on my mind. I don't know very much about North Korea and this and Nothing to Envy sound great starts to learning more.

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  3. My one and only nonfiction read this year! HA--yay, ME! Well, the month is still young . . . maybe with Nonfiction November, I will get a few more nonfiction titles read for the year.

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  4. I liked this one a lot too...but also felt it posed more questions than it answered (but, probably the best you're going to get when covering such a closed regime). I'm also curious to learn more about the lives of those emaciated people she kept seeing on the side of the road (and just regular North Koreans as opposed to the sons of the elite)...I'm thinking of reading Escape from Camp 14, the story of a defector from one of the NK labor camps.

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    1. Yeah, it might have added to the book to have some more background on the North Korea people, the political situation, etc.--I would have liked that. But then, maybe Kim felt she wanted this book to be strictly a memoir of what she personally experienced.

      Escape from Camp 14 sounds really interesting! Maybe you could put together a list of other reading on North Korea for next week's Nonfiction November topic...?

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  5. I literally just finished this book an hour ago!
    This subject is especially timely due to the news of the release and return home of two prisoners from North Korea today.I knew virtually nothing about North Korea before I read this book, and I have a lot more questions than answers now. I suppose that's to be expected given the nature of the information (or lack of it) that comes out of North Korea.
    I liked this book, but I felt that the references to the author's "lover" back home were a distraction from the rest of the book--however, I thought it was a great portrayal of a completely foreign environment. The lonliness and desolation are almost unimaginable!

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    1. Oh, yes, so timely! Yeah, I think this book is very specific to Kim's experience, and for any of us who want to learn more about North Korea, we'll need to read some other titles as well. But it certainly gives the reader a great sense of that isolation and being under constant surveillance that people must feel under this repressive regime.

      I totally agree that the references to the author's "lover" were . . odd. I'm not sure how that was supposed to fit into the broader topic!

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  6. I have been wanting to read this book -- I recently read Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son (fiction), which really piqued my interest in North Korea.

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    1. Well, you should give this one a try, then! I would now like to read some additional nonfiction books about North Korea.

      I still haven't read The Orphan Master's Son, although I have a copy of it. One of these days . . . !

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