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Without You, There Is No Us
Suki Kim
Crown
October 2014
On Sale: October 14, 2014
304 pages
ISBN: 0307720659
EAN: 9780307720658
Kindle: B00JTC9QBO
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
A haunting memoir 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 accepted a job teaching English.
Over the next six months, she will eat three meals a day
with her young charges and struggle to teach them to write,
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 and slaves."
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