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."Įrnest Hemingway Foundation Award - Nominee 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. 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 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. It is a chilling scene, but gradually Suki Kim, too, learns the tune and, without noticing, begins to hum it. "Chilling…reminds us that evil is not only banal it is also completely arbitrary."Ī haunting account of teaching English to the sons of North Korea's ruling class during the last six months of Kim Jong-il's reign.Įvery 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: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea’s Elite
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