The modern dystopia of North Korea is a mystery to many with its strictly enforced lockdown of travel and information, with threats of prison, torture and death hanging over the heads of those who step out of line. But some investigative journalists risk their lives and freedom to discover the reality of life in the rogue state—such as Suki Kim, who visited UW last week to talk about her experience posing as a teacher of North Korea’s elite young men in 2011.
The event is part of “Exploring Hemingway,” a series of events featuring prominent writers and their stories as made possible by a grant to Sheridan College in partnership with organizations including the Wyoming Humanities Council and the Ucross Foundation that will extend into coming years.
Kim, now considered an enemy of the state by North Korea, spent six months undercover as “the sole writer disguised as a missionary, disguised as a teacher” among other missionary-teachers teaching English at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, a “prison disguised as a campus.”
Her book, “Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea’s Elite,” describes her thoughts, experiences, and the relationships she built with the young men who will be one day be North Korea’s leaders—under the Great Leader, of course. It was the product of notes hidden within lesson plans and on flashdrives hidden on her person, in danger of discovery by the “minders” who constantly watched the teachers.
Kim began her presentation at the UW College of Law by playing one of North Korea’s most popular songs for her audience—“No Motherland Without You,” a chorus of many voices singing praise to the late Kim Jong-un as the foundation of their society, on which she based her book’s title.
“It played so much when I was there that I actually know it by heart,” Kim said. “It’s a world where there is really only one person, as a symbol of the Great Leader. The whole country is, two things: run by the Great Leader, about the Great Leader. Also another thing that is at the foundation of North Korea is the hatred of the United States.”
To illustrate the context of North Korea’s past, Kim shared an open secret of history. While many people might think of Korea’s division as dating back to the Korean War, she said, Korea was initially divided between the Soviet Union and the US, just as Germany was, after the defeat of Japan.
The Korean Peninsula of today, and the starkly different circumstances of its people, is a result of the circumstances established by the end of World War II—and made to last by the Korean War.
Kim showed a recent satellite photo of the region, comparing the brightly lit South Korea to the dark void of North Korea, with the lights of China further on. South Korea is among the richest nations in Asia and in the world, Kim said, speaking of its highly developed culture and industry with byproducts such as K-pop and Gangnam Style becoming hits around the world.
“It’s the opposite, it’s uber-capitalism,” Kim said. “And then you have North Korea, there’s just nothing there. …To maintain that, now? What that needs is control, and censorship.”
Kim first entered North Korea in 2002 posing as a loyalist to attend the 60th birthday of Kim Jong-il
“I grew up with this family that was separated by the war,” Kim said. “I wanted to understand why this is happening. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into, that time. As a writer, I wanted to understand it. As a Korean, I wanted to understand.”
She arrived in a country that had lost a tenth of its population, millions of people, to a famine in prior years.
“The human rights violation in North Korea is actually the worst in the world,” Kim said. “You can’t go anywhere on your own, but you can’t really write about it, because there is no journalistic evidence. You realize this kind of society is only possible when a generation has been killed off.”
With tightly restricted information and no freedom to move about, under complete government surveillance and control, it’s impossible for people to rise up and change anything, Kim said—especially because education is so focused on emphasizing the importance of the Great Leader and the people’s duty to their society.
“North Koreans are very, very busy, because it’s a collective society,” Kim said. “So there’s no time to think.”
Her own students were kept busy from when they rose in the morning until their return to their beds. After six months of slowly uncovering details about their lives and getting them to open up (often by slips of the tongue), Kim became close to her students—but they were unable to say goodbye at the airport because their schedules were so strict that they could not take time off to act on their own.
After her main talk, Kim answered questions from the audience pertaining to life in North Korea and her own personal experience, and signed copies of her book.
Kim was born in South Korea and has lived in the US as a novelist and journalist, and is currently a contributing editor of “The New Republic” magazine. She recently concluded a third stay at the Ucross Foundation as part of its residency program, in which competitively selected artists are hosted for two to six weeks and given uninterrupted time to think and create on Wyoming’s High Plains.
