Without You, There is No Us by Suki Kim (Broadway Books)

Imagine being “in a prison disguised as a campus,” constantly under guard and on guard, in the company of “thirty missionaries disguised as teachers,“ as “a writer disguised as a missionary disguised as a teacher.” Imagine living without freedom of movement, without the ability to call friends and family, without writing uncensored letters or emails, without heat in the winter or the privacy that comes with closing a bedroom door and knowing there is no surveillance waiting there. Imagine living this way for almost five months, teaching young men from the highest social class of their nation who have never used the Internet, rarely leave the campus and then only under tight supervision, who have been trained all of their lives to be unswerving soldiers in the service of their revered leader.

Suki Kim chooses this. Her life has been shadowed by North Korea from the time she can first remember. Living in Seoul until her family came to the US when she was fifteen, she grows up hearing stories of her mother’s older brother who was captured and taken to the north when the country was first divided and about her father’s teenage cousins, young nursing students who disappeared during the war and were never seen again. Division and separation is a common thread that is always present; unification of the country is a prevailing hope among Kim’s family and other members of the Korean diaspora. 

Kim comes to adulthood with a feeling of homelessness, one that oddly disappears during her initial visits to the capital of North Korea, Pyongyang. From the privileged, cushioned viewpoint of being part of a delegation and then as a journalist, Kim is comforted by the “sense of recognition” that she finds there, the feeling that she’s in touch with her past. When she’s given the opportunity in 2011 to teach English in Pyongyang, at a university recently established by Korean evangelical Christians, she grabs it.

Kim enters as the spy that her employers and the North Korean government vigilantly guard themselves against. Gathering material for a book is her goal and she comes equipped with unobtrusive, easily concealed thumb drives on which she puts her notes. To her colleagues, she’s a good Christian girl and Kim, through the way she dresses and the way she speaks, maintains that illusion. Even when she encounters a man who had been her guide when she had come to Pyongyang as a journalist, even when a reporter she had worked with shows up at the university on assignment and immediately recognizes her, even when the man she is in love with writes indiscreetly in his letters to her, Kim remains undetected.

What makes her dangerous charade bearable is her students.  She falls in love with them all, while always being aware that she must watch every word she speaks to them. Any deviation from the curriculum approved by “the counterparts,” English-speaking academics who scrutinize her lesson plans, can open cracks in the wall of isolation that’s been imposed on these young men and could possibly endanger their futures. Even the idea of showing a Harry Potter movie, something they’ve all heard of but have never come in contact with, is shot down as a danger, not by the counterparts but by the missionaries and  Kim comes to realize that slavish devotion to the Leader is quite similar to her fellow-teachers’ devotion to God.

“They’re beautiful” is her first impression of her students, which is rapidly followed by learning they’re all talented and well-practiced liars. They tell her about one man who managed to hack his university’s computer system and raised his grades in all of his courses. When this was discovered by the authorities, the student wasn’t disgraced  for his dishonesty but was rewarded for his expertise.

The Leader dies unexpectedly at the end of the semester when Kim is on the verge of going home. Overnight her students are transformed from begging her to return to ignoring that she’s still there. In their grief and uncertainty about the future, they’ve erased her--but she will soon betray them. Even though she’s changed their names in her stories about them, the confidences they have written to her in class assignments and that she discloses may well ruin their lives. Her book is both a horror thriller and a love story that ends badly, with Kim as the villain in the relationship. She’s the one who has cheated--and quite possibly has been destructive--for her own benefit, to advance her career.~Janet Brown