Without You, There Is No Us: My secret life teaching the sons of North Korea’s elite

by Suki Kim

When you are shut off from the world, every day is exactly the same as the one before. This sameness has a way of wearing down your soul until you become nothing but a breathing, toiling, consuming thing that awakes to the sun and sleeps at the dawning of the dark. The emptiness runs deep, deeper with each slowing day, and you become increasingly invisible and inconsequential.

Such is the condition of a first-generation immigrant for whom everything is separated into now and then, into before the move and after. The ocean that separates the adoptive home and the old country also divides time.

Some experiences are like that. You live through them, and yet you aren’t quite there.

It occurred to me then that everyone’s threshold for pain is different. For some, the end of a romance is devastating enough to make them turn to religion for refuge. For others, it is simply a cautionary tale, something to keep in mind for future loves.

now that I found myself so far from home, it was hard to understand why I had stayed unhappy for so long. Sometimes the longer you are inside a prison, the harder it is to fathom what is possible beyond its walls.

If only it had pulled out right then and there … There it is again, the mantra “if only.” I am always made aware of the alternative universe where things turned out differently, in which lives were saved. I am used to the mantra. For immigrants, regret can become a way of life.

And the storytelling continues as I type these words here in New York, in a language alien to those who lived through the division, a language that shields me from the worst of my grief. For even now, decades after I first adopted it, English does not pierce my heart the same way that my mother tongue does. The word division weighs less than bundan, and war is easier to say than junjeng.

It takes tremendous energy to censor yourself all the time, to have to, in a sense, continually lie.

no real believer would be interested in a nonbeliever for a mate.

The constant surveillance by the counterparts and the minders evoked fear in us. We knew that the consequences were unthinkable, so we did what we were told. We accepted our situation meekly. How quickly we became prisoners, how quickly we gave up our freedom, how quickly we tolerated the loss of that freedom, like a child being abused, in silence. In this world, there were no individual demands, and asking permission for everything was infantilizing. So we began to understand our students, who had never been able to do anything on their own. The notion of following your heart’s desire, of going wherever you chose, did not exist here, and I did not see any way to let them know what it felt like, especially since, after so little time in their system, I had lost my own sense of freedom.

The nationalism that had been instilled in them for so many generations had produced a citizenry whose ego was so fragile that they refused to acknowledge the rest of the world.

THANKSGIVING WAS COMING, and the news at home, according to CNN Asia, was the rising candidacy of Herman Cain, followed by accusations of sexual harassment. One of the headlines read: “God told me to run for President.” This was familiar to me. When I asked the other teachers why they had come to PUST, each of them had a similar answer. “God brought me here.” When I asked how much longer they would be here, many answered, “For however long God wants me here. He knows everything. He will decide.” This reminded me of Ruth’s claim that the Lord has his designs, and that the sufferings of North Koreans were a temporary stage on the way to heaven. Gulags, then, served a purpose in the name of Jesus, much the way my students were taught to follow their Great Leader despite the famine, or rather because of the famine, which was reinterpreted as a form of martyrdom necessary to the building of a “powerful and prosperous nation.” Thus, the Arduous March became a rite of passage that helped unite them against an outside world that demonized them.