Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

by Suki Kim

“If you keep moving like this, one day you’ll be too far away to come back.”

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

Fighting off pangs of loneliness and fear, I got up and switched on the kettle, which I had bought in Beijing, and looked for coffee in my suitcase. Over there, coffee will feel like currency, someone had told me, and this was true. I am not loyal to any brand, but in my dormitory at PUST, my Breakfast Blend coffee from Trader Joe’s felt like a true luxury, the mark of capitalism, a reminder of the outside world. I added a few drops of the long-lasting milk I had brought with me, which had a pungent, synthetic taste I would never get used to. So I stood there, with my first morning coffee in Pyongyang, looking out at the bleak, unknowable buildings. I felt as far away from everything I knew as if I had been erased overnight.

I remembered those few drifting years after college, taking off alone with a backpack to explore the world. I thought I was playing a dare with life then, challenging my limits, but I was scared most of the time and wept for no clear reason in dingy hostel rooms across Europe and Central America.

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.

But I was a writer. I believed in words, even if they only masked the uncertainty of time passing.

tradition is not well suited for globalization.

in my new world of America, one reinvents oneself constantly, which is a certain kind of privilege.

When nothing can be expressed openly, you become quite good at interpreting silence. And I read theirs as they read mine.

“I FEEL LIKE THE DAYS ARE JUST ABOUT WAITING,”

Remember you are one person to the world but to me you are the world.”

A foreign visitor could never penetrate their world, let alone appease their suffering.