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

by Suki Kim

That’s how I felt at times, a tiny insect circling itself, only to continue, and continue.

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

You know that the missing are there, just a few hours away, but you cannot see them or write to them or call them.

Sometimes the longer you are inside a prison, the harder it is to fathom what is possible beyond its walls.

Later I would wonder if it was decided in that moment that I would fall in love with them. We need to feel needed. We love the ones who want us.

For those of her generation who lost somebody, life is forever divided between before that day and after.

For immigrants, regret can become a way of life.

The entire country was like a linguistic and cultural Galápagos.

men were required to serve in the military for ten years, starting at seventeen,

Then I looked at the other two at the table. Suddenly I did not trust any of them. These moments of doubt were like poison.

I felt like a mother terrified of her own children, an extremely ugly feeling.

But there were some evenings when I did not want to play this guessing game, when my disappointment was so profound that I chose to sit with the students whose English was the poorest so that they would be less likely to lie to me.

Of course, the DPRK purposely infantilized its citizens, making everyone helpless and powerless so that they depended on the state.

They had built the entire foundation of their country on isolationism and wanting to kill Americans and South Koreans, yet they needed to learn English and feed their children with foreign money.

Being in North Korea was profoundly depressing. There was no other way of putting it. The sealed border was not just at the 38th parallel, but everywhere, in each person’s heart, blocking the past and choking off the future. As much as I loved those boys, or because of it, I was becoming convinced that the wall between us was impossible to break down, and not only that, it was permanent.

This unexpected chance to join the Harry Potter bandwagon made them feel included in a world that had always been denied to them.

In a country where the government invents its own truth, how could they be expected to do otherwise?