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

by Suki Kim

When you lose your home at a young age, you spend your life looking for its replacement.

the United States and the Soviet Union, who together liberated Korea only to carve it up as a proxy for the Cold War.

I have looked up black-and-white pictures of Seoul from that day, faded evidence of refugees who could be from any Asian country fleeing any war.

It was at moments like these that I could not help but think that they—my beloved students—were insane. Either they were so terrified that they felt compelled to lie and boast of the greatness of their Leader, or they sincerely believed everything they were telling me. I could not decide which was worse.

Their grades weren’t the only thing that would save them, but they were the only thing under their control.

He said that he just could not figure it out. “A coffin,” I told him the next day. He then wrote to me in his letter, “Frankly, I did not know that an answer to this riddle would be on the Internet, and on the occasion of that answer, I realized how useful the Internet was.”

THE SAME RAIN FELL HERE as anywhere else, and that seemed wondrous to me, and I remembered the monsoon in Seoul, and for the first time I even missed it.

My thoughts were the only thing I could claim as my own, and they circled in my head all day long until I wrote them down.

A border existed here too. Perhaps here was our greatest fear, the fear of the other.

The rest of the time, the commentators exhausted every glorifying adjective to describe Kim Jongil, who was “so great” and “very great” and “the greatest.”

All of us had become paranoid, for good reason. But human beings are resilient, and also forgetful.

and after a month even a prison feels like home at times.

In both North and South Korea, in the late fall, most families make enough kimchi to last through the winter. This tradition originated more than a thousand years ago, when vegetables were not readily available year round.

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.

Their entire system was designed not to be questioned, and to squash critical thinking.

The questions they would realize they had not been asking because they did not imagine they could, or because asking meant that they could no longer exist in their system.

“But we never do it at the ones in Pyongyang, since then everyone needs a special permit to enter there,” he added. This was the first time I’d heard a student mention any restrictions on travel.

Everything was designed to subjugate you and seize your will.

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