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

by Suki Kim

BACK IN MY room, I felt agitated knowing that my journalist friend was at PUST, most likely housed in the teachers’ dormitory, where guests were always put up. But it did not matter. There was no way to communicate. I could not tell him anything that was going on with me, and he could not tell me any of his news. In this system, we simply were not allowed to know each other. He would most likely be here for a few days and leave. He would see what he was allowed to observe, and get out when he was told to leave, and write about the designated sliver that the regime had permitted him to see. It would not be anything close to the truth of this place, and he would know that, but he would be helpless to find out more. None of that had any bearing on my daily life, and it was strange how quickly I could put the thought out of my mind. His presence was irrelevant because, for the moment, we belonged in different worlds. This realization was alarming. It felt like a taste of how my students viewed me, or of what might have been behind the vacant gazes of Pyongyang citizens. A foreign visitor could never penetrate their world, let alone appease their suffering. No one ever deviated from the script.