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

by Suki Kim

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

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

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. Like Katie, I could not shake off the hurt of a bad relationship, and instead sat brooding with that pain for years. Yet, 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.

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.