![Without You, There Is No Us](https://d3525k1ryd2155.cloudfront.net/h/644/099/1602099644.0.m.jpg)
Without You, There Is No Us
by Suki Kim
- Used
- Good
- Paperback
- Condition
- Good
- ISBN 10
- 0307720667
- ISBN 13
- 9780307720665
- Seller
-
Missoula, Montana, United States
Payment Methods Accepted
About This Item
Every day, three times a day, the students march in two straight lines, singing praises to Kim Jong-il and North Korea: Without you, there is no motherland. Without you, there is no us. It is a chilling scene, but gradually Suki Kim, too, learns the tune and, without noticing, begins to hum it. It is 2011, and all universities in North Korea have been shut down for an entire year, the students sent to construction fields except for the 270 students at the all-male Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST), a walled compound where portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il look on impassively from the walls of every room, and where Suki has gone undercover as a missionary and a teacher. Over the next six months, she will eat three meals a day with her young charges and struggle to teach them English, all under the watchful eye of the regime.
Life at PUST is lonely and claustrophobic, especially for Suki, whose letters are read by censors and who must hide her notes and photographs not only from her minders but from her colleagues evangelical Christian missionaries who don't know or choose to ignore that Suki doesn't share their faith. As the weeks pass, she is mystified by how easily her students lie, unnerved by their obedience to the regime. At the same time, they offer Suki tantalizing glimpses of their private selves their boyish enthusiasm, their eagerness to please, the flashes of curiosity that have not yet been extinguished. She in turn begins to hint at the existence of a world beyond their own at such exotic activities as surfing the Internet or traveling freely and, more dangerously, at electoral democracy and other ideas forbidden in a country where defectors risk torture and execution. But when Kim Jong-il dies, and the boys she has come to love appear devastated, she wonders whether the gulf between her world and theirs can ever be bridged.
Synopsis
Suki Kim was born in Seoul and moved to the United States at the age of thirteen. She is the author of the award-winning novel The Interpreter and the recipient of a Guggenheim, a Fulbright, and an Open Society fellowship. She has been traveling to North Korea as a journalist since 2002, writing essays and articles for the New York Times , Harper's , and the New York Review of Books .
Reviews
(Log in or Create an Account first!)
Details
- Bookseller
- The Vespiary Book Restoration & Bindery
(US)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- SQ9580384
- Title
- Without You, There Is No Us
- Author
- Suki Kim
- Book Condition
- Used - Good
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Binding
- Paperback
- ISBN 10
- 0307720667
- ISBN 13
- 9780307720665
- Publisher
- Broadway Books
- Date Published
- 2015-10
- Keywords
- north korea
- Bookseller catalogs
- History;