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Dec 13, 202310 min read

Suki Kim - the South Korean undercover in North Korea

Without you there is no us

Suki Kim is a South Korean investigative journalist, novelist, and essayist with American citizenship living in New York. She traveled to Pyongyang for the first time in 2002, joining a group loyal to Kim Jong-Il and writing about it for a New York Review of Books cover story. In 2011, she lived in North Korea undercover among the country's future leaders during the final year of Kim Jong-Il’s reign.

Undercover in North Korea

Suki Kim told BBC Mundo about her experience, something that few foreigners have been able to experience in the last 70 years of North Korea's isolation:

"My interest in North Korea comes from a combination of two reasons. As a journalist, I was frustrated at not knowing the truth about what happens in that place, which is a huge tragedy. The second is that my family was separated by the War of Korea in 1950. That war and the subsequent division of the peninsula separated millions of Koreans. My uncle, my mother's brother, stayed in the north, and my grandmother never saw him again. The same happened with my father's cousins ".

Her book Without You, there is no Us: Undercover among North Korea's elite children is an unprecedented literary documentation of the world's most secretive Gulag nation. Gulag was a system of concentration camps in the Soviet Union where political prisoners suffered violence, torture, and abuse of all types, in addition to being forced to work in sub-human conditions. This system reached its peak during the government of dictator Joseph Stalin.

Kim got a job at the newly opened Pyongyang University for Science and Technology (PUST), the only private university in North Korea, attended by male children of North Korean leaders. PUST was founded by evangelical groups from several countries. Its employees are mainly American teachers who are there as volunteers, financed by their churches. Kim was hired to teach English for a period of six months. North Korea is full of paradoxes. This university is one of them.

What country is this?

North Korea is a country with a population of about 25 million people, located in the north of the Korean Peninsula between the East Sea (Sea of Japan) and the Yellow Sea. It is a highly secretive communist state that remains isolated from most of the world.

In 1910, Japan formally annexed the Korean Peninsula, which it had occupied for five years after the Russo-Japanese War, between 1904 and 1905. During 35 years of colonial rule, Koreans suffered brutal repression at the hands of Japan's military regime. During the Second World War, Japan sent many Koreans to the front as soldiers or forced them to work in war equipment factories. Thousands of young Korean women became "comfort women", providing sexual services to Japanese soldiers.

After the defeat of Japan in 1945, the United States and the Soviet Union divided the peninsula into two zones of influence along the 38th Parallel, or 38 degrees north latitude. In 1948, pro-US South Korea was established in Seoul, led by the strongly anti-communist Syngman Rhee. At the end of World War II, Kim II Sung was chosen by Stalin to lead North Korea.

"Students are treated like soldiers. They exercise in groups, run in groups, every hour they go out to march in groups to honor the Great Leader, and they are constantly indoctrinated about the Great Leader's greatness and hatred of the United States. I arrived to feel great affection for my students, who seemed much more innocent than other 20-year-olds in other parts of the world. They were adorable, energetic, and curious. Typical students of that age who make jokes all the time. This human aspect is a huge contrast with the lifestyle that is imposed on them and to which they are continually exposed".

The Korean War

In 1950, with the support of the Soviet Union and China, North Korean forces invaded South Korea, starting the Korean War. The United States entered the war leading an army of about 340,000 United Nations troops. In July 1953, with more than 2.5 million military and civilian casualties, both sides signed an armistice.

The agreement left the borders of North and South Korea unchanged, with a heavily guarded demilitarized zone about four kilometers wide along the 38th Parallel. A formal peace treaty, however, was never signed.

The Kim dynasty

Kim Il Sung – After the Korean War, Kim Il Sung shaped his country according to the nationalist ideology of Juche (self-reliance). The state took tight control over the economy, collectivized agricultural land, and established private property. State-controlled media and restrictions on all travel into or out of the country have helped preserve the veil of secrecy surrounding North Korea's political and economic operations. With Soviet support, Kim transformed his military into one of the strongest in the world, even as economic growth stagnated during the 1980s.

"We must remember that they are young elites, but that the rest of the population lives under the same control. There were occasions, on Sundays, when we were allowed to go out in groups and with escorts on excursions that had been previously approved, including to visit and place flowers in buildings belonging to the Great Leader. Sometimes we would leave Pyongyang to visit the Great Mountains or some farm. Outside the capital you do not see many things. The roads are empty, there are no cars on the streets. The people we were with allowed to interact, like the students, they looked like us. But the people you see on the sides of the roads are markedly smaller and seem malnourished. We were never allowed to talk to anyone in the streets.

Kim Jong-Il - the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc damaged North Korea's economy and China became its only ally. In 1994, Kim Il Sung died of a heart attack and was succeeded by his son, Kim Jong-Il. The new leader instituted a new policy, establishing the Korean People's Army as the country's main political and economic force.

The new policy widened existing inequalities between the military and elite classes and most ordinary North Korean citizens. During the 1990s, widespread flooding, poor agricultural policies and economic mismanagement led to a period of prolonged famine, with hundreds of thousands dead and many crippled by malnutrition. The emergence of a robust illegal market to meet these shortages would force the government to take steps to liberalize the state economy.

Kim Jong Un – in December 2011, the position of supreme leader went to Kim Jong Un, the second youngest of Kim Jong Il's seven children who died from a heart attack. Kim Jong Un has taken steps to consolidate power, ordering the execution of his own uncle and other political and military rivals. Kim's government also continued work on its nuclear arsenal, further straining his country's relations with the West.

"The places they took us to looked like movie sets and there were never people in those places. We only saw the other members of the group and, everywhere, every place was covered with thousands of slogans of the Great Leader. This is the reality they show . The control in the country is extraordinarily strong. They control every aspect of life, and everything is related to the Great Leader. After all the research I had done on North Korea, I had never imagined that such great control could exist. The reality It is worse than you can imagine.

War against the United States?

In 2013, a third nuclear test resulted in trade and travel sanctions from the UN Security Council, as well as a formal protest from China, North Korea's only major ally and main trading partner. In 2017, tensions between North Korea and the United States reached an unprecedented level. The North Koreans launched their first intercontinental ballistic missile with force to hit the continental United States.

It threatened to launch missiles near the US territory of Guam and tested a bomb seven times larger than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Such actions provoked even tougher sanctions from the UN Security Council and an aggressive response from US President Donald Trump, leaving the global community fearing the possibility of nuclear war.

"Religion is not allowed here and proselytism (catechesis, apostolate) is a very serious crime, punishable by death. The only one who is venerated in the country is the Great Leader. But the evangelical community made an agreement with the government: it would fund university and not proselytize - despite it being obvious that this was the long-term goal. Thus, fundamentalist evangelical groups are financing the education of the country's future leaders in exchange for a potential long-term missionary purpose."

Do North Koreans think about what lies beyond their borders?

For a decade, Suki Kim conducted extensive research on the country. She spoke to nearly a hundred defectors in China, Mongolia, Thailand, and Laos. She entered North Korea for short periods, but what she was looking for was the possibility of living there, incognito.

She ensures that young North Koreans are not allowed to express any curiosity about the outside world. This, for her, is a type of psychological abuse that conditions citizens to accept what surrounds them without question. All the people's routine and entertainment work to honor the regime and the philosophy of the system.

"The government has to approve everything that happens at the university. They select the students, who are mainly children of ruling party officials. In North Korea, the government decides everything about the individual: the career they will pursue, the school they will attend, the activities they will do. When I was there, there were 270 students, all men who lived on campus. I taught English to two classes, with around 50 students aged 19 and 20 each. The university is guarded by the military, and no one has permission to leave. The government defines escorts who live with professors on campus and their job is to monitor them 24 hours a day. I had an escort watching me day and night, literally, as its members slept in the room below mine. Everything we did and taught had to be approved, monitored and recorded."

Books

Without You there is no Us - a haunting account of teaching English to the children of North Korea's ruling class during the last six months of Kim Jong-Il’s reign. Every day, three times a day, students march in two straight lines, singing the praises of Kim Jong-Il and North Korea: Without you, there is no homeland. Without you, there is no us. It is a chilling scene, but little by little she also learns the melody and, without realizing it, begins to hum it.

"What did I think of my students? It is a complex question. For my book, I was trying to understand what they thought and felt but living in a system of constant control and surveillance, no one really knows what people think or feel the students are also under a system of constant supervision. They were never alone. They watched each other and me. They used to have a weekly meeting where they reported on the other students and the teachers."

In 2011, all North Korea's universities are closed for an entire year and students are sent to construction camps—except for the 270 students at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST), a walled complex where portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong-Il look on impassively from the walls of each room.

Suki has accepted a job teaching English, and for the next six months she will eat three meals a day with her young charges and struggle to teach them how to write, all under the watchful eye of the regime. The book offers a moving and incalculably rare glimpse into life in the world's most unknown country, and the privileged young people she calls "soldiers and slaves."

The interpreter - Suzy Park is a 29-year-old Korean American interpreter who works for the New York City court system. She makes a frightening and sinister discovery about her family's history that sends her on a terrifying quest. Five years earlier, her parents, workers who lost personal happiness for their children's gain, were brutally murdered in an apparent robbery of their store. But the spark of a new clue draws Suzy into the dangerous North Korean underworld and finally reveals the mystery of her parents' murder.

"It was under this constant surveillance that I understood the unbearable situation in which they live, the fear of always watching and reporting others, the impossibility of going anywhere or with anyone, and the way in which the world and their imagination are restricted. At this time, in 2011, students had never heard of the internet, and I was prohibited from talking about it. I had strict orders not to reveal anything to them about the outside world and they had no information about what was happening outside their country, they did not know about the Taj Mahal, nor the Eifel Tower, nor did they know who Michael Jackson was. Television in North Korea has only one channel with programs about the Great Leader. Programs from China or Russia is also broadcast, all based on "socialist ideas". There is only one newspaper and the articles published are also linked to the Great Leader. The same goes for the books they read and all other forms of education and entertainment.”

Essays

One of her most acclaimed essays, The Reluctant Memoirist (The New Republic, 2016), exposed racism and orientalism in publishing, as well as the systematic undermining of the female experience, and brought publishing giant Penguin Random House its own publisher, to formally correct the mislabeling of her book. Her Essay on Fear for Lapham’s Quarterly was selected for The Best American Essays 2018 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

Reports

Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Slate, Atlantic, New Yorker, and New Republic, where she is a contributing editor. Kim's investigation into sexual harassment at New York public radio WNYC for The Cut was named Best Investigative Reporting of 2017 by Longreads, resulting in the firing of some of her longest-running show hosts and the eventual departure of her president.

In 2018, the Best American Essays series published her Essay on Fear, and in 2020, for a New Yorker story, Kim did an interview with Adrian Hong, the elusive leader of the first North Korean opposition who spoke to her as she fled the United States Department of Justice.

Scholarships and awards

Kim has received the following fellowships: Guggenheim, George Soros Open Society, Fulbright Senior Scholar, and Nova América. She also received the Berlin Prize at the American Academy and served as the Ferris Professor of Creative Nonfiction at Princeton University. Her TED Talk drew nearly 6 million viewers. She was the keynote speaker at the 2020 convocation of Barnard College, Columbia University.

Kim has been featured in media around the world from CNN, BBC, MSNBC, including shows such as CBS This Morning, Christian Amanpour Show and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, 2021-2022 Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellow at Harvard University . She is working on a nonfiction book (to be published by WW Norton), which was a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award.

"I lived in terror the whole time. If I had not been writing the book, my situation would have been different, but I was taking notes in secret and I knew that no one had ever tried to do that in the country. I kept my notes on USB sticks and always carried them with me. Every day I deleted everything from my computer and left no trace of my work. The possibility that my escort would discover these notes gave me the creeps. In my room there were hidden microphones; and all the classes I gave were recorded. Yes, a system of constant fear. I lived in terror thinking I could die there.”

Her first novel, The Interpreter (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) was the winner of the PEN Open Book Award and a finalist for the PEN Hemingway Prize, and her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Washington Post, Harper's, Atlantic, The New Yorker and The New Republic, where she is a contributing editor.

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