Suki Kim spent a large part of 2011 on the premises of a technical university, teaching English to 270 students. This was no ordinary teaching assignment however – the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology was training the sons of high-level officers of the North Korean regime and Kim was taking copious notes throughout the many months of her tenure, undercover, to report on the truth behind the veil of propaganda in the world’s most secretive country.
Kim, a Korean American journalist, was born in South Korea but moved to the United States when she was 13. In 2002, she made her first visit to North Korea to write about the 60th birthday celebration of Kim Jong-il and quickly became obsessed with life in the totalitarian country that she calls “a virtual prison state”. She returned in the following decade but always as part of carefully-orchestrated journalist tours where everything is scripted down to the last detail. When the opportunity to “teach” presented itself, Kim jumped at it, armed with a book contract, and pulled off a dangerously high-stakes feat of investigative journalism. With all teachers under constant surveillance, the discovery of Kim’s notes (kept on hidden USB sticks and a camera SD card) or true purpose would have immediately earned her a place in one of the country’s twenty gulags, where, according to the Human Rights Watch, over 200,000 political prisoners are held. Every classroom session was recorded and every room was bugged.
At the recently-concluded Jaipur Literature Festival, Suki Kim spoke about the revelatory book she wrote on returning to the United States, Without You There Is No Us, and the extent of fear, misinformation and propaganda that she encountered in her six months there. Everything, she said, revolved around the legend of the Great Leader – at the time of her reporting it was Kim Jong-il not Kim Jong-un – from the books and magazines that she came across, to almost all the television coverage. The students began every morning with songs about the Great Leader, they had to march, singing his praises even while going to the canteen to eat a meal and watched endless documentaries about Kim Jong-il and his father, Kim Il-sung.
But what shocked Kim the most was how little these men of 19 years and 20 years knew about the world. They were students of computer science in one of the best universities in the country but had no idea what the Internet was or that humans had landed on the moon. They remained true to the script they were taught their whole lives and when Kim tried to draw out their inner thoughts by asking them to write essays, they struggled because they had no concept of critical thinking.
Suki Kim spoke to Scroll.in at the Jaipur Literature Festival. Edited excerpts from the interview:
There was a sense of incredible sadness in the book, hopeless in many ways that things will never change. Did you find any glimmers of hope in your time there?
I am very hopeless about the topic. I hadn’t planned on adoring the students as much as I did. They were so lovely, funny and sweet, the way youth can be, so full of possibility, and yet these men had none. Perhaps their loveliness was hope, the fact that they weren’t destroyed entirely. They were born and raised in this awful way yet the sparkle for life was still there. At the same time, if you were to think of them as your brother or your son, it would break your heart because you know they would never realise any of their dreams, they don’t even know what dreams are. They don’t know anything that they should be enjoying at this beautiful age of 19 and 20. The more I grew to love them, the more I thought it was unbearable.
Parallels are sometimes drawn between North Korea and other countries like Cuba or China. Is that a fraudulent comparison to make?
There might be elements of China or Cuba or even [East] Germany that you see in North Korea but we’ve never seen something like this last this long. You have three generations of people stuck in this place, living under the lie of the Great Leader worship. Everything they get taught is a lie. They get taught that their Great Leader has conquered the world. We can only make that comparison because we don’t know the extent ourselves, the seriousness of it is not quite evident to people. The more I got to know these students, the more I kept thinking, “Is this fixable?”
People would love to believe that it’s not as bad as it is. They think, “Surely some people use the internet”. But think about it – if people could google Kim Jong-un, would Korea be the way it is? The fact that it’s such a desperate situation is frightening. You keep thinking “How do you make it stop?” and even if it stops – let’s say the Great Leader regime falls apart, let’s say somebody assassinates him – what about the 25 million people who have been born and raised this way for three generations, what about their psychology? I don’t see how one can come back from that. I don’t see this as a reconcilable problem in any way.
In the book you mention that all the people you spoke to in North Korea were living lives based on, essentially, a lie. What are the lessons we can learn from that in the age of “fake news”? Are there parallels in what is happening in the world today?
You know, the book came out before Trump’s time and people in America, at the time at least, didn’t see themselves in the book. But now, within the last year, people come up to me and ask me that question: “Is this what we’re heading to?” You are supposed to just believe in certain things, you know. The lies shouldn’t be coming from...Presidents aren’t supposed to lie, or the news network you’re watching for information shouldn’t be publishing false information. But we are in that world now. And I think there’s a really dangerous thing because then your foundation is confusing.
I wrote a whole chapter in my book about how my students in North Korea lied all the time. It was really hard to figure out why they were lying, there were so many levels of lying. They lied to survive, sometimes they just repeated lies because that’s what they’ve been told. Most disturbingly, they did not know what were lies or what were truths, or even that lies are a bad thing. The truth there, really isn’t the truth. When your entire foundation as a human being is confusing and shaken...that was really heartbreaking to me. It does make you question humanity.
You write about how people are kept really busy all the time, such as marching three times a day just to go to the canteen for a meal. What do you think would happen if one fine day that routine was completely taken away from them and they discovered the truth about their world? It seems like something that could only be imagined though fiction, which you’ve written before...
Just imagine the amount of work that takes, something like marching to the cafeteria for a meal. To get in line to practise songs in praise of The Great Leader while they’re doing it. When all they’re really doing is walking down the road to get a meal. It’s this unbelievable waste of time. It’s an unthinkable system, people who live that way all their lives. We see it with defectors...they find it really hard to adjust, very few people actually adjust.
But defectors are also a different example, because most of them come from the Chinese border area and a lot of them are somewhat aware of what’s happening. These farmers who cross over the river are very different from those on the inside. Pyongyang is deep inside North Korea and this is a country where you can’t travel between towns, you need an authorised travel pass to do so. They have no idea. We can read fiction and feel comforted that this is not real. But in North Korea, this is reality right now, this is not even reality that happened 50 years ago. We can read about concentration camps under Nazis and be relieved that we are not living in that world. That this happened already. North Korea is today. Right now.
Speaking of right now, the Trump and North Korea standoff is on everybody’s mind. How real do you think is an actual threat from North Korea, is this something to be worried about?
Trump is melodramatic about everything on Twitter, it doesn’t even have to be about Korea, it’s about absolutely everything. In reality, nothing has changed about America’s attitude towards North Korea, it’s the status quo. It’s like this Olympics PR move of the unified team – this moment too, will pass. It has nothing to do with the real policies between the two Koreas. The only thing is, every time Trump makes it all about Trump, it distracts from the real issues. There is the concern that it has all gone so farcically extreme in this escalating tension that some mistakes could be made somewhere. Whether it’s bantering only or if it’s translating into real action, constant threats about nuclear war from the United States President is not a positive thing.
You wrote an essay about the mislabelling of your book as a memoir. That when a woman succeeds in a work of investigative journalism, it is slotted as memoir. Do you think race also played a role in this? In light of slightly-shifting conversations about women in the workplace, do you see this changing anytime soon?
Once you call something a memoir, it no longer has journalistic value because it becomes about memory. It takes away from your expertise. I went in there with a book contract in hand and was copiously taking notes, 400 pages of notes, that is not memory. It’s no accident that the celebrated experts on North Korea...you know I give a lot of talks at festivals...it’s generally all white men. Or else, people like stories by defectors. But defectors are victims and also not professional writers. So the professional writers who do get credited are white men, a lot of whom don’t speak Korean at all or have never been to North Korea. Why is that set of population credited with having authority on this topic?
It’s really upsetting that despite my being the only journalist who has actually lived in the country, embedded, and having followed it for over a decade, people were not focusing on the actual information contained in the book. The fact that leading journalists came out attacking the book as a memoir isn’t very hopeful. I might be very cynical about this but consider who the editors-in-chief of the biggest news networks are. I don’t know why they would suddenly give me credit when they were so ready to take it away. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that this is not a fair world.