About this item
A haunting memoir of teaching English to the sons of North Korea's ruling class during the last six months of Kim Jong-il's reign 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 accepted a job teaching English.
About the Author
Suki Kim is the author of the NY Times best-seller "Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korean Elite" and the novel "The Interpreter," which was a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Award in 2004. She is a contributing editor at The New Republic, and her investigative reporting and nonfiction have appeared in Harper's, the NYTimes, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. She has been awarded Guggenheim, Fulbright, Open Society fellowships, and her 2015 TED Talk has been viewed by several millions.
