Book review: "Without You, There Is No Us" by Suki Kim

Hello!

I'm sitting on my cozy couch while sipping on some Mulled wine and writing these lines 🍷🎄 Earlier this year, I sporadically decided to read at least twenty books. Twenty is not a difficult sum, it's actually quite doable. Ever since I was 14, I've been obsessed with reading literature classics, and by "classics" I mean "books that supposedly everybody should read". I set high standards for myself: I started with Kafka's Metamorphosis, followed by Madame Bovary, and Wuthering Heights. When I reached Nietzsche, I went mad. The Russians were also a tough cookie: very deep and philosophical.

Philosophy had always been a genre I looked at with curiosity: I was partly fascinated and partly fearful of not fully grasping the concepts. I read somewhere that Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder was a good place to start, so I read it and loved it. Sadly, my high school philosophy teacher was anything but inspiring, so I ended up leaving many great philosophy classics aside for a very long time.

"Without you, there is no us" by Suki Kim came to my hands after watching the South Korean series Crash Landing on you. For a while, I was absolutely fascinated with the Korean Wave, it really is addictive! In the series, a paragliding mishap drops a South Korean heiress (Son Ye-jin) in North Korea - and into the life of an army officer (Hyun Bin), who decides he will help her hide. Funny enough, their story brings them to Switzerland 🇨🇭 How incredible if only something like that would happen in real life!

As a graduate in IR, Korea is a fascinating topic: the division of Korea by the 38th parallel, the dividing line separating North and South Korea, is a must, similar to the tensions of India and Pakistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia, or China and Japan, but worse. The 38th parallel was drawn by the Soviets and the US in 1945 after the surrounding of Japan. Quite a complex and heartbreaking story. One expects it would happen as with the German reunification. However, it's a completely different scenario. As a whole, "Without you, there is no us" shines a light on the ongoing tragedy of Korea's 1953 partition.

The author of the book, Suki Kim, is a Korean-American investigative journalist who, at some point in her life, wonders about her own story, that of her family, and that of many Koreans. And so that was the seed that planted curiosity, which led Suki Kim to travel five different times to North Korea.

In 2011, Suki Kim found an opportunity to go back to North Korea with Christian missionaries, volunteering to teach English writing skills at the recently inaugurated Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST). The University was only for young men, particularly, for the sons of the North Korean elite. What Kim narrates along the pages is truly fascinating and never heard of before.

It's not only the fact that these young men don't know anything about what's going on beyond the borders of North Korea, but also, and especially, the indoctrination. They have been taught to believe that their Great Leader is a fair and brave patriarch thanks to whom the country exists as it is, and so they follow the personality cult of juche.

Juche translates as “self-reliance" and is a mélange of different ideologies and/or concepts: Marxism, Confucianism, 20th-century Japanese imperialism, and traditional Korean nationalism.

The political philosophy known as juche became the official autarkic state ideology of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) in 1972. Although foreign scholars often describe juche as “self-reliance,” the true meaning of the term is much more nuanced.

Kim Il Sung explained: Establishing juche means, in a nutshell, being the master of revolution and reconstruction in one’s own country. This means holding fast to an independent position, rejecting dependence on others, using one’s own brains, believing in one’s own strength, displaying the revolutionary spirit of self-reliance, and thus solving one’s own problems for oneself on one’s own responsibility under all circumstances.

The DPRK claims that juche is Kim Il Sung’s creative application of Marxist-Leninist principles to the modern political realities in North Korea. Kim Il Sung and his son Kim Jong Il have successfully wielded the juche idea as a political shibboleth to evoke a fiercely nationalistic drive for North Korean independence and to justify policies of self-reliance and self-denial in the face of famine and economic stagnation in North Korea.

Source: Lee, Grace (2003) The Political Philosophy of Juche, Stanford Journal of East Asian Affairs, Volume 3, num. 1, Spring 2003. Available here.

There's so much behind this concept that explains the denial in which North Koreans live today. One of the things that impacted me the most was when Suki Kim explains how often students, most of them about 20 years old, are very naive and go and guard the Juche tower at PUST for long hours and even during the cold nights of winter. Students, even the ones from the elite, will go and work on construction sites. They cannot travel freely in the country and are hardly monitored. The school was surrounded by guards at all times, and no one was allowed to leave campus except for authorized outings, not even professors. Lesson plans had to be approved in advance by the DPRK, and the teachers were carefully watched by the North Korean minders. Her students were healthy, but Suki Kim saw many malnourished people during the approved outings, and things that aren't just normal.

This denial is topped by surreal facts, for instance, North Koreans believe things like Korean is the most widely spoken language around the world, AIDS was cured by a North Korean, or the hamburger was invented by a Korean. She writes about the relationships she developed with the students, and about her observations of daily life both inside and outside the university walls. For instance, the movements of teachers are under surveillance, but also the messages and calls. In this scenario, Suki Kim has to be extremely careful of not leaving any trace and not saying much to the rest of the missionaries, who believe she's fulfilling Christ's will.

The layers of control are staggering. An atmosphere of fear, loneliness, and repression engulfed every aspect of life and was stifling. Yet, at times, Suki Kim was able to connect on a meaningful and emotional level with her students. These interactions made her observations all the more heartbreaking. For all the time she's in North Korea, she keeps taking notes of every thought and interaction, even if that means putting her life in danger.

After seven months undercover, Suki Kim leaves Pyongyang the day after the news broke of the death of Kim Jong-Il in the Juche Year 100, which counts time on the calendar beginning with the birth of the original Great Leader, Kim Il-Sung.

Overall, this is an interesting look into life in one of the most isolated and mysterious countries in the world, the hermit kingdom. Frightening to glimpse the way these people are brainwashed and groomed to group mentality rather than as individuals. Amazing that in this day and age, an entire country can be shut off so completely from the rest of the world.

Below some links should you be interested in learning more:

• Suki Kim website: https://www.sukikim.com/

• Link to buy the book "Without You, There Is No Us", by Suki Kim

• Link to buy the book "In Order To Live : A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom", by Yeonmi Park

• Democratic People's Republic of Korea website

• An interesting article: http://cau.ac.kr/~seronto/SOVIET%20AIMS%20IN%20KOREA%20&%20THE%20ORIGINS%20OF%20THE%20KOREAN%20WAR.pdf