Without You, There Is No Us: My secret life teaching the sons of North Koreas elite

*This book is a literary nonfiction based on investigative reporting. It contains emotions & personal perspectives & personal history devices that make a book literary. The book is not based on memories to explain the authors life, but based on undercover investigative reporting to convey the psychology of North Koreas future leaders and their very complex and human and inhumane world. Neither a straightforward reporters nonfiction nor a memoir about a womans selfdiscovery, Without You, There Is No Us is a tour de force journalistic feat mixed with a narrative literary voice from within the worlds most brutal gulag nation. Here is the publishers original jacket copy:A haunting memoir of teaching English to the sons of North Koreas ruling class during the last six months of Kim Jongils reign Every day, three times a day, the students march in two straight lines, singing praises to Kim Jongil 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 fieldsexcept for the 270 students at the allmale Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST), a walled compound where portraits of Kim Ilsung and Kim Jongil look on impassively from the walls of every room, and where Suki has accepted a job teaching English. Over the next six months, she will eat three meals a day with her young charges and struggle to teach them to write, 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 colleaguesevangelical Christian missionaries who dont know or choose to ignore that Suki doesnt 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 selvestheir 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 ownat 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 Jongil 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. Without You, There Is No Us offers a moving and incalculably rare glimpse of life in the worlds most unknowable country, and at the privileged young men she calls soldiers and slaves.