Without you, there is no us

How do we know what is true? Sometimes we know through direct experience, but most often, we know because of what we've been told by others. Sometimes these others are experts who have studied for years and have had their own direct experiences, but in these cases, we need to first accept as true their expertise.

It used to be general agreement in on who was a reliable source of information and what the truth looked like but with each succeeding year thie becomes less true. There are too many conflicts of interest, for one. Scientists, in the employ of tobacco companies claim the link between smoking and cancer hasn't been proved. They have the credentials of experts, but can they be trusted?

Is the croud-sourced wikipedia as accurate a source of information as Britanica, written by experts? After the recent U.S. election it can even be debated whether it matters what is actually true.

In North Korea, this kind of confusion has been eliminated. The truth is decided for you by the Dear Leader. He does this out of love for his people, which can therefore be united. Westerners don't like choice all that much in practice and prefer to surround themselves with like minded people who hate and ridicule those outside their bubble. Debate is only possible on those ideas that fit within the Overton window, and few people ever change their mind by much.

But Westerners like the illusion of choice. That's why appliances come with so many different settings on their dials. People prefer and purchase those products though in the end, they always select but a tiny subset of the settings the manufacturer has made available.

Our society has invented the button that does nothing, most famously on pedestrian crosswalks to pretend to offer some control of when the lights will change. Our represenatives in Washington can ignore the fact that 90% of its citzen want some kind of gun control legislation, yet we all still feel as if we have a choice in how we are governed.

Kim Suki didn't get to choose whether her book would be called a memoir, or journalism. Her publishers went with "memoir" which they thought would increase sales. Perhaps they even took into consideration the effect of the author's protesting this decision as itself good for sales, for that is what drew me into reading it.

As a person with a choice, I am voting for it being journalism. The question being answered here is how do the son's of N. Korea's elite adjust to growing up in a society where so little is under one's control. We're not talking ordinary citizens but the upper echelon here. Their days are totally mapped out for them from dawn to dusk. Everything they do is monitored. Ms. Kim points out that they use "we" rather than "I" to express what thoughts they are allowed to have. They have no access to the internet, nor can they contact their parents who are not 30 minutes away. (Even more interesting to me is that their parents cannot contact them.)

At the age of 19, they are exquisitely adjusted to their society, accepting the restrictions under which they live with nary a sign of conflict. They lie to themselves and their teachers (and each other) not as a conflictual necessity, but as an easy way of life, and they accept the doctrinal lies of the Dear Leader just as easily. It is, after all, the only life they've ever known. The foreigners who are their teachers have a much more difficult time adjusting and do so in an atmosphere of continual anxiety.

All the while there is a sensitive attunement allowing an emotional communication beyond the level of language. Ms. Kim has a stronger bond with her students than she does with her Brooklyn lover back home. She claims their relationship failed because of physical separation but I'd like to suggest that her connection to her students, whom she may not physically touch or speak to other than in English, and whom she ends up leaving forever, is stronger than her relationship with her lover ever was.

She both wants to enlighten her students as to their plight and simultaneously protect them from ever finding out which she fears would end up with them being sent to the gulag. The students are curious about the world outside but also cheerfully accept the limitaions under which they live. They don't seem to be on the brink of some major mental illness. We don't hear of any public freakouts or students mysteriously disappearing.

Her students' lies don't seem to be of the kind of a sociopath or of someone out of touch with reality but more like the social lies we Westerners tell each other to be polite, only in their caseit has so much larger a scope.

Less well adjusted are the counterparts and minders who seem cynical and bitter. I don't see these students ending up that way. I imagine them of a higher caste than those destined to become the watchers and secret police. If you think about it, many of our own Western police are cynical and bitter too.

Ms. Kim's literary style is well suited to the story she has to tell us. I am now curious about her novel, The Interpreter.

Suki Kim set out on a mission to try her best in humanizing her North Korean students, and she really succeeded for me. This is a perspective of North Korean citizens that's completely engrossing, even if it's only a very narrow lens of it (which is hardly Kim's fault considering).

A frequent criticism I've seen of this book is how much attention Kim brings to her personal life. Personally, I'm quite glad that she included her mother and grandmother's personal experiences from fleeing in the South. They add a much-needed look into the other side of the conflict. I can't say the same for Kim's constant writing on her 'lover' back in New York, but the mentions of him were infrequent enough for me to live with.

Overall though, that's really the only blemish that the book has. I found its ending genuinely heartbreaking, and the conversations with the students are where the book shines. This is a must for anyone interested in a fairly recent look at the upper crust of the North Koreans.

I've read several books on North Korea, but this one is unique because it was written by someone who went there to teach english at a Pyongyang university where many foreign professors had been brought in to teach the children of North Korea's elite families. She forms bonds with the students and gets to observe their behavior first-hand over the course of several months. She also shares her own perspective on what it's like to live in North Korea as a foreigner: Under constant surveillance, not being allowed to travel freely even within the country, having almost no contact with her friends and family in the U.S., and having to go to great lengths to obtain simple items, like the ingredients to bake a cake. Finally, unlike books written by defectors, the North Koreans in this book are being raised as true believers and do not have (or do not admit) any doubt that their country is the greatest and most prosperous in the world. It's a worthy read for people who are as fascinated by North Korea as I am.

I'm not a huge fan of memoirs, and I honestly wasn't expecting this to be as memoiry as it is. I was expecting a reported nonfiction account of life inside North Korea--which much of the book is--but the book too often veers off into being about a Korean-American woman who's upset that she can't openly talk to her 'lover' in Brooklyn because of the restrictions/spying in North Korea. And the end gets into a little too much of the teacher-as-savior "l love my students so much!" teacher narrative nonsense that, even though I'm a teacher, always upsets me for some reason. When the book is focused on life for North Koreans, especially those who aren't fortunate enough to attend a school for the elite youth of the nation, it is a terrifying look into a real-world dystopia. The descriptions of the students and their willingness to lie and apparently spy on each other gives some insight into how the regime works to maintain its power and illusion of divinity.