Suki Kim Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Interview

Suki Kim talks about her book Without You There Is No Us, why she loved her North Korean students and what she feared the most during her brief time in the country.

In 2011 you traveled to North Korea to teach at a school staffed entirely by foreigners and kept notes secretly the entire time. If your notes had been discovered, you could have been deported, or even imprisoned. What made you willing to take that risk?

I've been obsessed with North Korea all my life. I was born and raised in South Korea and immigrated to the U.S. when I was 13 years old. Members of both sides of my family were taken to North Korea during the Korean War and never seen again. Beginning in 2002, I traveled there to report stories for various magazines. When I learned about PUST (Pyongyang University of Science & Technology), a university staffed only by foreigners, I realized this could be an unusual opportunity to get behind the curtain, and I applied for a job there.

My goal was to write a book that humanizes North Koreans. I wanted to go beyond the almost comic images of the Great Leader—of a crazy man with a funny hairdo and outfits, whose hobby is threatening nuclear war. The truth is so much more dire and frightening. I wanted to help outsiders see North Koreans as real people, as people we can relate to, so that we can begin to care about what happens to them. That was my goal and it seemed ...