Excerpt from Without You, There Is No Us by Suki Kim, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

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AS IT HAPPENED, THE FIRST DAY OF CLASS—THE DAY WHEN A group of mostly American teachers took on the education of 270 North Korean young men—fell on July Fourth, but no one seemed to notice the irony. There was no red, white, and blue here. No barbecues and fireworks. Never having taught English as a second language before, I felt nervous as well as excited. Remembering the dress code, I put on a light blue button-down shirt, a calf-length gray skirt, and a pair of low heels. I had been warned that women generally did not wear pants in North Korea, and I could not remember ever having seen them on previous trips to Pyongyang.

At 7:15 a.m., I stood outside my dormitory facing the five-story structure where classes were held, known as the IT (Information Technology) building. To its left was the monument I had seen when we first drove in. Students called it the Forever Tower because the words OUR GREAT LEADER IS FOREVER WITH US were carved into one side, top to bottom. It resembled Juche Tower, which dominated Pyongyang, and I wondered how many such towers there were around this country. As I approached the IT building, I could hear music booming from a speaker in the foyer. I would soon get used to the blasting intrusion of recorded music, but on that first day, it struck me as ominous, and intensified the feeling of being watched. I could hear the lyric, "I want to walk endlessly, my beloved Pyongyang night. Please don't advance, beautiful Pyongyang night." It was one of their most popular songs, a student would tell me later—an ode to Pyongyang.

As I entered the main door, a female guard nodded from a booth. The walls along the staircase displayed the portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, along with such exhortations as "Keep your feet firmly on the ground of your motherland and keep your eyes on the world!" and "Let's think in our way and create in our way!" The narrow hallway on the second floor was lined with teachers' offices, ending in an area decorated with three scrolls reading: LEADER LUCK, GENERAL LUCK, CAPTAIN LUCK. In Korea, if you are born from good parents, it is said that you have "parent luck." If you marry well, you have "husband luck." So according to the scrolls, this nation was lucky in three things, Kim Jong-il, the General; his dead father, the Leader; and his young son, the Captain. This was the first mention of the heir apparent, Kim Jong-un, I had come across in all my visits to Pyongyang.

At the end of the hall were four freshman classrooms, which served as homerooms. There were one hundred freshmen, one hundred sophomores, and about seventy graduate students. Because the school had been open for less than a year, there was not yet a junior or senior class—all the undergraduates had transferred from other universities and started anew as freshmen. According to a memo from President Kim's office, there were seventy-five foreign teachers and staff. However, I counted only thirty or so teachers, about half of them Caucasian and the other half of Korean origin, from countries around the world. (None were South Korean, mainly because of visa issues.) Of the thirty teachers, about half spoke at least some Korean, but the rest did not.

The freshmen were divided into four groups according to their proficiency in English, Class 1 being the strongest and Class 4 the weakest. I was assigned to teach Reading and Writing to Classes 2 and 4 (another set of teachers handled Speaking and Listening) for an hour and a half each in the morning. The afternoons were reserved for office hours and group activities.

Our textbook, New Horizon College English 1, had been used in China at YUST and was approved by the "counterparts." These so-called counterparts were the North Korean teaching staff who oversaw our lessons. Everything, from books to lesson plans, had to be approved by them before we could share it with students. If any extra material was to be used in class, we were required to submit it a few days before the lesson for approval. All through that summer, I was never quite sure who the counterparts were or where they were, and even after I returned in the fall and taught English to a few of them, the mention of the word counterpart never failed to make me nervous.

Excerpted from Without You, There Is No Us by Suki Kim. Copyright © 2014 by Suki Kim. Excerpted by permission of Crown. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.