Bookshop USA Translation
 
  Korean Booklist News & Notice Site Map
 (0)
 
Total KRW 0
 Prices are tax excluded  
 
 
 
HOME > BOOK SHOP > NORTH KOREA    
 
Without You, There Is No Us :My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite
Price per Unit (piece): KRW 28,800
USD 21.59
Author: Suki Kim
Publisher: Crown Publishers
Pub. Date: 2014
Pages: 291
Cover: Hardcover
Dimensions (in inches): 5.6 x 8.5 x 1.03
ISBN: 9780307720658
Language: English
Quantity:     
 
   
 
  Send to a friend
  Print
 
 
 


A haunting memoir of teaching English to the sons of North Korea's ruling class during the last six months of Kim Jong-il's reign
 
Every day, three times a day, the students march in two straight lines, singing praises to Kim Jong-il 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 fields—except for the 270 students at the all-male Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST), a walled compound where portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il 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 colleagues—evangelical Christian missionaries who don't know or choose to ignore that Suki doesn't 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 selves—their 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 own—at 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 Jong-il 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 world's most unknowable country, and at the privileged young men she calls "soldiers and slaves."

 
 

Korean Booklist published in May...
Korean Booklist published in Apri..
Korean Booklist published in Aug...
Korean Booklist published in Jul...
Korean Booklist published in Jun...
Korean Booklist Published in May...
Korean Booklist Published in Apr...
Korean Booklist published in Mar...
Home | Products | About Us | My Account | Terms | Privacy Policy | Shipping & Handling Policy
B1 Korean Publishers Association B/D, 105-2, Sagan-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul, 110-190, Korea
TEL : 02-734-9565 (in Korea) / 82-2-734-9565 (outside Korea) / FAX : 02-734-9563 / E-mail : hankinseoul@gmail.com
Business Registration Number : 101-81-90070 / Seoul Government Shopping Mall Registration Number : 01-1299
Copyright © 2012 SEOUL SELECTION. All Rights Reserved.                 Designed by Ebizcare.com