She is mystified by how easily her students lie, unnerved by their obedience to 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. 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.

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 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. It is a chilling scene, but gradually Suki Kim, too, learns the tune and, without noticing, begins to hum it. The possibility that these young men - and their families - may be punished for their interactions with Kim is disturbing.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 reignĮvery 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. The regime is known for its paranoid purges and brutality - Kim Jong Un had his uncle executed for treason in December of 2013. The repercussions of Kim's book on her students will remain unknown for the foreseeable future. I do not want to imagine what might happen if they retained my lessons, remembered me, began questioning the system. I hope they have forgotten everything I inspired in them and have simply grown to become soldiers of the regime. Kim later regrets her conversation with him, and acknowledges she has put her students at risk. Or, as it turned out, he could be curious and reckless. The student could be a plant trying to trip her up. 'There I was,' she writes, 'a spy of sorts, hoping not to plant bombs but to plant ideas.'Īt one point, a student asks her about general assemblies and she gives an explanation of democracy. She also actively attempts to enlighten them to the outside world. These are the students she betrays, and not just by writing this memoir. Yet they also embrace Kim and revere her as a teacher, shouting 'Good morning, Professor Kim! How are you?' each morning. They keep huge swathes of their lives from her, repeatedly lying as a group to her about their activities and whereabouts.

Kim writes that she develops a fierce maternal love for her students, who open up to her in some ways and remain profoundly mysterious in others.

Without you there is no us book