The students are even exempt from the 10 year (8 for girls) compulsory military conscription and obligatory annual month of field labor for city and country dwellers alike. PUST is college for the crème-de-la-elite of society: children of the one-percenters. And they need the foreign instructors who will work without pay. That’s the kind of bizarro-land NK is: although they hate outside religion, since the school is paid for by foreign Christians and staffed by holy volunteers, it’s tolerated behind closed doors. Well, atheist if you don’t count KimIlSungism. Kim finds herself with a trying bunch of Christian Westerners not preaching Jesus in the world’s most militantly atheist country. Outside the book, two Americans are currently in jail in NK for doing just that sort of thing so Ms. Established in 2010, PUST is founded, financed, and run by South Korean and American Evangelical Christians, but the foreign teachers were absolutely forbidden to preach or talk of Christianity there. Her book chronicles a year as a volunteer ESL teacher at the fascinating Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST). She suffered a sense of dislocation and cultural buffeting, as anybody would at such a tender age, and compensating for that she has become an incredible writer and a keen observer of human nature. Kim came to America at the age of 12 with her family in the 1980s.
There are many decent pyongyangologists, but few speak Korean, which obviously hampers a deeper understanding, and many have only visited occasionally or fleetingly.īorn in Seoul, Ms.
Kim’s year there was in 2011, just before the end of Kim Jong Il and the reign of his son, “Fatty 3” as the Chinese like to call him.
Published in 2014, it could have been written yesterday: with the exceptions of a little stronger “capitalism” and more cell phones, nothing has changed. Kim’s book is one of the most insightful reads a NK buff can use to explore from an armchair. Tourism to North Korea is possible, but as your reviewer wrote in Forbes lately it’s a hazardous and horribly unethical destination. Book Review: “Without You There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea’s Elite,” by Suki Kim
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