![]() ![]() ![]() She changed the names of all the students and teachers - and even the North Korean government minders who shadowed them - for protection from reprisals. The book will anger the regime of Kim’s son, Kim Jong Un, and the school’s Korean-American leadership and benefactors. Her last experience with students was seeing them completely overcome with grief. Her new book, “Without You, There Is No Us,” is a vivid, uncompromising and intensely personal account of the six months she spent teaching at a Pyongyang university in 2011, a period that happened to end on the day dictator Kim Jong Il’s death was announced. Suki Kim, a Korean-American immigrant, author of the widely praised 2004 novel “The Interpreter” and magazine chronicler of occasional visits to the North, is in the second group, those who don’t care whether they return. ![]() They are not alone: A sizable number of academics, businesspeople and journalists apply the soft bigotry of low expectations to North Korea in trade for access to it. They pay little mind to the absence of basic freedoms for North Koreans and dismiss the restrictions they experience themselves. ![]() In the first are those by authors who clearly wish to be allowed back. For a country as closed and intimidating as North Korea is, the number of memoirs by people who briefly lived there is surprisingly large - at least one a year since 2000, according to a list by the Seoul-based website NK News. ![]()
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