Without You, There Is No Us

I didn't even know about this book until a couple weeks ago when I saw someone's review of it on their blog. And as someone who has never read any book on this subject, I thought why not. But now I'm having trouble articulating what I feel.

This is a memoir of the author who worked as an English teacher in a university in North Korea. I have no clue about the DKRK at all because I've never read books on the subject, except listening to the sensational news items about its current leader. So I definitely went in to this to understand how the country works, from the perspective of someone who got to experience it atleast for a time. It shouldn't have come as a surprise, but the narrative is pretty bleak. The constraints on freedom, being completely cutoff from the world, being scared to even email family members who live in other countries, the same exact routine everyday - I could feel in the author's words her despair over what was happening and how helpless she was feeling. At the same time, she is also surrounded by evangelical Christian professors whose aim is completely different, and I thought there were quite a few parallels between the DPRK regime and the religious professors, especially in the way they tried to control what could be taught and what couldn't, how to manipulate the thinking of other people, and how they believed in their own made up reality which had nothing to do with the real world.

It's a world unto itself and just like the author, I wasn't sure if I wanted to pity her students who were so brainwashed about the greatness of their country that they couldn't accept anything else from their professor, or if I should be angry that they were just being willfully bling to all the faults. It's hard to judge them by our moras and standards, because the consequences for them even asking a question about the outside world can be too much and their living in denial (willfully or not) is probably their best survival mechanism.

I don't know if it was the nature of the book or the writing style, but I felt like the author's despair permeated my head too and I have only felt dreary day after day since I started it. It obviously doesn't help that the outside world is currently scary as hell because the pandemic is wreaking havoc in my country, and I'm trying to live in denial so that I may keep my sanity. But I have to mention that the author does get very repetitive at times, which might bore us as a reader, but I also thought it reflected the kind of repetitive life she had to live there. The audiobook helped in making me want to continue reading, because I'm pretty sure I would have ditched it if it was a physical copy.

In the end, I think this is a unique perspective because we see how the life and education of the children of the elite in NK is, and how insular and manipulative their lives are. I just think you need to be in the right mood to read it, because it's not very engaging and it's bleak nature can put off a reader, despite the bleakness being a major feature of life in the country and the feeling is completely unavoidable.

Fascinating - I wish it had been longer!

Interesting and very accessible.

I'm not a huge fan of memoirs, and I honestly wasn't expecting this to be as memoiry as it is. I was expecting a reported nonfiction account of life inside North Korea–which much of the book is–but the book too often veers off into being about a Korean-American woman who's upset that she can't openly talk to her ‘lover' in Brooklyn because of the restrictions/spying in North Korea. And the end gets into a little too much of the teacher-as-savior “l love my students so much!” teacher narrative nonsense that, even though I'm a teacher, always upsets me for some reason. When the book is focused on life for North Koreans, especially those who aren't fortunate enough to attend a school for the elite youth of the nation, it is a terrifying look into a real-world dystopia. The descriptions of the students and their willingness to lie and apparently spy on each other gives some insight into how the regime works to maintain its power and illusion of divinity.