Hai! It's almost new years and I will be uploading my top 16 of 2016 pretty soon!
But today I will be reviewing the book Without you, there is no us, by Suki Kim which I read because it sounded interesting and was one of the only books on Asia that I could find in Waterstones.
Genre:Autobiography
Book: Without You, There is no us
Author: Suki Kim
Release date: 14th October 2014 (my birthday!)
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Source: Waterstones
Synopsis:
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."
***
What I liked about it? I really loved the historical aspects of the novel, because it answered a lot of questions I have always had about the divide between North and South Korea. It also interested me because there were a lot of references to China within the novel and as I mentioned in my last review of Chinese Cinderella I have a particular interest in China and so I was excited whenever it was mentioned or intertwined within the story.
What I did not like? I can't help but feel that Suki is exaggerating a lot of the story for sales and popularity. It made me quite skeptical throughout the whole reading process, and whilst it was written well it seemed too fairy-tale like without the extreme happy ending.
So, because of this I gave her novel a rating of...
3.5 stars out of 5.
I didn't enjoy as much as I wish I had, but I wish her luck on her journey as a journalist!
(Disclaimer: The images used in this post are not mine.)
Yours Faithfully,
~ Literature and Tea
