This family history, paired with a couple of sanctioned trips to North Korea, made Kim want to see underneath the scant images we have of the country, past the carefully orchestrated and controlled visits she was allowed to make, beyond the caricature of an inexplicable leader so often poked fun at in the media. Suki Kim grew up in South Korea and like so many others there, had a family member disappear forever when North and South Korea were partitioned. This book is her memoir of her time there. However, Suki Kim, a journalist and author, had access to this society for a brief moment in time when she went to North Korea for several months and taught English to the sons of the North Korean elite. We shudder at the thought of such a dictatorship, finding it something out of dystopian fictions like 1984. In this day and age of instant access to information, we have very little insight into a population and a country where these very things are true. We cannot imagine being so removed from the rest of the world as to have no knowledge at all of scientific advances, popular culture, or world events. We find it hard to imagine an unthinking reverence for our leader. We have trouble envisioning a society so secretive and closed.

And what little we do know does not recommend it to us.

We know so little about North Korea that it can loom quite large in imagination.

Without you there is no us by suki kim