Korean-American writer calls NK gulag

Suki Kim

By Jun Ji-hye

Korean-American author Suki Kim describes North Korea as a giant gulag after her six-month experience as an English teacher at an elite school in Pyongyang.

In a video recently uploaded on the website of TED, a nonprofit organization, Kim described the Great Leader comprehensively.

“Every book, every newspaper article, every song, every TV program ― there is just one subject,” she said. “The flowers are named after him; the mountains are carved with his slogans. Every citizen wears the badge of the Great Leader at all times. Even their calendar system begins with the birth of Kim Il-Sung.”

She also noted that Pyongyang University of Science and Technology was a heavily guarded prison, posing as a campus.

“Teachers could only leave on group outings accompanied by an official minder. We were never allowed to discuss the outside world,” she said.

The account of her six months in the secretive state teaching English led to the publication of the investigative memoir, “Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea’s Elite,” last year.

The book chronicles her living undercover in Pyongyang during Kim Jong-il’s final six months in 2011. It takes its title from a popular North Korean song, which flatters the North Korean leader like other songs popular in the isolationist state.

“Since 2002, I had visited North Korea a few times. And I had come to realize that to write about it with any meaning, or to understand the place beyond the regime’s propaganda, the only option was total immersion,” she said. “So I posed as a teacher and a missionary at an all-male university in Pyongyang.”

Follow Jun Ji-hye on Twitter @TheKopJihye