Without You There Is No Us by Suki Kim

This book is subtitled My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite; A Memoir. Suki Kim spent about seven months teaching English at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST) built in an empty suburb of Pyongyang in 2011. She left Pyongyang the day after the news broke of the death of Kim Jong-Il in the Juche Year 100, which counts time on the calendar beginning with the birth of the original Great Leader, Kim Il-Sung.

Kim’s memoir of that time teaching is full of her fears—fears that she will be kicked out of North Korea, fears that she or her friends or family or students will be retaliated against, fears that she will be poisoned by the food, or that she will suffer nutritional deficiencies. All these fears have their basis in the conditions she faced there. She put her life as an American reporter and novelist on hold to teach in North Korea and she needed enough information to make a book or the effort was wasted. What she didn’t count on was the very real impact she was able to have on her students, and they on her.

Kim’s students at PUST were talented college-aged sons of high-level government cadres, hand-picked to attend intensive English-language training. Kim taught Level 1 and Level 4, so she could see the range of skills. Many of the students had excellent English language ability and comprehension, but it was concepts like “internet,” “hip-hop,” “women’s studies,” and “Social Security” that threw them. Gather together all your experience of the culture of Koreans or Korean-Americans that you know and multiply it by a million. The culture is so intensified and distilled in its isolation that college-aged boys sleep with pictures of their mothers and claim their only interest is to serve the Great Leader, though in private they admit to a heartbreaking homesickness and desire for intimacy.

While we begin to imagine what they would think were they ever confronted with the true diversity of American artistic life, Kim brings us back to the harsh reality that these young men have been taught since childhood to abhor and detest the filth of America’s cultural richness. She was startled to discover that the boys sang songs every day both praising their leader but also promising a bloody vengeance on his enemies. When she would point out that she could technically be considered one of those enemies, the boys would look away.

Just before Kim left her post at PUST a student wrote to her a letter expressing his anger at a grade she had given him. When they met to discuss his feelings about her explanation, he thoughtfully remarked that he’d actually cared both about her opinion and about the grade. And he believed she would listen to him. He’d never had a conflict with a teacher before. This may seem a small thing, perhaps, but for seven months work, it is Kim’s great achievement.

We in the United States have grown used to students who actually challenge teachers and who care about their grades. It is true this student was one of the top performers and wanted to keep his class ranking. But he also thought he’d be listened to which is something he may not have expected in his normal schooling and which is why he’d never protested before.

We get used to Suki Kim saying she was afraid to ask questions or speak freely to provoke reactions but in fact she did figure out something about what ordinary North Korean lives were like from her protected and restricted perch. She saw the folks who picnicked on the tarmac of a highway, having travelled halfway from their villages to meet up in a convenient place; she met older folks in Pyongyang suburbs who were friendly and inquisitive until the minders barked at them to “get inside”; she heard the bus drivers for a school outing playing a counterfeit Simon & Garfunkel tape until the minders came back from the hike; she passed on the gossip that rabid dogs fed rat poison were subsequently eaten by the school staff (that really could have/should have been confirmed—it would have made a far better anecdote).

Has it occurred to anyone else that countries divided by foreign powers often don’t work in the way they were intended? I wonder if arbitrary division by uninvolved parties is a good choice. I am thinking now of Korea, but also of the Middle East. It seems to me we should just force them to the bargaining table and insist on some kind of negotiated settlement. The outcomes of divided lands are always so prolonged and damaging. Let the ones doing the negotiating take responsibility for their choices.

What Kim tells us about the knowledge base of North Korean students, even the elite ones at a university for science and technology, is truly frightening. They are terrifyingly ignorant of the latest advances in science and technology, and are nationalistic to the point of mania. One cannot see this ending well. That there exists among the old a remembrance of things past is a relief. Hopefully restrictions can be eased before they pass so that some remembered joy can be passed on.

I used to think China ridiculously restrictive and the government overbearing, but now I see China as the wild and uncontrollable environment it really was. North Korea is small enough to manage the control—it is surely a test case for how dictatorial control works and how it doesn’t. It should be pointed out that PUST was a school set up by Christian ministries and although they were not allowed to overtly preach a Christian message, they still worshipped among themselves while they were there. Kim makes the point more than once that the kind of worship of the Great Leader paralleled in unattractive ways the worship of these loyal followers for their version of Christianity. Both groups were equally close-minded about other choices, other paths.

Thanks to Suki Kim for doing what we couldn’t or wouldn’t. Her notes from the other side add to growing evidence and shore up earlier reports that we found hard to believe.


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The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson

This very long, very dark, and highly imaginative work by Adam Johnson forces upon the reader a series of distasteful sensations, only a few of which are horror, fury, hatred, injustice, and revenge. But by the end, one also experiences hope, compassion, sincerity, integrity, and love. Thoughts surface, submerge, roil in the mind during the days spent reading this huge novel, leaving one as drained and unsettled after a session with it as if one had “eaten bitterness.” Welcome to North Korea. If you’ve ever wondered, this is one man’s take.

Much has been written of Johnson’s seven years constructing this story. He had done research, and in several interviews pointed to memoirs of escapees, like The Aquariums of Pyongyang, and one recently published by Penguin, called Escape from Camp 14. Johnson undoubtedly used news reports to reimagine the visits of western envoys as part of his story, but the blackness central to the society was difficult for me to believe. However, in one interview published in the Paris Review, Johnson denies he showed us the real blackness: “…I had to leave much of the darkness out of my book. The real darkness of the gulag there was so bleak that I had to cut it out. You couldn’t read it.” It is just as well, then, for this book was quite black enough to leave one feeling untethered.

The novel is broken into two parts. The first half tells of a young man growing up and finding his way in a society that seems confusing and dangerous: innocuous behaviors have consequences that are out of proportion to their intent. It is difficult to read this half of the novel. I am not enamored of character-as-victim when the consequences are so dire.

Relief comes immediately in the second half of the book, when we perceive a shift in the balance of power, from state authority to the citizenry. The young man of Part I, Jun Do (perhaps “John Doe”), decides to he will write his own obituary and becomes an actor rather than merely acted upon. We are told of this change in the power ratio in an ingenious series of flashbacks as he is being interrogated over a period of time. The interrogator is the voice in this section of the novel, and we see the power of Jun Do’s non-confession on his listeners.

I think, perhaps, only an American could have written this book. A novel of the same subject written by a European may be more philosophical, literary, and well…sad. This is literature, but it is brash, brazen, curious, and a little like America’s pop culture: the hero molds his own story and puts it right out there for everyone’s delectation. He doesn’t lie, but he spins the truth, and keeps on spinning to the end. The story is also a remake of that American classic film, Casablanca, in which the hero with a great love for a dame allows her to escape to freedom while he deals with the demons that would hold her captive.

I am not going to deny the first part of this book was difficult and agonizing for me to read, but I urge readers not to forsake the book before you reach the middle if you are at all interested in the subject. In Part Two we finally see a man rather than a victim and the character of the book changes completely after this break. It is fiction in the form of a prison diary. If you’ve ever read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956, or Elie Wiesel’s Night, you will remember how riveting books of desperation and depravation can be.

And yes, I did order Escape from Camp 14 to read after this. I want to see how much parallels what Johnson created, and because one’s palate for ordinary fiction is rather spoiled after such a book as this. Sometimes great literature demands more of us. While I am not ready to place this in the “greats” file yet, it is big, brave, unblinking. Johnson has a unique voice that cannot be mistaken for another. He brings to us news of the condition of people in North Korea, an issue we need to examine.

An interview of Adam Johnson by Charlie Rose about this book can be viewed here.

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The Man with the Baltic Stare by James Church

This is my first time listening to the audio of this series. I am a great fan of Inspector O, and of James Church for imagining this character and his life. It is a truly unique mystery/spy series set in North Korea in the same way that Colin Cotterill’s Di. Siri Paiboun series takes a look at Laos in a different way. The fact that an old man is the center of each of these series gives the reader a long-range perspective and their sense of humor and justice. A young man would be confused and probably angry in countries as difficult to navigate as North Korea and Laos, so an older man has much to offer in terms of philosophy and history.

Part of the wonder of these series is the fact that they are each set in a remote locale in terms of international and social relations. We wonder, but can’t know much about how the populace lives and thinks. The joy of discovering familiar human wants and needs in a culture so distant is remarkably refreshing and reassuring. It makes us laugh all the harder at jokes poking fun at their own national idiosyncracies…after all, aren’t they letting us in on the joke? Of course, each of these books is written by a foreigner (American, British), but that must make it more accessible for those of us who will never travel to these places. The authors have a good sense of the contradictions and frustrations that us outsiders tend to find overwhelming, and reassure us that citizens of these countries also find these things confusing. They just find ways to carry on their lives in spite of the difficulties.

So, because I like the series so much, I am awfully disappointed in Blackstone Audio for not looking harder for an appropriate voice for the series. I’m sure Feodor Chin is a nice person and all that, but making the voice of a 70+ year old Korean spy sound like a 40-something American private eye from the 70s is really a distraction. His hearty voice bats slang with such American maleness that one cannot ignore any longer that this is just an old American spy writing in the voice of a Korean agent. When reading by oneself, a reader might ignore little inconsistencies and put one’s imagination to good use, but never does a reader comes to this series expecting an American private eye or point of view. Trying to make this series sound like a pulp mystery churned out annually by the chart-topping blockbuster novelists is a mistake…nay, a crime.




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Bamboo and Blood by James Church

James Church's series of North Korean Police Detective Inspector O is something of an anomoly in the world of detective fiction. Here we have a keen-eyed detective whose field of expertise is not so much citizen-on-citizen violence as government-on-citizen violence. While Inspector O is a patriot of uncommon fidelity, the angle from which we view his mind working is not so much internal as external. We, facilitated by the author Church, are watching Inspector O make decisions and we are making an analysis. We are foreign agents--we are being taught to be foreign agents--in this series written by a foreign agent. We are being shown what to look for, and this is latest edition, we are even being taught tradecraft. Wacky tradecraft, but there you have it.

I like Inspector O very much. The author has a depth of compassion for him and his close compatriots that helps us to imagine them with a depth of character and a degree of humanity. We know so little about North Korea, every bit of description helps us "to put flesh on the bones", so to speak. And if even a portion of the descripton given us here of that woe-begone country is true, North Korea and its people are in a world of hurt.

I especially liked this third book in the series because Inspector O was given his head and allowed to travel overseas. He was quite witty when describing Geneva and New York, the "talks" going on there, and the spymasters he encountered. Much of the best parts of this book consisted of conversation rather than description, so Church is taking a unique jog in the business of series writing and engaging the reader in a way different from others writing detective series. Church's method is more cerebral, and less kinetic, the characters more likely to suffer psychological damage than physical. Approach this with an open mind, and I believe you will be amused, but will also have plenty of food for thought.

The Ultimate Weapon is No Weapon by Shannon D. Beebe and Mary Kaldor

One mustn’t feel side-swiped by this discussion of a change in focus of the traditional military. In our hearts, we’ve known it for some time, that our military with it’s focus on heavy machinery and fighter-jets we can’t use (the F-22)—that this magnificent fighting force composed of brash young kids listening to i-pods and practicing on video games--wasn’t really “winning” the wars in Iraq, and in Afghanistan. We’ve seen also that our National Guard is increasingly deployed for disaster relief, construction and reconstruction, rather than for fighting. After the Haiti earthquake, we sent in troops—and they had to keep peace. It’s odd, that we spend so much time teaching our fresh-faced young men to kill and then direct them to save instead. It appears to be time to rethink this—rethink the plan we have for our military, the money we spend on it, the demands we expect to be placed on it.

I actually agree with the Kaldor thesis that we should fundamentally rethink our strategic balance of weapons. I believe it is very unlikely state-based government is going to drop a nuclear bomb on anyone, except possibly one as unhinged as the present North Korean government. Even then, it is likely cooler minds in the chain of command would stop that atrocity before it became reality. Kaldor argues that we provoke the deadly venom of mad-states by not having deniability when it comes to nuclear. In the end, I see no reason to preserve the nuclear option. Even in retaliation, it is unlikely a state contemplating using a nuclear weapon could present a reasonable moral argument for doing so.

I agree with the authors Beebe and Kaldor that non-state insurgent groups and weather are going to be the sources of our greatest security challenges in the coming years, and that perhaps we should think about creating a security force, a military, with a fundamentally different focus: defensive rather than offensive, stabilizing rather than destabilizing, sustaining a different kind of troop. Instead of the “militarization of diplomacy” where DOD personnel assume public diplomacy and assistance responsibilities that civilian agencies do not have the trained staff to fill, perhaps we should think about the ‘diplomization’ of the military, where a civilian-led operation has a policing arm separate from a military arm separate from a construction arm. Different roles, different teams, same mission?

Beebe, a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Army, talks about his work looking at what “security” means to people in different countries in Africa, and comes to the conclusion that their concerns are daily-living immediacies, not long-term possibilities. Mary Kaldor is the Director of the Centre for the Study of Global Governance at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Finally, the two authors directly address the role of energy in our on-going concerns: “Energy security is a global problem linked to climate change and so, instead of geopolitical competition, there needs to be a global strategy that combines diversification, transparency, and human security.” Both authors recognize they will be criticized for this approach (for being too optimistic), but our children may surprise us with their wisdom, pragmatism, and innovation. This is a short, clear, thoughtful framing of the debate.