Quotes from Suki Kim

when I arrived in 2011, I found myself in "Juche Year 100." The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) follows a different calendar system, which counts time from the birth of their original Great Leader, Kim Il-sung, who died in 1994; Juche, which roughly means "self-reliance," is at the core of North Korea's foundational philosophy.

the five-thousand-year-old kingdom of Korea was divided by the Allies who liberated it from Japan, that everything went wrong.

When you lose your home at a young age, you spend your life looking for its replacement.

There was no divorce in the DPRK, but in America the rate was more than 50 percent, and divorce let to crime and mental illness, according to him. So what happens when people are unhappy here after being married for a while? I asked. The student looked at me blankly. Still another student wanted to write about how McDonald's was horrible. The same student then asked me, So what kind of food does McDonald's make?

there. Of course, the DPRK purposely infantilized its citizens, making everyone helpless and powerless so that they depended on the state.

You can only drive yourself crazy if you have no distance from the world

Never hint that there is something wrong with their country.

I am often asked, "Which Korea do you come from? North or South?" It is a nonsensical question. The chance of me or any Korean out and about in the world being from the North is almost nil. Virtually no one gets out of North Korea.

The idea that North Korea alone excelled while all other nations were falling behind seemed a near obsession.

Either they were so terrified that they felt compelled to lie and boast of the greatness of their Leader, or they sincerely believed everything they were telling me. I could not decide which was worse.

My wishes were quite simple. I wanted nice warm clothes and fresh milk for my students, and I wanted the lights to come back on when it went dark, or at least enough flashlights and batteries for all of them. I wanted enough heat to ward off the cold, better food for these boys who were still growing. There were times when satisfying their basic needs—light, heat, nutritious food—seemed as important as giving them freedom.

these lovely, lying children, I saw very clearly that there was no redemption here.

lesson began—more of a get-to-know-you

Throughout history, China was always the big brother to neighboring Korea, this tiny kingdom unfortunately located adjacent to the massive empire, and in some ways, that tradition seemed to have held up. Anyone following North Korea would tell you that it is China that really holds the power.

Koreans' love–hate relationship with Japan carries on to this day, compounded by their relationship with the superpowers who took over where Japan left off: the United States and the Soviet Union, who together liberated Korea only to carve it up as a proxy for the Cold War.

What if we were the instigators of his doubt, what if he was beginning to realize that everything he had known thus far was a lie, and that we were the ones who held the key to truth? We agreed that we would never sit with him again, not even if he asked. "A dinner with us might get him killed," Katie said. I wanted to dismiss the comment as the melodrama of a twenty-three-year-old, but I knew it wasn't that. In North Korea, such a consequence was entirely possible.

Of course, the DPRK purposely infantilized its citizens, making everyone helpless and powerless so that they depended on the state.

tradition is not well suited for globalization.

There was nothing any of us could write about except what we were allowed to see, which was a concert like any other, a few staged welcome performances, and the usual tourist sites. It was a lesson in control and manipulation. The real audience was not those in the concert hall but the journalists whose role was to deliver a sanitized version of North Korea to the outside world, and what shocked me was how easily seduced they were.

Their culture was saturated with messages about killing South Koreans and Americans and references to horrifically gruesome acts, and it seemed as though they spewed those messages back out unthinkingly, perhaps in the same way that young Americans mimic behavior they see in violent movies and video games. There was really no point in holding a discussion about different kinds of love, since they all agreed that the only real love was the love of the motherland.

Be careful with your terminology: Great Leader, Dear Leader, Precious Leader. Those names have to be carefully used, or better yet, just stay away from discussing them at all.

Resignation is a habit, and it is contagious. It

all roads converge on a single moment on June 25, 1950. For those of her generation who lost somebody, life is forever divided between before that day and after.

Those years, from 1945 to 1950, had been confusing, with Kim Il-sung, the Red Army major, in the North, and Syngman Rhee, the American protégé, in the South. Cold War politics knows no bounds, and the people had no say in its dreadful consequences. Resignation is a habit, and it is contagious