Quotes from Suki Kim

are." I had begun to feel the same way. When a student from Class 1 said, openly and unashamedly, that the unfortunate thing about losing the trivia game was that they had been caught cheating and should have cheated better, I wondered if it was possible that they had never been taught that lying was a bad thing. Perhaps they felt free to continue doing it as long as they could get away with it. Was

There it is again, the mantra "if only." I am always made aware of the alternative universe where things turned out differently, in which lives were saved. I am used to the mantra. For immigrants, regret can become a way of life. Shouts

Hardly anyone knew what country had first landed men on the moon, despite the fact that they were science and technology majors. Asked what year computers had been invented, most had no idea; it was only after much consultation that one team ventured a guess: 1870.

Of course, in response to any question about their own country - such as when their first satellite, Kwangmyongsong-I, was launched into space (an event much boasted about by the DPRK, although the rest of the world deemed it a failure) - they all shouted out the exact date and year.

had met a number of South Korean journalists who were rather jaded by North Korea and uniformly said that to understand the DPRK, you needed to follow the money.

This was always the case with North Korea. It was like the bad boyfriend whose presence could never be depended on, so you always had to seize the opportunity to spend time with him when he made himself available.

I emphasized the importance of essays since, as scientists, they would one day have to write papers to prove their theories. But in reality, nothing was ever proven in their world, since everything was at the whim of the Great Leader. Their writing skills were as stunted as their research skills. Writing inevitably consisted of an endless repetition of his achievements, none of which was ever verified, since they lacked the concept of backing up a claim with evidence.

I wondered if it was possible that they had never been taught that lying was a bad thing.

For those of us raised by mothers and fathers who experienced such trauma firsthand, it is impossible not to continue this remembering. I

This singular obsession with his every movement, from the way he laughed to the exact angle of his gaze, was because only one topic existed. There was only so much you could say about one man who was probably sick in bed, so they filled the time by dissecting every last aspect of his life.

Almost no one understood the fundamental idea behind writing a job application letter. They would write sentences such as I have no job and would like a job or I am bored and want a job. The entire concept of making oneself marketable in the eyes of a prospective employer did not exist.

No way. Don't touch that. If their book said it was true, you can't tell them that it's a lie.

The notion of following your heart's desire, of going wherever you chose, did not exist here, and I did not see any way to let them know what it felt like, especially since, after so little time in their system, I had lost my own sense of freedom.

Being in North Korea was profoundly depressing. There was no other way of putting it. The sealed border was not just at the 38th parallel, but everywhere, in each person's heart, blocking the past and choking off the future. As much as I loved those boys, or because of it, I was becoming convinced that the wall between us was impossible to break down, and not only that, it was permanent.

The surprise turned out to be songs: "Our Unforgettable Teacher" and the "Song of Suki," a regional folksong they had been vaguely aware of, whose lyrics they had searched out during their August vacation and written down neatly on a piece of paper as a parting gift.

I feel a greater obligation, both as a writer and as someone deeply concerned about the future of Korea, to tell the stark truth about the DPRK, in hopes that the lives of average North Koreans, including my beloved students, will one day improve.

The terror here was palpable.

One thing was clear. Their collective decision to switch their essay topics to condemn America seemed to have been compelled by the articles about Zuckerberg.

The Song of the Assassin," the theme of which was hunting. As we listened, it became clear that the objective of that hunting was to get the heads of the "Yankee nom," which means, roughly, "Yankee bastard." The refrain, over and over, was "Hunting American noms." The word the performers used for Americans' heads was not mauri but daegari, which is used only to refer to animals.

I sang along, but I could not help noticing that if you replaced the word Jesus with Great Leader, the content was not so different from some of the North Korean songs my students chanted several times each day.

wanted them to claim their own actions by saying "I" instead of "we," but here there was no "I." Even "we" did not exist without the permission of their Great Leader.

We accepted our situation meekly. How quickly we became prisoners, how quickly we gave up our freedom, how quickly we tolerated the loss of that freedom, like a child being abused, in silence. In this world, there were no individual demands, and asking permission for everything was infantilizing. So we began to understand our students, who had never been able to do anything on their own.

North Koreans took up the aesthetics of China. Culturally and visually, the nation seemed to have grown to resemble China. And this made me wonder: If North Koreans were to see Seoul today, would it look American to their eyes? Sixty-some years ago, the superpowers had artificially divided Korea, and this Chinese Korea was the legacy of that division.

Being divided into groups and ranked in hierarchies—that was what they knew. An individual action was unthinkable. Group spirit dominated everything. Even when they were competing, they looked out for one another.