Quotes from Suki Kim

they did not like to volunteer answers during class. These were excellent students. They prepared so thoroughly that it often seemed pointless to go over their homework. The margins of their textbooks were filled with scribbled notes. Yet they hesitated before raising their hands. When I would call on them, they would immediately get up to answer, but volunteering seemed foreign to them.

When I visited either of the two Koreas I always imagined that I was traveling back to my roots and would discover new truths about my past. Now it occurred to me that the past I was seeking had for many years been buried under and overtaken by American and Chinese influences. The Korea of my imagination existed only in paintings, history books, the memories of older generations, and in the remnants that I glimpsed, every now and then, like shards of glass poking out from the buried past.

this was a country where the most important thing a woman had ever done was to give birth to the Great Leader—not unlike the Virgin Mary.

We believe what we want to believe.

But no phrase puzzled them more than Social Security deduction.

His style of criticism—indirect, using the third person—was not unfamiliar to me. I had interviewed many defectors in the past, and it was surprising how many of them readily bashed the people around them, often behind their backs. I wondered if their behavior stemmed from the lifelong indoctrination of weekly critiques, from the constant spying on their fellow citizens.

The past was all right there before me: generations of Koreans separated by division; decades of longing, loss, hurt, regret, guilt.

North Korea had a random feeling to it; there seemed to be no pattern, no rhyme or reason to what aspects of Western culture—whether an icon like Michael Jordan or the detritus of the culture—might be allowed in.

In front, I saw five or six women squatting and cutting the grass with scissors. This was a familiar sight by now, but still strange. At PUST, and even in Pyongyang's parks, I had noticed workers doing the same. Lawnmowers were used in the rest of the world, but not here. Was it about control or was there simply a shortage of gas?

Sometimes the longer you are inside a prison, the harder it is to fathom what is possible beyond its walls.

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.

For even now, decades after I first adopted it, English does not pierce my heart the same way that my mother tongue does. The word division weighs less than bundan, and war is easier to say than junjeng.

They would swear that the United States was their number one enemy, and yet carrying a pack of Marlboro Lights seemed to be a sign of privilege and class.

I reminded myself that I did not come from a place where mind games were a prerequisite for survival to such an extreme degree, a place where the slightest act of rebellion could have unimaginable consequences. Slowly

North Korea was the evangelical Christian Holy Grail, the hardest place to crack in the whole world, and converting its people would guarantee the missionaries a spot in heaven.

That was the inherent contradiction. This was a nation backed into a corner. They did not want to open up, and yet they had no choice but to move toward engagement if they wanted to survive. They had built the entire foundation of their country on isolationism and wanting to kill Americans and South Koreans, yet they needed to learn English and feed their children with foreign money.

I believed in words, even if they only masked the uncertainty of time passing.

The stars are in your favor, darling, you can't be horrible. Nope, they won't let you.

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.

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. In both groups, singing was a joyful, collective ritual from which they took strength.

They were always comparing themselves to the outside world, which none of them had ever seen, declaring themselves the best. This insistence on "best" seemed strangely childlike, and the words best and greatest were used so frequently that they gradually lost their meaning.

Such is the condition of a first-generation immigrant for whom everything is separated into now and then, into before the move and after.

The entire country was like a linguistic and cultural Galápagos.

History is a record of many such irrationalities.