Suki Kim, an American journalist born in South Korea, told HuffPost Live’s
Suki Kim, an American journalist born in South Korea, told HuffPost Live’s Josh Zepps on Tuesday how she got involved teaching 50 students whose families were part of Pyongyang’s elite.
Though Kim had traveled to North Korea before, she spent six months in Pyongyang in 2011 undercover, finding a job as a teacher at the all-male Pyongyang University of Science and Technology. She explained the bizarre agreement behind PUST; it was founded by a Korean American Christian evangelical under the agreement that teachers inside the school would not proselytize, a crime punishable by imprisonment.
She told HuffPost Live the school was under intense surveillance by the military. “I was watched 24/7. The school was bugged, so there wasn’t really any way to show anything out in the open,” Kim said.
Her students, whom Kim described as “lovely,” were unaware of the school’s religious affiliation. But they knew she was a foreigner and that they weren’t allowed to show much curiosity about the outside world. When they did subtly ask her questions about life beyond North Korea, she was afraid to answer because she didn’t “know what danger it posed for [them].”
When Kim returned from North Korea, she penned her experience in a new book, Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea’s Elite.