Suki Kim > Quotes

“Sometimes the longer you are inside a prison, the harder it is to fathom what is possible beyond its walls.”
― Suki Kim, Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

“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.”
― Suki Kim, Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

“TIME THERE SEEMED TO PASS DIFFERENTLY. WHEN YOU ARE shut off from the world, every day is exactly the same as the one before. This sameness has a way of wearing down your soul until you become nothing but a breathing, toiling, consuming thing that awakes to the sun and sleeps at the dawning of the dark. The emptiness runs deep, deeper with each slowing day, and you become increasingly invisible and inconsequential. That’s how I felt at times, a tiny insect circling itself, only to continue, and continue. There, in that relentless vacuum, nothing moved. No news came in or out. No phone calls to or from anyone.”
― Suki Kim, Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

“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.”
― Suki Kim, Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

“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.”
― Suki Kim, Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

“The interpreter, however, is the shadow. The key is to be invisible. She is the only one in the room who hears the truth, a keeper of secrets.”
― Suki Kim, The Interpreter

“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,”
― Suki Kim, Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

“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.”
― Suki Kim, Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

“I did not tell my students that, or how their team faced Portugal, the opposing team, all alone in a stadium packed with more than sixty thousand Portuguese fans and just seventy North Korean laborers shipped in from Namibia. Seeing the World Cup in person would have sounded unreal to them, and besides, they did not like the topic. North Koreans still seemed to feel great shame over their team’s loss, despite the fact that in the world’s eyes it had been an admirable effort. But for them failure of any degree was not tolerated.”
― Suki Kim, Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

“Even teaching them to write an essay turned out to be dangerous, since the idea of coming up with your own thesis and making an argument based on evidence doesn’t exist in North Korea.”
― Suki Kim, Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

“The entire country was like a linguistic and cultural Galápagos.”
― Suki Kim, Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

“The nationalism that had been instilled in them for so many generations had produced a citizenry whose ego was so fragile that they refused to acknowledge the rest of the world.”
― Suki Kim, Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

“Such is the condition of a first-generation immigrant for whom everything is separated into now and then, into before the move and after.”
― Suki Kim, Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

“The stars are in your favor, darling, you can't be horrible. Nope, they won't let you.”
― Suki Kim, The Interpreter

“History is a record of many such irrationalities.”
― Suki Kim, Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

“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.”
― Suki Kim, Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

“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.”
― Suki Kim, Without You, There Is No Us: My secret life teaching the sons of North Korea’s elite

“the speed with which they lied was unnerving. It came too naturally to them—such as the moment when a student told me that he had cloned a rabbit as a fifth grader, or when another said that a scientist in his country had discovered a way to change blood type A to blood type B, or when the whole class insisted that playing basketball caused a person to grow taller. I was not sure if, having been told such lies as children, they could not differentiate between truth and lies, or whether it was a survival method they had mastered.”
― Suki Kim, Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

“For thousands of years, scarcely anyone left. Korea was the hermit kingdom, with its spiritual basis in Confucianism, Buddhism, and Shamanism, until 1910, when it was annexed by Japan and colonized for thirty-five years thereafter, followed by the Korean War in 1950. Having been born and raised under these brutal colonizers, my paternal grandfather spoke fluent Japanese. Shortly before his death, in the mid-1980s, he came to stay with my family in Queens, where he befriended a young Japanese woman, a missionary from the Unification Church. When my father confronted him about his sudden interest in the cult, my grandfather answered that he didn’t care about the Moonies, he only enjoyed the chance to speak Japanese with his new friend. Like others from his generation, he suffered from a sort of Stockholm syndrome and missed the language of his oppressors.”
― Suki Kim, Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

“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.”
― Suki Kim, Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

“You can only drive yourself crazy if you have no distance from the world”
― Suki Kim, The Interpreter

“But the blessing came with its price. Being bilingual, being multicultural should have brought two worlds into one heart, and yet for Suzy, it meant a persistent hollowness. It seems that she needed to love one culture to be able to love the other. Piling up cultural references led to no further identification. What Damian had called a “blessing” pushed her out of context, always. She was stuck in a vacuum where neither culture moved nor owned her. Deep inside, she felt no connection, which Damian seemed to have understood.”
― Suki Kim, The Interpreter

“I believed in words, even if they only masked the uncertainty of time passing.”
― Suki Kim, Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

“I was not sure if, having been told such lies as children, they could not differentiate between truth and lies, or whether it was a survival method they had mastered.”
― Suki Kim, Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

“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.”
― Suki Kim, Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

“WHEN YOU ARE shut off from the world, every day is exactly the same as the one before. This sameness has a way of wearing down your soul until you become nothing but a breathing, toiling, consuming thing that awakes to the sun and sleeps at the dawning of the dark. The emptiness runs deep, deeper with each slowing day, and you become increasingly invisible and inconsequential. That’s how I felt at times, a tiny insect circling itself, only to continue, and continue. There, in that relentless vacuum, nothing moved.”
― Suki Kim, Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

“Resignation is a habit, and it is contagious. It”
― Suki Kim, Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

“I wondered if it was possible that they had never been taught that lying was a bad thing.”
― Suki Kim, Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

“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.”
― Suki Kim, Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite

“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.”
― Suki Kim, Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite