Suki Kim is the only writer to ever to live undercover in North Korea to investigate and write a book from inside the country.

Kim held a book signing and lecture at the Pomerantz Center on Sunday afternoon as part of the Iowa City Book Festival.

Born in South Korea, she moved to the United States at 13. This is her second time in Iowa, coming once before in January.

“Suki Kim’s book *Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korean Elite* was the 2016 selection of the University of Iowa’s Center for Human Rights one-community one-book program,” said Professor Greg Hamot, an associate director of the Center for Human Rights.

Since 2002, Kim has traveled to North Korea numerous times and witnessed Kim Jong-il’s 60th birthday, among other events such as the country’s year of 100 and the death of Kim Jong-il in 2011.

Kim first found her way to North Korea through a pro-North Korean minister in New York. She said the best way to get into the country was to ask as little questions as possible.

However, she said, she wasn’t going for what she first assumed. After landing in North Korea, she found out she was one of five delegates, representing the United States for Kim Jong-il’s 60th birthday.

As the youth leader representative, she quickly realized why North Korea had chosen her. She was fluent in both Korean and English, and she was a known novelist who had family connections to North Korea.

“I was just a part of their propaganda. They hoped I would write a book in support of Kim Jong-il,” Kim said. “I realized while there, the control was beyond anyone’s imagination, North Korea is good at showing the white-washed version. Writers have their hands tied. It’s hard to investigate there.”

Investigating in North Korea is hard not only because of the government, she said, but because of how one-sided the interviews will always be. After a while, Kim realized going back to North Korea wouldn’t teach her anything new unless she lived there. However, she said, living there while investigating is an almost impossible accomplishment.

Kim did go above and beyond to find a way to live in North Korea. She applied for and nailed a position teaching at Pyongyang University of Science and Technology. Kim said she knew the university was corrupt and mostly propaganda, but it was her only way inside the country.

Kim said she would write in the early morning or late at night, deleting what she wrote from her computer immediately after saving it to a flash drive. She would keep the flash drive with her at all times, and inside it she had such files as lessons plans, putting her book information hidden in the middle.

“It is always inspiring to discover the risks that writers and other humanitarians are willing to take in service to truth and dignity,” Douglas Larche, a senior Fulbright scholar, said.

Kim discovered that in 2011, to “celebrate” the year 100, North Korea shut down all the universities and sent almost all the men to construction jobs. The few elite men who weren’t sent to these jobs were sent away to Pyongyang University.

“The elites didn’t have it much better, the level of control and fear was the same,” Kim said. “Even this was another form of propaganda.”
Kim said she thought it was very odd that all universities shut down other than Pyongyang University. She said it’s almost as if they were sending the elite men into safekeeping and everyone else into the labor force. It was as if the government was getting ready for some big shift to happen to it.

Kim realized they were bracing for when Kim Jong-il passed away later that year. The official report was that he died on his train, which she said the government says he was almost always on going around the country working for the people. However, Kim realized it seemed as though they had been preparing for his death for months and as if it had already happened in the past.

The country’s sadness and grief was very real when Kim Jong-il passed, she said. She said he was treated as more than leader, it was almost as if he was a god.

Some of her students might have realized it was wrong, however it was all they knew, she said. None of her students knew what the internet was, and she even showed them a Harry Potter movie for the first time in their life.
“You’re torn; you want to show them the world,” Kim said. “But you don’t want to risk getting them in trouble, either.”