Tonight's guess are Suki Kim on The Daily Show and Sarah Koenig on The Colbert Report.
Suki Kim is an author best known for her book The Interpreter. Tonight she is on to promote her latest book
Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite
Every day, three times a day, the students march in two straight lines, singing praises to Kim Jong-il and North Korea: Without you, there is no motherland. Without you, there is no us. It is a chilling scene, but gradually Suki Kim, too, learns the tune and, without noticing, begins to hum it. It is 2011, and all universities in North Korea have been shut down for an entire year, the students sent to construction fields—except for the 270 students at the all-male Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST), a walled compound where portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il look on impassively from the walls of every room, and where Suki has accepted a job teaching English. Over the next six months, she will eat three meals a day with her young charges and struggle to teach them to write, all under the watchful eye of the regime.
Life at PUST is lonely and claustrophobic, especially for Suki, whose letters are read by censors and who must hide her notes and photographs not only from her minders but from her colleagues—evangelical Christian missionaries who don't know or choose to ignore that Suki doesn't share their faith. As the weeks pass, she is mystified by how easily her students lie, unnerved by their obedience to the regime. At the same time, they offer Suki tantalizing glimpses of their private selves—their boyish enthusiasm, their eagerness to please, the flashes of curiosity that have not yet been extinguished. She in turn begins to hint at the existence of a world beyond their own—at such exotic activities as surfing the Internet or traveling freely and, more dangerously, at electoral democracy and other ideas forbidden in a country where defectors risk torture and execution. But when Kim Jong-il dies, and the boys she has come to love appear devastated, she wonders whether the gulf between her world and theirs can ever be bridged.
Without You, There Is No Us offers a moving and incalculably rare glimpse of life in the world's most unknowable country, and at the privileged young men she calls "soldiers and slaves."
It is a deeply unsettling book, offering a rare and disturbing inside glimpse into the strangeness, brutality and claustrophobia of North Korea.
But "Without You, There Is No Us" also is unsettling because it is clear Kim's subterfuge put her university hosts and students in peril. Her book raises difficult questions about whether this insight is worth the considerable risk to these innocents, none of whom knew her real reasons for being there.
Kim acknowledges this conflict throughout her memoir, but she concludes that the betrayal is worth the greater good. She explains that she changed faculty and students' names in an attempt to protect them, yet she understands there may be repercussions:
I have written this book with the full knowledge that it will anger the DPRK regime, the president of PUST, and my former colleagues there. Although I am sorry to cause the president and faculty distress, I feel a greater obligation, both as a writer and as a person deeply concerned about the future of Korea, to tell the stark truth about the DPRK, in the hopes that the lives of average North Koreans, including my beloved students, will one day improve.
Kim writes that she develops a fierce maternal love for her students, who open up to her in some ways and remain profoundly mysterious in others. They keep huge swathes of their lives from her, repeatedly lying as a group to her about their activities and whereabouts. Yet they also embrace Kim and revere her as a teacher, shouting "Good morning, Professor Kim! How are you?" each morning.
These are the students she betrays, and not just by writing this memoir. She also actively attempts to enlighten them to the outside world. "There I was," she writes, "a spy of sorts, hoping not to plant bombs but to plant ideas."
At one point, a student asks her about general assemblies and she gives an explanation of democracy. The topic is extremely perilous. The student could be a plant trying to trip her up. Or, as it turned out, he could be curious and reckless. Kim later regrets her conversation with him, and acknowledges she has put her students at risk
Review: 'Without You, There Is No Us' by Suki Kim
This sounds like a good book, however it is troubling. She may have put innocent lives in the cross hairs of a tyrannical regime to write it. On the other hand, if more is known about the plight of North Koreans there might be enough pressure from the rest of the world to get the ball rolling on basic reforms there. This book combined with the new movie The Interview will surely have Kim Jong-un all worked up, which is never a good thing as North Korea tends to start shooting or lobbing bombs at South Korea when they feel mistreated.
Sarah Koenig is a
journalist, public radio personality, staff producer of the television and radio program, This American Life, and is the host and executive producer of the acclaimed podcast Serial
Serial is a podcast where we unfold one nonfiction story, week by week, over the course of a season. We'll stay with each story for as long as it takes to get to the bottom of it.
Season One
On January 13, 1999, a girl named Hae Min Lee, a senior at Woodlawn High School in Baltimore County, Maryland, disappeared. A month later, her body turned up in a city park. She'd been strangled. Her 17-year-old ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed, was arrested for the crime, and within a year, he was convicted and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison. The case against him was largely based on the story of one witness, Adnan’s friend Jay, who testified that he helped Adnan bury Hae's body. But Adnan has always maintained he had nothing to do with Hae’s death. Some people believe he’s telling the truth. Many others don’t.
Sarah Koenig, who hosts Serial, first learned about this case more than a year ago. In the months since, she's been sorting through box after box (after box) of legal documents and investigators' notes, listening to trial testimony and police interrogations, and talking to everyone she can find who remembers what happened between Adnan Syed and Hae Min Lee fifteen years ago. What she realized is that the trial covered up a far more complicated story, which neither the jury nor the public got to hear. The high school scene, the shifting statements to police, the prejudices, the sketchy alibis, the scant forensic evidence - all of it leads back to the most basic questions: How can you know a person’s character? How can you tell what they’re capable of? In Season One of Serial, she looks for answers.
It sounds interesting, but I have not listened to it. I am really not a fan of true crime as entertainment, but it at least doesn't seem to be as exploitative as some of the crap on TV.
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