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a6f8ceb
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Sometimes the longer you are inside a prison, the harder it is to fathom what is possible beyond its walls.
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Suki Kim |
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1c44bc0
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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 time..
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Suki Kim |
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b7300af
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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.
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Suki Kim |
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ea33520
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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.
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Suki Kim |
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0fb6c4a
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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.
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Suki Kim |
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4056ab5
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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.
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Suki Kim |
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6c4048d
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Such is the condition of a first-generation immigrant for whom everything is separated into now and then, into before the move and after.
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Suki Kim |
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856793b
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As for unmarried women, I have no idea where they are buried. For a very long time, in Korea, no one talked about them.)
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Suki Kim |
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6001d32
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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,
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Suki Kim |
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2022377
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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.
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Suki Kim |
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535e681
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these lovely, lying children, I saw very clearly that there was no redemption here.
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Suki Kim |
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cd6e771
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The stars are in your favor, darling, you can't be horrible. Nope, they won't let you.
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stars
self-love
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Suki Kim |
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e6cdf70
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There it is again, the mantra "if only." I am always made aware of the alternative universe where things turned out differently, in which lives were saved. I am used to the mantra. For immigrants, regret can become a way of life. Shouts"
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Suki Kim |
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eba7e6f
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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.
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Suki Kim |
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f57304a
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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.
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Suki Kim |
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b290c4a
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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."
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Suki Kim |
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505ce97
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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 ow..
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Suki Kim |
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8ac8a78
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The entire country was like a linguistic and cultural Galapagos.
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Suki Kim |
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92c31f1
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History is a record of many such irrationalities.
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Suki Kim |
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dc97c9a
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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.
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Suki Kim |
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54380eb
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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.
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Suki Kim |
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7859209
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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.
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Suki Kim |
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760c7cc
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You can only drive yourself crazy if you have no distance from the world
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going-crazy
truths
the-world
insanity
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Suki Kim |
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4132251
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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 ey..
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Suki Kim |
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b762e49
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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 fa..
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Suki Kim |
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1e2b1af
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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.
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Suki Kim |
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2c7338b
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We believe what we want to believe.
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Suki Kim |
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9e6a55b
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18
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Suki Kim |
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dde31cf
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The terror here was palpable.
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Suki Kim |
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6dbcb31
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The surprise turned out to be songs: "Our Unforgettable Teacher" and the "Song of Suki," a regional folksong they had been vaguely aware of, whose lyrics they had searched out during their August vacation and written down neatly on a piece of paper as a parting gift."
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Suki Kim |
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076a88b
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You will need to pay for the gas. Euros, Chinese renminbi, and U.S. dollars will be accepted, but the North Korean won is used only at Potonggang Department Store or at Tongil Market.
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Suki Kim |
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735374a
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there. Of course, the DPRK purposely infantilized its citizens, making everyone helpless and powerless so that they depended on the state.
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Suki Kim |
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07527f8
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I am often asked, "Which Korea do you come from? North or South?" It is a nonsensical question. The chance of me or any Korean out and about in the world being from the North is almost nil. Virtually no one gets out of North Korea."
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Suki Kim |
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78d9305
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Nothing, it seemed, could break through their belligerent isolation; moreover, this attitude left no room for any argument, since all roads led to just one conclusion.
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Suki Kim |
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349cce7
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lesson began--more of a get-to-know-you
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Suki Kim |
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e25d84b
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Resignation is a habit, and it is contagious. It
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Suki Kim |
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d6cef3f
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This was always the case with North Korea. It was like the bad boyfriend whose presence could never be depended on, so you always had to seize the opportunity to spend time with him when he made himself available.
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Suki Kim |
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b6c57eb
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I wondered if it was possible that they had never been taught that lying was a bad thing.
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Suki Kim |
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e7e409c
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For those of us raised by mothers and fathers who experienced such trauma firsthand, it is impossible not to continue this remembering. I
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Suki Kim |
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e706373
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No way. Don't touch that. If their book said it was true, you can't tell them that it's a lie.
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Suki Kim |
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7c8c2d5
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I feel a greater obligation, both as a writer and as someone deeply concerned about the future of Korea, to tell the stark truth about the DPRK, in hopes that the lives of average North Koreans, including my beloved students, will one day improve.
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Suki Kim |
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2bacfc7
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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.
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Suki Kim |
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8d197cf
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For a moment, I felt a pang of envy. I remembered those few drifting years after college, taking off alone with a backpack to explore the world. I thought I was playing a dare with life then, challenging my limits, but I was scared most of the time and wept for no clear reason in dingy hostel rooms across Europe and Central America. But the years had worked their magic, and that scared girl I had been in that remote place in time had dissol..
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Suki Kim |
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678a56a
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Never hint that there is something wrong with their country.
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Suki Kim |