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  • The Anti-Atlantis:Suki Kim, North Korea, and Immersion Narrative
  • Christopher P. Wilson (bio)

In 2014, the acclaimed novelist Suki Kim, born in South Korea and raised in the United States, released one of our most unusual nonfiction accounts of contemporary totalitarianism. Her book, titled Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite, recounted Kim's six-month investigative journey while working as a teacher in a Christian academy for young North Korean men, just outside their capital city of Pyongyang. By and large, Kim's book was released to considerable acclaim, with the Boston Globe calling it a "daring" exposé, the New York Review of Books "fascinating," and a national range of newspapers appending accolades such as "vivid," "uncompromising," or "valiant."1 Yet even as Without You rose to The New York Times' hardcover best-seller list, and then went to paperback, Kim found herself wanting to push back against her book's marketing and reception—or, we might say, against the undertone of certain implicit slights or dismissals directed at her along the way.

Kim itemizes these complaints in a 2016 essay in The New Republic, titled, "The Reluctant Memoirist," a confessional piece in which she enumerates the suggestions that, in the eyes of some, her book had not been much of a journalistic exposé at all.2 Rather, she says, these critics implied that Without You was really just a memoir, a story of a woman's self-discovery targeting the current market for stories about the return to one's ethnic "roots."3 As Kim tells it, the problem had begun with her publisher's plan to place the label "A Memoir" on her book cover; Kim says she initially complained about the labeling but went along, hoping that the content of her book would override its apparent niche packaging.4 However, even with that intimation of what was to come, Kim says she was unprepared for how such marketing seemed to open the door to insinuations directed at her motives, her journalistic integrity, and the risks she had taken as a reporter. She writes: "By casting my book as personal rather than professional[,] … as [the story of] a woman on a journey of self-discovery[,] … I was effectively being stripped of my expertise. … I was being moved from a position of authority—What do you know?—to the realm of emotion: How did you feel?". The worry was exacerbated, she says, when she found herself slotted on book-tour panels primarily targeting female readers eager to [End Page 93] ask about her "spiritual journey." Even then, she says, there would be "someone in the audience—often white, often male, inevitably hostile—who raised his hand to challenge my work" ("Reluctant"). The worst of it, however, came with hostile emails and online commentary, especially in tweets that claimed her work raised ethical concerns about putting her North Korean student-subjects at risk or declared she had done so for "personal gain." She felt especially galled when The New York Times assigned a reviewer (Euny Hong) not because she was qualified to assess the book's political analysis, Kim felt, but simply because that reviewer shared her Korean ethnicity.

In other words, to Kim, these matters went well beyond market classifications and their associated gender norms. Rather, Kim argues that the reclassification of her book also opened the door for what she calls an "Orientalist" marginalization. For instance, when reviewers, online commentators, or fellow journalists criticized her exposé as (in her words) a "kiss-and-tell" book out to make a "quick buck," or zeroed in on her supposedly unethical undercover strategy, she felt that these comments alluded to certain unnamed, just-below-the-surface Asian stereotypes: a propensity for money-mindedness, deception, and even female seductiveness. These suggestions rekindled emotions she had not felt "for a very long time":

Not just since the end of my yearlong book tour … but since I first arrived in America as a foreigner at age 13, mute and powerless. In immigrant ghettos, I learned that in my adoptive home, my skin was considered yellow, the color of the forsythia that had bloomed...

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