Without You, There Is No Us

English, in Kim's classroom, turned out to be a dangerous subject — not because of grammar, but because language carries the world it comes from. To teach a sentence is to teach an assumption behind it, and almost every ordinary English exercise smuggled in ideas the regime could not tolerate. A lesson on writing a personal essay assumed a self with private opinions. A lesson on persuasion assumed that facts could be debated. Kim found herself constantly editing the world down to what would fit through the compound's walls.

The simplest assignments produced the strangest results. When she asked the students to write about their daily lives, their essays came back flattened into slogans and praise for the leaders, as though a genuinely personal sentence were a thing they had never been allowed to form. When she asked them to describe their weekends, the answers were vague, because free time in the Western sense barely existed. The very structure of the language she was teaching kept bumping against the structure of the lives they were living.

The most haunting thread in Kim's account is how completely lying had become the fabric of daily life — not as a moral failing but as a survival mechanism woven into everything. The students lied to her, sometimes knowingly, sometimes not, because they had been raised inside a story and had no vantage point from which to see it as a story. They told her about family trips and abundant food and technological triumphs, and she could rarely tell where propaganda ended and genuine belief began. The line had been erased long before any of them were born.

Kim, in turn, was lying too. Every day she smiled through her role as a devoted teacher while secretly recording notes for a book, hiding her laptop, disguising her true reasons for being there. She was as embedded in deception as her students were, and she felt it. The book's honesty about her own dishonesty is part of what gives it weight; she does not pretend she stood cleanly outside the system she was documenting. She lived inside its logic, and it cost her something.

Step back from the semester and Kim's book becomes an argument about what total control does to the inner life of the people it holds — even, or especially, its favored ones. We tend to picture dictatorship as a matter of walls, guards, and censored newspapers, an external cage. Kim's account suggests something more disturbing: that the deepest damage is done inside the mind, in the erosion of the ordinary capacity to know what is true, to speak plainly, to trust another person with a private thought. Her students were not starving in a camp. They were the elite. And they had still been remade at the root.

This is why she calls them both soldiers and slaves. They were being groomed to run the country, given rare access to foreign teachers and modern tools, and they were also utterly captive — captive not only physically but epistemically, unable to step outside the only reality they had ever been permitted. The privilege and the imprisonment were the same fact seen from two angles. That doubling is what makes them so hard to write about, and so hard to forget.

When Kim finally left, she carried her students' faces and letters out with her, along with the notes that would become the book — and the knowledge that she could never tell them what she had done, or send word, or know what became of them. The intimacy she had built was real, and it was also, structurally, impossible; the wall she had lived behind closed again the moment she stepped past it. Without You, There Is No Us takes its title from a regime anthem, a line meant to bind the people to their leader. In Kim's hands it curdles into something else: a portrait of people so thoroughly bound to a fiction that they can no longer locate themselves apart from it.