Without Them, There Is No You: The Role of Personal Choice and History in Resisting Political Control

In 2011, Korean-American journalist Suki Kim went undercover as an English teacher at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, working to teach her students while simultaneously recording everything she could about the workings of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). In 2014, her book Without You, There is No Us was published as a memoir, in part due to the inclusion of personal details considered less relevant to the story, thereby undercutting her journalistic credentials. Here, using C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man as a theoretical framework for understanding oppressive regimes and the ways that they control the population, I am able to shed light on both the rhetorical purposes of the inclusion of personal details and the counter-function of eliminating those details in the citizenry of the DPRK. Abolition, combined with The Screwtape Letters, here function as the theory enabling the reader not only to understand the complexity of Kim’s work, but the seriousness of mechanisms of control applied to those living under the North Korean regime (and other oppressive governments) as well as the weakness of those mechanisms.