“ No way. Don’t touch that. If their book said it was true, you can’t tell them that it’s a lie. Suki Kim
“ There. Of course, the DPRK purposely infantilized its citizens, making everyone helpless and powerless so that they depended on the state. Suki Kim
“ The past was all right there before me: generations of Koreans separated by division; decades of longing, loss, hurt, regret, guilt. Suki Kim
“ 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. Suki Kim
“ 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. Suki Kim
“ 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, challeng… Suki Kim
“ 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. Suki Kim
“ Be careful with your terminology: Great Leader, Dear Leader, Precious Leader. Those names have to be carefully used, or better yet, just stay away from discussing them at all. Suki Kim
“ 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 fo… Suki Kim
“ 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. Suki Kim
“ 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… Suki Kim
“ 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 junje… Suki Kim
“ 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. Suki Kim
“ 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. Suki Kim
