Suki Kim (born 1970) is a Korean American journalist and writer. She is the author of the novel The Interpreter and the book Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea's Elite, about her time teaching English in Pyongyang. Kim is the only writer to have lived undercover in North Korea to conduct immersive journalism. She is a contributing editor at The New Republic.
Early life Kim was born in Seoul, South Korea, and immigrated to the United States with her family at thirteen. She is a naturalized American citizen.
Kim graduated from Barnard College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English. Kim also studied East Asian Literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. She has received a Fulbright Research Grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Open Society Foundations Fellowship. Kim was also a Ferris Journalism Fellow at Princeton University, where she was a visiting lecturer.
Work
The Interpreter Kim's debut novel, The Interpreter, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2003, is a murder mystery about a young Korean-American woman, Suzy Park, living in New York City and searching for answers as to why her shopkeeper parents were murdered. To search the novel, Kim took a job as an interpreter in New York City.l The book received positive reviews and won several awards. The Interpreter was translated into Dutch, French, Korean, Italian, and Japanese.
North Korea Kim visited North Korea in February 2002 to participate in the 60th birthday celebration of Kim Jong-il. She documented this experience in a February 2003 cover essay for The New York Review of Books.
Kim accompanied the New York Philharmonic in February 2008, when they traveled to Pyongyang for the historical cultural visit to North Korea from the United States. Her article, "A Really Big Show: The New York Philharmonic's fantasia in North Korea", was published in Harper's Magazine in December 2008.
Kim's second book, Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea's Elite, documents her three and a half months in Pyongyang, where she taught English at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology in 2011. Kim posed as a Christian, as the university is largely funded by Christian evangelicals, and secretly took notes. She obscured the identities of her students to protect them from the authorities. The staff accused Kim of falsely claiming they were missionaries, which Kim dismissed, saying their long-term goal was to convert North Koreans to Christianity.
In a 2016 essay in The New Republic, Kim wrote that she had been criticized for using deception to enter North Korea and accused of endangering her students, lying about her experience or for writing the book for profit. She disagreed with the publisher's marketing of Without You, There Is No Us as a memoir, as it was taken less seriously as a work of investigative journalism. She argued that coverage of North Korea was colored by orientalism as it was dominated by the work of white authors who had only entered North Korea on supervised tours.
Later work In 2017, Suki Kim broke a sexual harassment scandal against the journalist John Hockenberry at WNYC in an article in The Cut. Her investigation led to the firing of two longterm WNYC hosts, Leonard Lopate and Jonathan Schwartz, and the resignation of its CEO, Laura Walker, and Chief Content officer, Dean Cappello. Her article was voted the Best Investigative Reporting of 2017 by Longreads.
In 2020, Kim published an investigative feature in The New Yorker on Free Joseon, a group that has declared itself a provisional government for North Korea. She was the first to interview the group's leader, Adrian Hong, while he was on the run from the Department of Justice.
Bibliography
Books +YearTitle2003The Interpreter 2014Without You, There Is No Us; My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite
Anthologies +YearTitleRef2005New York Stories: The Best of the City Section of the New York Times2017The Moth Presents All These Wonders2018The Best American Essays 2018
Essays and op-eds
About North Korea and South Korea +YearTitlePublicationRef2003A Visit to North KoreaThe New York Review of Books2003Korea's New WaveThe New York Times2003Strange CentennialThe Boston Globe2005Die Ahnen und die Wasser (The Anticipation of the Water)Neue Zurcher Zeitung2005Hwang, Drawn and Quartered?The Wall Street Journal2006Great LeadershipThe Wall Street Journal2007Asia's ApostlesThe Washington Post2007Globalizing GriefThe Wall Street Journal2008A Really Big Show: The New York Philharmonic’s Fantasia in North KoreaHarper's2009Notes from Another Credit Card CrisisThe New York Times2010The System of DefectingHarper's2010North Korean Fans Attend the World CupNewsweek2013The Shared Wound in KoreaThe New York Times2013The Dear Leader's Heinous ActThe New York Times2014The Good Student in North KoreaThe New York Times Magazine2014My Time at an Elite Pyongyang Boarding SchoolForeign Affairs2014Teaching Essay Writing in PyongyangSlate2014The Sony Hack Is North Korea's Biggest Victory in a Long TimeSlate2014Dear Leader's Great VictoryThe National Post2014The Secret Shame of North Korea's Slave WorkersNewsweek2015What ‘The Interview’ Gets Right and Wrong about US Policy Toward North KoreaThe Nation2016Is it Time to Intervene in North Korea?The New Republic2016Republic of Disappointment.Slate2016Across the Broken BridgeThe New Republic2016Korean Reporters Got Fired, Got Active, and Got The PresidentForeign Policy2017The Meaning of Kim Jong Nam's MurderThe Atlantic2017An Extraordinary Statement from a North Korean PrinceThe New Yorker2017Is Christian Evangelicals’ Money Helping to Prop Up North Korea’s Regime?The Washington Post2017Tourism to North Korea isn’t about engagement. It’s torture porn.The Washington Post2017My two messed-up countries: an immigrant’s dilemmaThe Guardian2017South Korea Is More Worried About Donald Trump Than Kim Jong UnForeign Policy2018The DealmakerThe New Republic2018Covering the North Korea Summit While Trapped in a Warehouse in SingaporeThe New Yorker2018North Korea’s Lipstick DiplomacyThe New York Times2020How South Korea Lost Control of Its Coronavirus OutbreakThe New Yorker2020The Underground Movement Trying To Topple the North Korean RegimeThe New Yorker
Other work +YearTitlePublicationRef2003Translating Poverty and PainThe New York Times2003Marriage of Inconvenience?The New York Times2003North Ride HomeGourmet2004Facing Poverty with a Rich Girl's HabitsThe New York Times2006Our Affair Was One Long Lesson in How to Break UpThe New York Times2010Forced from Home and Yet Never Free of itThe New York Times2015Love Stories: Why I Flew to Beijing in Search of the Perfect DressVogue2016Mr Rubio's NeighborhoodThe New Republic2016The Reluctant MemoiristThe New Republic2016What Happened in BrisbaneThe New Republic2017Land of DarknessLapham's Quarterly2017Public-Radio Icon John Hockenberry Accused of Harassing Female ColleaguesThe Cut
Awards +YearTitleNotesRef2003Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book AwardThe Interpreter, winner2004Ernest Hemingway Foundation AwardThe Interpreter, nominee2004PEN Openbook AwardThe Interpreter, winner2019Berlin Prize Winner
Fellowships +YearTitleRef1998Millay Colony for the Arts1998Ucross Foundation1999Ragdale Foundation1999The Edward F. Albee Foundation Fellowship2001MacDowell Fellowship2002MacDowell Fellowship2003MacDowell Fellowship2003Santa Maddalena Foundation Fellowship2005Ucross Foundation2006Guggenheim Fellowship2006MacDowell Fellowship2007Bogliasco Foundation Fellowship2010MacDowell Fellowship2012George Soros's Open Society Foundations Fellowship2014New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship2017Ferris Journalism Fellowship at Princeton University2018Ucross Foundation2019Arizona State University's Center on the Future of War Fellowship2019New America Foundation Fellowship2019MacDowell Fellowship2020Schloss Wiepersdorf Fellowship
See also
List of Asian American writers
References
External links
Official Website Suki Kim on Twitter