Suki Kim

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.