The three semesters I spent as a foreign student at Kim Il Sung University were a bittersweet period in my life. Even before North Korean agents arrested me, I had mixed emotions about the country.

Foreign residents in the DPRK live under stifling surveillance and a veil of suspicion. I was unable to overcome the intense system of social control, which blocks the way at every turn to prevent real, meaningful connections between foreigners and local people. 

The most disheartening aspect of life in North Korea was the hypocrisy, which in North Korea resembles George Orwell’s doublethink in “1984.” Hypocrisy