If North Korea is in the news, you know something bad happened.
Usually it’s a nuclear missile test, cyber attack, or military purge.
Most recently, it was the sad case of Otto Warmbier, the college student from Cincinnati who, in January of 2016, was arrested in North Korea for stealing a propaganda poster. Sentenced to 15 years of hard labor, Warmbier died shortly after being released earlier this month.
Headlines aside, satellites and space stations are our most reliable windows into life in North Korea. Astronauts on the International Space Station caused an International Sensation in 2014 when NASA released a photo taken as the space station flew over the Korean Peninsula.
The photo shows North Korea as almost completely black. China and South Korea are brightly illuminated, but—save for the glimmer of Pyongyang—North Korea blends into the black ocean. This absence of light is an exquisite metaphor for what we don’t know about life in the “hermit kingdom.”
North Korean defectors put a human face on life in this police state, but they’ve proven to be unreliable witnesses, in part because lying is a reflexive survival mechanism for North Koreans.
Escape from Camp Fourteen, by Blaine Harden (DB 76532), is the most prominent example. Three years after publication, Shin Dong-hyuk, the young defector at the heart of the book, changed some of the details of his story. (See http://www.blaineharden.com/escape-from-camp-14-reviews/.)
As Harden notes, because North Korea is closed to the outside world, it’s difficult to fact-check defectors’ stories, and they must be read with a skeptical eye.
Several recent memoirs written by defectors, vetted by skeptical eyes, shed slivers of light on North Korea, including IN ORDER TO LIVE: A NORTH KOREAN GIRL’S JOURNEY TO FREEDOM, by Yeonmi Park (DB 82685).
Park escaped North Korea in 2007 at the age of 13, along with her mother. Both were sold as slave brides in China, and Yeonmi later helped traffic other North Korean women—one of many examples of what she did, quite literally, in order to live.
Park eventually finds her way to South Korea. Along the way, she discovers that freedom can be cruel and painful. Her salvation is books: reading helps her learn how to be a human.
Park offers a disturbing but human portrait of North Korea as “hell on earth.” Yes, it’s not uncommon to go weeks, if not months, without electricity. She and her family eat roasted cicadas, grasshoppers, and dragonfly heads to survive the famine of the 1990s. When faced with a fertilizer shortage, the regime institutes a policy which is so bizarre that it’s almost amusing. Almost.
Hatred of Americans is a pillar of education in North Korea: schoolchildren are taught to hate Americans. The bleakness of life in North Korea is even reflected in its language: there is no word for “justice.” And the only definition of “love” is what you feel for the Dear Leader.
While you’re enjoying those lazy hazy crazy days of summer, take a moment to give thanks that you live in the United States, where justice is more than a word, and you can love to your heart’s content.
NLS Annotation: An autobiographical recounting of life in the repressive North Korean society in which the author was raised, and her subsequent escape. She describes her family, the culture of leader worship, her father’s imprisonment and torture, and how, even after her escape, she was sold into sexual slavery in China. Unrated. Commercial audiobook. 2015.
For more about Yeonmi Park and North Korea, travel to these links:
Park’s remarkable 2014 One World Summit speech:
Park’s book talk at Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon:
And a ReasonTV interview:
For further exploration of North Korea, read THE GREAT LEADER AND THE FIGHTER PILOT: THE TRUE STORY OF THE TYRANT WHO CREATED NORTH KOREA AND THE YOUNG LIEUTENANT WHO STOLE HIS WAY TO FREEDOM, by Blaine Harden (DB 82372).
THE ORPHAN MASTER’S SON (DB 74282), by Adam Johnson, is a fictionalized peek inside North Korea. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2013.