Legit Lit About North Korea

As with most of the books I enjoyed reading, I first heard about Adam Johnson's The Orphan Masters Son from an NPR book podcast. The reporter made it sound fascinating, and her praise was validated when the book later won the Pulitzer Prize. Having read Escape From Camp 14* a few months before, I was curious to read more about the mysterious, troubled other half of Korea. I was not disappointed.


A book set North Korea has great potential to be irredeemably depressing. So I was relieved that Johnson chose to write the novel as a dark satire. The humanitarian crisis in North Korea may seem an inappropriate topic for humor, but the situation is so desperately ironic that the book's tone seemed appropriate.  The hero in The Orphan Master's Son is Jun Do, a play on the generic, western "John Doe," which allows Jun Do to represent every North Korean. Jun Do is anything but ordinary however, if by circumstance more than because of any particular personal qualities, and during his extraordinary life he is thrust into nearly every unusual circumstance in which a North Korean man might find himself. After his beautiful mother is forcibly relocated to Pyongyang, he lives in an orphanage with other abandoned boys all named after North Korea's glorious martyrs under the care of his mourning, angry father. He performs manual labor of every description, works in the dreaded North Korean mines, is trained in special combat, learns English so as to tap and monitor enemy radio signals, works as a kidnapper of Japanese nationals, travels to the United States as a "diplomat," falls in with a famous actress, impersonates a high-ranking official, and escapes from a prison. To supplement Jun Do's diverse experiences, Johnson also adds the narrative of an interrogator to provide the perspective of an average Pyongyang citizen, and also throws in short chapters composed of propaganda blared at the citizens through loudspeakers installed in their homes. An no book about North Korea would be complete without the Dear Leader, who is a character in the book as well. 


A reviewer wrote that Jun Do is not sympathetic, but I disagree; in fact, I found every character but Kim Jung-Il to be sympathetic, though many of them do cruel things. The setting is developed so that it's clear that characters really have no choices. Johnson, a professor at Stanford, conducted extensive research on North Korea and even visited, though due to the secrecy of the regime much was necessarily left up to his imagination. (The Author's Note at the end of the book, in which Johnson describes his supervised excursions through Pyongyang, is fascinating.) Interestingly, I learned that the propaganda chapters, which I found to be the most ludicrous parts of the book, were also the most authentic. 

In addition to being fascinating, The Orphan Master's Son is an exquisitely written novel. I haven't read any of Johnson's other offerings, but if they're all this masterful I have a feeling I would be captivated by his account of a person crossing a street or brushing her teeth. The sheer force of his talent driving a book about illusive North Korea was enough to make this one of the best books I've read in a long time. 

I finished The Orphan Master's Son several months ago, and polished off another, related book last night. Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick has been on my list for a while, and I moved it to the top when my friend Virginia re-recommended it recently. (It's also a National Book Award finalist.) Demick's book is not fiction, but I recognized many of the themes and even the same irony from the pages of The Orphan Master's Son. Demick interviewed hundreds of defectors and visited North Korea several times in researching her book. The finished product centers around the lives of six people from all walks of life who left the country during the famine years in North Korea. One is a doctor, a formerly loyal citizen who began to become disillusioned during the famine when patient after patient in the pediatric ward died from basic infections they were too malnourished to fight off. A pair of former lovers, one the daughter of a miner from a family with "tainted blood" and the other a high-born, brilliant student at a prestigious Pyongyang University, fled separately; their twin accounts reminded me that North Koreans, despite their extreme circumstances, are nonetheless real people who laugh, gossip, and fall in love. Another account is that of a scrappy orphan boy who begs, steals, borrows, and smuggles long enough to survive his childhood, then manages to live through a few years in a labor camp before his release and subsequent escape across the border into China. The final two testimonies are from a mother-daughter pair, the elder a devout disciple of her monarch and the younger a skeptical critic who escapes North Korea and then pays her mother's passage, too. 

Although it necessarily delves into North Korean history and politics, Nothing to Envy is never dry or slow; in fact, it is one of the most gripping non-fiction books I've read. Demick weaves in enough fact to orient the reader and enough human interest material to keep it all relevant on a level that is deeply personal. I particularly appreciated her ability to make me relate to people whose experiences could not be more different from my own. To the developed world, the North Koreans' naive acceptance of ludicrous propaganda and adoration of a man who is clearly their worst enemy is, at best, a source of amusement. But Demick gently but unambiguously makes it clear that when one is surrounded by the same message for a lifetime with no evidence to the contrary, one will believe just about anything.   

I recommend both these books unhesitatingly, though it might be best to read them in the opposite order that I did. Starting with Nothing to Envy would lay a sound foundation of knowledge about the country and its politics, for one thing. It may also lead to a deeper appreciation of the fact that, unbelievable as it seems, many of the most outrageous parts of The Orphan Master's Son are almost certainly accurate.


*Escape From Camp 14, by Blaine Harden, tells the true story of Shin Dong-Hyuk and his escape from one of North Korea's labor camps, then from the country itself.  Shin is the only known person born inside the gulag system to have escaped. While aspects of his story seem unbelievable, Shin's account is consistent with the stories of other defectors, and Harden, to whom Shin told his account, is an expert on North Korea. It's worth reading, though I didn't like it as much as the two books discussed above. Though Shin's story alone was fascinating enough to make this book worth reading, I was more interested in what I learned about the psychology of people living in extreme conditions. It would seem that Shin's troubles would have ended once he reached South Korea and claimed asylum, but really he was only beginning his foray into a bewildering and alienating world. A person who has had to fight for his own survival for his whole life faces great obstacles, even when he is sheltered, well fed, and physically safe. I sensed that although he had escaped, Shin may never be completely free.