A North Korean
Defector’s Story
Excitedly turning the pages of The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s
Story, written under her
current name of Hyeonseo Lee, one gets the impression
that an equally apt title would have been “The Girl with Nine Lives.” So exciting and frightening is the story that
it is easy to see why, as of this writing, the book which was published in 2015,
has now garnered 2,678 customer reviews on Amazon.com and ranks #1 in both book
and Kindle sales in the category of “Political Freedom” and #2 in Kindle sales
in the category, “Emigration & Immigration.” It’s a truly gripping, exciting story, and you
can’t put the book down until you see how it ends.
One also gets a very good idea from the
book of what it is like to live in the ultimate totalitarian,
Stalinist-Communist, Kim-dynastic state of the Democratic People’s Republic of
Korea. It is every bit the hell on earth that one might
have imagined it to be from what little we are able to learn about it in the
Western press. Actually, it’s probably a
little worse than one can gather from Lee’s book, because her family was rather
privileged as things go in North Korea.
This reviewer, who served in the U.S. Army
in South Korea in 1967-68, got his first inkling of the oppression of North
Korea in the summer of 1968 while working in the periodicals room of the
University of North Carolina library beginning his first year of graduate
school. One of the publications
available there was the English language Pyongyang
Times. It was meant to be a
propaganda publication, painting the DPRK in the most favorable light and its
enemies in the worst, but it managed to achieve precisely the opposite
end. Abject fear radiated from every
article. One got the impression that the
person whose name accompanied the article, right up the ladder to the
functionaries putting the rag out, lived in terror that they might leave the
impression that they had failed to give enough credit to the beloved and
respected leader Kim Il Sung. What
horrible fate must have awaited them should they slip out of line was not hard
to imagine.
Not only is North Korea a human rights
horror—one huge prison camp—but it is also an economic disaster. Both are the clear results of Communism
practiced in its purest, most extreme, form.
We have seen it before in the Soviet Union, in Eastern Europe, in China
under Mao Tse Tung, and in Southeast Asia. It has disappeared in Europe and has greatly
softened in the rest of Asia, but now under the third generation of Kims, it persists at its worst in North Korea.
Koreans, as I noted in my review of the
movie, Chunhyang, have a tendency to take things to extremes. In the 19th century Korea was
already known in the West as the Hermit Kingdom for its xenophobia and
isolation. North Korea has found Soviet-style
Communism to be a perfect philosophy for perpetuating that attitude. By contrast, South Korea moved the American
expatriate columnist for the English language Korea Times, James Wade, to use a word for its people that I had
never before encountered, “xenophiles.”
No country in the world is more open to foreign influence. As Wade observed, South Koreans, even then,
in 1968, seemed to have the attitude that anything foreign had to be
better. I noted, as well, that that
small newspaper had a lot better coverage of international news than anything
that I had observed in the United States.
This openness to all things foreign goes a long ways toward explaining South
Korea’s economic success. It also
explains why the creation of its popular culture in drama and music has exported so well to the rest
of the world, particularly to the other countries of East
Asia. The Koreans have drawn the best
from what they have found abroad, in the East and the West, even Mexico’s
popular telenovelas, and put their
unique stamp upon it.
As wretched as conditions are for the
people of North Korea, one risks life and limb to suggest to a Korean, at least
to one of my generation, that the people in that part of the peninsula would
have been better off had they never been liberated from Japan, a proposition
which to me seems almost self-evident.
Older Koreans will have none of such talk. Emotions are still raw over the half-century
of humiliation that Koreans suffered at the hands of the brutal,
ethnic-supremacist Japanese. One can get
a good idea of the difference in attitude of South Koreans toward Japan versus
North Korea by watching two fairly recent Korean movies, Battleship
Island
and Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood
of War. The Japanese are the vilest of villains in
the former World War II drama, while the North Koreans come across as hardly
worse than the South Koreans in the latter epic of the Korean War.
The North Koreans, of course, retain a
similar animus towards the Japanese as the South Koreans, as do the people
throughout East Asia who suffered under Japan’s brutal occupation, for that
matter. Hyeonseo
Lee tells us that the families lowest in the rather strict pecking order in the
North are the descendants of those who worked for the Japanese occupiers. There is a certain irony in this, because the
system that the Kim’s have imposed upon the North is in many ways similar to
the one imposed by the Japanese. Emperor
worship has been replaced by Kim family worship, the people still live in great
fear of the people running the government, and as Lee tells us, every North
Korean wears two faces, a public and a private one.
One can get an appreciation for the
similarities in the opening pages of the very moving memoir, The Divided Land: A Tale of Survival in War-Torn Korea, by Korean-American, Theresa Lee. Theresa was a young schoolgirl when Emperor
Hirohito made his surrender speech on the radio. She was devastated and was very surprised to
find that her parents’ reaction was quite the opposite. The public face that they had kept up to
avoid trouble with the ruling authorities had, up to that point, extended even
to their own children to keep them out of political trouble with the
authorities at school. Theresa thought
they were all just good Japanese although she was a bit puzzled by the fact that
she had three names, a Japanese name, a Korean name, and a Catholic name.
Fear of the authorities was also quite
strong in South Korea during the period in which the country was ruled by
military dictators. I met a Korean
civilian who worked for my U.S. Army command during my tour at a restaurant
upon revisiting the country in 1974. He
looked around warily at the nearby booths to make sure that our conversation
would not be overheard by anyone. One
can get a very good idea of what things were like in the country by watching
the 2017 Korean movie, A Taxi Driver, about the bloody
1980 uprising in Gwangju, in the far southwest part of the peninsula.
The fact that such movies can be made now
in the South is a very good measure of how far the Republic of Korea has
progressed politically. It is also a bit
of a measure of how very difficult reunification will be, so deep are the
continuing divisions between the North and the South. One can gather from Hyeonseo
Lee’s book that only the slightest bit of liberalization by the young,
third-generation dictator, Kim Jong Un, would be very dangerous for him. While he might fear meeting the fate of
Muammar Gaddafi by giving up his nuclear weapons, what happened to Romanian
Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, should he begin to relax the barriers between the North
and the South and to liberalize in even the slightest degree must surely be
very much in his mind.
One
might have hoped that at least the great economic liberalization that has
occurred in neighboring China would have spilled over into North Korea, but
apparently there has not been much of it.
Free interchange of goods and people between the two countries would be
a big threat to the Kim tyranny, and so it is not permitted. It is distressing to see the degree to which
the Chinese government is complicit in the tyranny. Almost all of Lee’s Perils of Pauline-like
adventures occur in China, where the Chinese government cooperates with the
North Korean government in returning people like Lee to their home country, no
matter what unspeakable retribution might await them there.
Hyeonseo
Lee has a very good TED talk on the
Internet, which might well be called the “Gangnam Style” of that genre when it
comes to popularity. As of this writing
it has 11,142,036 views. It is certainly
well worth watching, but if you have any plans to read the book—which I
heartily recommend—don’t watch the talk until you have finished the book. It’s full of spoilers.
August
29, 2018
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