North Korea, from a North Korean Perspective: The Aquariums of Pyongyang
The Aquariums of Pyongyang
by Kang Chol-Hwan and Pierre Rigoulot
Translated by Yair Reiner
Basic Books, 2001 (new edition 2005)
For a book that documents, in graphic detail, the ten years the author spent in a North Korean labor camp, this was not overly disturbing to read. Let me clarify: Although some scenes, if properly imagined, can turn your stomach inside out, and although this is a book that you cannot put out of your mind perhaps ever, the author leaves you feeling somewhat removed from the action. His voice, filtered through interpretation and translation (the book was originally published in France) still holds a sort of numb calm that belies many horrors. It is as if his story, his years inside the camp, has been whitewashed: the contour of the facts remain, but the emotional color you would expect is absent. After he made it to South Korea, where he now lives, and told his story many times to the reporters, he writes "I occasionally felt I was trading my experience for a story that was no longer my own." It is as if Kang Chol-Hwan, the newspaper writer who owns Hyundai stock and a nice car stereo, was not really the boy who had been shipped from Pyongyang to the Yodok prison camp with his family thirty years ago.
In addition to detailing the camp, Kang explains how his family ended up there and how, after his release, he eventually escaped North Korea. His grandparents had immigrated to Japan during the occupation. In Kyoto, his grandfather had made a fortune running gambling halls while his grandmother helped run a Korean organization connected to Kim Il-Sung's government. They returned to Korea hoping to help build their homeland into a utopia. It is amazing how heedlessly Kim's regime could throw away its most capable and loyal subjects. But perhaps they were doomed from the start. One-party regimes work best ruling over a nation of peasants whose lives actually have been improved (through land reform, etc.) by the regime. Educated and skilled people notice when the country declines--they remember a better time and had hopes for a better life. So, these elements must be purged. But you cannot run a country with only peasants.
Kang is a good storyteller. The pre- and post-Yodok sections flow easily and coherently. But in the camp section he loses all narrative flow. The author repeats or gets ahead of himself. He sometimes introduces or dispenses with characters haphazardly. But this, I suppose, is how life goes, if you are living in a gulag. The entire family did hard labor for ten years, subsisting on a daily ration of corn supplemented by rats. They were forced to get used to death and forget about dignity. Still, Kang manages to remember and point out the little bubbles of hope and humanity in the people around him. Perhaps intended as an anti-Communist manifesto (Rigoulot is a journalist who has worked on The Black Book of Communism), the book is much more about the far-from-ideological struggle and will of Kang and his family. Kang's grandmother, in the end, still believes in Marx and Engels. But certainly not in Kim Il-Sung.
The book ends with a plea to do all we, the international community, can to help the North Korean people. Now, because of famines that have ravaged the country over the last decade, almost everyone in the country lives like he did in the camp. On the other hand, he wants to do nothing that could aide Kim Jong-Il (Kim Il-Sung's son) in any way. Unfortunately, Kim has ensured that we cannot really work on the former without also doing the latter. Still, Kang's testimony should give South Koreans pause before they rush to shake Kim's hand, as Kim Dae-Jung, then-president of the South, did in 2000. And perhaps we Americans should not be so eager to abandon our hard-line stance, as I had suggested we should in my previous post.
by Kang Chol-Hwan and Pierre Rigoulot
Translated by Yair Reiner
Basic Books, 2001 (new edition 2005)
For a book that documents, in graphic detail, the ten years the author spent in a North Korean labor camp, this was not overly disturbing to read. Let me clarify: Although some scenes, if properly imagined, can turn your stomach inside out, and although this is a book that you cannot put out of your mind perhaps ever, the author leaves you feeling somewhat removed from the action. His voice, filtered through interpretation and translation (the book was originally published in France) still holds a sort of numb calm that belies many horrors. It is as if his story, his years inside the camp, has been whitewashed: the contour of the facts remain, but the emotional color you would expect is absent. After he made it to South Korea, where he now lives, and told his story many times to the reporters, he writes "I occasionally felt I was trading my experience for a story that was no longer my own." It is as if Kang Chol-Hwan, the newspaper writer who owns Hyundai stock and a nice car stereo, was not really the boy who had been shipped from Pyongyang to the Yodok prison camp with his family thirty years ago.
In addition to detailing the camp, Kang explains how his family ended up there and how, after his release, he eventually escaped North Korea. His grandparents had immigrated to Japan during the occupation. In Kyoto, his grandfather had made a fortune running gambling halls while his grandmother helped run a Korean organization connected to Kim Il-Sung's government. They returned to Korea hoping to help build their homeland into a utopia. It is amazing how heedlessly Kim's regime could throw away its most capable and loyal subjects. But perhaps they were doomed from the start. One-party regimes work best ruling over a nation of peasants whose lives actually have been improved (through land reform, etc.) by the regime. Educated and skilled people notice when the country declines--they remember a better time and had hopes for a better life. So, these elements must be purged. But you cannot run a country with only peasants.
Kang is a good storyteller. The pre- and post-Yodok sections flow easily and coherently. But in the camp section he loses all narrative flow. The author repeats or gets ahead of himself. He sometimes introduces or dispenses with characters haphazardly. But this, I suppose, is how life goes, if you are living in a gulag. The entire family did hard labor for ten years, subsisting on a daily ration of corn supplemented by rats. They were forced to get used to death and forget about dignity. Still, Kang manages to remember and point out the little bubbles of hope and humanity in the people around him. Perhaps intended as an anti-Communist manifesto (Rigoulot is a journalist who has worked on The Black Book of Communism), the book is much more about the far-from-ideological struggle and will of Kang and his family. Kang's grandmother, in the end, still believes in Marx and Engels. But certainly not in Kim Il-Sung.
The book ends with a plea to do all we, the international community, can to help the North Korean people. Now, because of famines that have ravaged the country over the last decade, almost everyone in the country lives like he did in the camp. On the other hand, he wants to do nothing that could aide Kim Jong-Il (Kim Il-Sung's son) in any way. Unfortunately, Kim has ensured that we cannot really work on the former without also doing the latter. Still, Kang's testimony should give South Koreans pause before they rush to shake Kim's hand, as Kim Dae-Jung, then-president of the South, did in 2000. And perhaps we Americans should not be so eager to abandon our hard-line stance, as I had suggested we should in my previous post.
Labels: book review, North Korea
posted by Brian at 12:38 PM
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