We have need of a more visceral knowledge of North Korea, for despite the quantity of books and studies that annually appear, we do not meaningfully understand the legendarily opaque, signal-mixing DPRK. Its dystopian perversity overmatches our moral imagination's capacity to comprehend. Also, with regard to the whom we come to know by way of these studies—mostly the abused North Korean majority—even after we have tallied their corpses and sufferings, and assigned psychological nomenclature to their psychic afflictions, their plight continues to overwhelm our empathetic abilities. What one of Melanie Kirkpatrick's North Korean interviewees says of South Koreans in Escape from North Korea: The Untold Story of Asia's Underground Railroad (New York: Encounter, 2012), her recent book about the network of safe houses and shelters that is these days helping North Koreans get out of their maniacally mismanaged home state—“they know, but they don't really know” (p. 241)—applies to us too.
One answer to this need, say authors Haggard and Noland in their Witness to Transformation: Refugee Insights into North Korea (Washington, D.C.: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2011) is the growing number of North Korean refugee testimonies that are a byproduct of the country's famine and post-famine exodus wave. Into the country's dystopian day-to-day reality, these narratives offer otherwise unobtainable insights (p. 1). I here review one such testimony, that of Shin Dong-hyuk, the only person ever known to have been born into a DPRK penal camp (kwalliso) and to have escaped it—as his testimony is recorded by the American journalist Blaine Harden. I also review American novelist Adam Johnson's rendering of the contemporary North Korean scene, for well-imagined fiction, as the whole history of creative writing attests, often achieves levels of discovery and insight to which nonfiction cannot rise.
As he tells Harden, Shin was born into the North's gulag-like network of penal territories, the titular, no-exit Camp 14. Very likely, his parents had been allowed to mate because one or both had reported another prisoner's misdeeds. Snitching, says Shin, was just about the only way prisoners could come by sexual, familial opportunities. From birth forward, his life's chief properties were hunger, cold, dirt, and a perverse system of moral instruction that reminded him constantly of his worthlessness. He ate rats and insects, picked through dung for corn kernels, lived with lice, wore clothing peeled from corpses, watched executions, bathed in the rain, and snitched on his male and female fellows as his deformed conscience and his survival required.
At age thirteen, he was forced to watch as his mother and elder brother were publicly executed. He was unmoved by the experience. Indeed, he had ratted his family out. What else could he do? They had talked of escaping, which was against the rules, conscience told him. Also, succeed or fail, the attempt would result in his torture and death as a blood relative of the schemers. So he snitched. And he was tortured anyway. On the worst day of his life, his jailers suspended him from the ceiling and gradually lowered him into a fire as they tried to get from him a confession of his complicity in his mother's escape plan. He passed out before he could yield the confession, which would have been meaningless anyway, since his mother and sibling had not included him in their plans. Appointment as a slave laborer in a dam construction project and a later assignment feeding swine kept him alive as a teen. The dam was considered important, so its workers were fed to live rather than to die. On the pig farm, he scavenged.
In his moment of truth, Shin's hunger saved him. For the whole of his life up until that moment, hunger had been a monster inside him. In his twenty-three years, he had never once entirely placated it, never once stood up to its bullying. So when a new prisoner told him of foods outside the fence that he strained to imagine, his hunger compelled him to join the fellow in an escape. Next, when the other man's headlong rush of the camp's electrified fence resulted in his being snared and scorched to a writhed crisp, Shin's hunger told him to follow regardless. He shimmied over his colleague's corpse through the gap in the fencing created by the dead man's weight. The electricity brazed him, but not lethally, shielded as he was from its killing impact by the other man's body.
And, thus, Shin was out, running and hobbling as his injuries allowed, stealing, hiding, begging, lying, and day jobbing through frontier China toward South Korea, where, in 2008, Harden is introduced to him, the clueless, paranoid, unemployable but otherwise healthy ward of the South Korean resettlement agency responsible for North Korean defectors’ material and psychological care.
As a journalist should, Harden tells this story and its aftermath—the lesser ups and downs of Shin's eventual resettlement in the United States—circumspectly. He is careful to embellish nothing. He fact-checks the details of Shin's narrative that he can, and he finds others’ corroboratory historical contexts. Without question, however, he trusts Shin's stories of torture and abuse. The young man's scars are too many and too various to be doubted. Escape from Camp 14 is a success. It installs in our otherwise overmatched imaginations the horrific plight of the estimated 200,000 souls condemned to a prison existence in North Korea, and it urges us to wish for an end to their misery.
Less successful is Adam Johnson's admirable effort to write a novel revelatory of North Korea's singular dystopia. This is because Johnson, who teaches creative writing at Stanford University and there oversees the Stanford Graphic Novel Program, brings to bear on his project the sensibilities and aesthetics of a graphic novelist. He employs, too, other, more conventional writer's resources—satire, farce, caricature, dark humor, irony, archetypal situations, and plot fullness; however, the aesthetic mode that primarily drives The Orphan Master's Son is the arch, faux realism that he borrows from graphic novels. Admittedly, the novel's Washington Post and New York Times reviewers have called it “poignant,” “moving,” and “adequately serious.” However, this reviewer is not as much won over by the book as they are.
That said, what is the novel about? Its picaresque protagonist is Pak Jun Do, a boy born to a mother who was a singer and a father who became an “orphan master” (head of an orphanage) as a means of keeping his son after his wife was taken away from him by a central government whose routine practice is to steal away to Pyongyang the nation's pretty provincial women. It would seem, then, that Jun Do's father loved him; however, such was not the case. He disliked the boy because he reminded him of his stolen wife, and, thus, the keeper of orphans was harder on his own son than on his charges who were nobody's children, the much abused orphans. Still, Jun Do had privileges; for one, he could assign names from the list of the nation's 114 Grand Martyrs of the Revolution to the boys who came into the orphanage without names. He has even named himself, equivocally, after the martyr among the 114 who hanged himself to prove his love for his country. Indeed, though Jun Do would not know it, he has given himself a name that sounds like John Doe, that is, our English name for those who have no identity. On Johnson's part, these things are fairly clever fictional inventions, revelatory of a large theme in his book, the regime's godlike authority in North Korea to deny and dispense identities, to decide who is who.
Jun Do has, then, some degree of self-mastership in his country's puppet theatre. He has, after all, named himself, and though it is a name from the Dear Leader's approved list, its deference to the will of the jealous and truculent bully who runs the North Korean show is really just a cover. He is essentially an identity switcher, a trickster in a society whose intolerance of such an entity makes it incapable of seeing him.
Jun Do has other essential features. He is a darkness specialist, for seeing and working in the dark are skills he learned in his post-orphanage adolescence when he was put to work in the tunnels that cross from North to South beneath the DMZ. Further, like everyone else in his coercive society, he has learned to shut down conscience when its inklings urge behaviors detrimental to self. This ability, learned first in the orphanage, is improved in his next job, a sailor assigned to kidnap Japanese citizens. His commanding officer tells him at the beginning of his first mission to not even think about those he snatches up. “Don't even count them. Catch somebody with your hands, then let them go with your mind. Do the opposite of counting” (p. 17).
Again, Jun Do is an eavesdropper. After his kidnapping tour, he is next given intelligence school training, a radio, and the job of listening for enemy submarines. He does this work on a rundown North Korean fishing boat that does most of its fishing in international waters, outside its legal limits. His shipmates resent his stationing on their boat, for it puts them at greater risk of capture, and of punishment for getting caught when they get back home. Thus, Jun Do is also Jonah.
Ample, as you see, is Johnson's imagination, and susceptible to meaningful analysis are his inventions. Further, he can occasionally deliver the telling scene that fiction, more than nonfiction, is required to supply. One such scene occurs when Jun Do reflects on his father's abuse and decides that the abuse is proof of his father's genuine paternity: “Only a father…could take a boy's shoes in winter. Only a true father, flesh and bone, could burn a son with the smoking end of a coal shovel” (p. 8). Such are the thought processes, suggests the text, of those whose father and chief is the Dear Leader.
However, the novel's potent passages are robbed of their strength by the larger text's graphic-novel quality. Examples of this, the text's principal mode, abound. Cartoonish, for example, is the just-kidnapped opera singer Rumina's answer to Jun Do's request from outside the bag into which she has just been stuffed to tell him how a song ends: “Let me out and I'll tell you.” This is cartoonish, of course, because no woman who has just been overpowered by two strange men and folded into a sack responds in this way. Cartoonish, too, are the interrogator's spoken directions to his associates in a moment of supposed high drama: “Round up some rain shovels and slickers. We're going to fetch an actress” (p. 357). The obvious B-grade movie echo in lines like these is standard in graphic novels. Again, narrative sentences like this one—“Yes, the hero thought, this might be his ugliest assignment yet” (p. 116)—ask to be read within the aesthetics of a graphic novel, not within the aesthetics of conventionally realistic fiction.
Unfortunately, this cartoon mode exerts its influence over the novel's major characters as well as minor, with the result that, instead of taking seriously Jun Do and Sun Moon, his love interest in the novel's second half, we experience them and their adventures as occasions for the winking, half-clever interplay that goes on between readers and authors in graphic novels, as well as between viewers and screenwriters in television's overnight cartoon offerings (think, for example, of the Cartoon Network's Adult Swim). Then we forget them. That is unfortunate because we need to remember the people whom they represent, the people of North Korea.
