by corroborative testimony.
Too often controverted in their plot details
On the Call to Dismiss North Korean
Defectors’ Memoirs and on Their Dark
American Alternative
John Cussen
Stars between the Sun and Moon: One Woman’s Life in North Korea and
Escape to Freedom, by Lucia Jang with Susan McClelland. New York:
Norton, 2014. 280 pages. $26.95, hardcover.
A Thousand Miles to Freedom: My Escape from North Korea, by Eunsun
Kim with Sébastien Falletti, trans. David Tian. New York: St. Martin’s Press,
2015. 228 pages. $24.99, hardcover.
The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story, by Hyeonseo
Lee with David John. London: William Collins, 2015. 304 pages. $26.99,
hardcover.
In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom, by Yeonmi Park
with Maryanne Vollers. New York: Penguin, 2015. 273 pages. $27.95,
hardcover.
The Orphan Master’s Son, by Adam Johnson. New York: Random House,
2012. 433 pages. $26.00, hardcover.
Fortune Smiles, by Adam Johnson. New York: Random House, 2015.
301 pages. $27.00, hardcover.
They are wrong, of course—the more finical sects of North Korea experts,
that is, those who advise us to set aside as unreliable the four recently
published memoirs by female North Korean defectors listed above. Too
novelesque to be trusted, the experts say. Too infrequently backed up
Korean Studies, Volume 40. 6 2016 by University of Hawai‘i Press. All rights reserved.
140
by the memoirists’ own spoken accounts of their childhoods in North
Korea and of their lives in peril in China. Too transparently suborned
by those several right-wing geopolitical leviathans whose ‘‘soft power’’
modus operandi include the buying and shopping of human rights dis-
course. And, lastly, too fond of the spotlight themselves, these videogenic
survivor-memoirists. In short, not to be relied upon in the all-important
project of knowing what everyday life is like in North Korea, say the
experts.1
The memoirists have been defended too (see below), and it is my
purpose here to add two more arguments to the several that have already
been put out in their favor. However, before making the points I wish to
make, I’ll begin with an important concession. Also, by way of introduc-
tion, I’ll unpack the more important cultural and political contexts out of
which come the memoirs’ dismissive critiques, for the contexts’ unpacking
is also instructive.
The concession is this: that, yes, the memoirists have themselves to
some extent brought on this criticism. In particular, discrepancies be-
tween Yeonmi Park’s spoken accounts of her escape from North Korea
and of her transit through China from her printed text’s accounts of the
same life intervals have provoked skepticism. Did she cross the Yalu River
into China with her mom and dad on the last day of March 2007, as she
has in several of her speeches testified?2 Or, as her memoir has it, did she
cross with her mom alone? Also, importantly, in the absence of her father,
was her mom immediately raped by the smuggler/broker who received the
pair in Changbai, China, moments after they had scooted across the frozen
Yalu?3 And what about Hongwei? The next, more powerful human
trafficker in Park’s memoir, the thug who, having collected into his peri-
patetic criminal household not only his thirteen-year-old ‘‘little wife’’
Yeonmi but also her mom and (until he dies) her dad, suddenly releases
daughter and mother, with no clear motive for doing so other than the
desire to lighten his retinue in a time of police pressure and, too, because
he felt as if he ‘‘was being haunted by [Yeonmi’s] father’s ghost’’ for
having raped his daughter?4 Is that counterintuitive turning point in
Yeonmi’s story credible?
On the other hand, much of the memoirists’ checkered credibility
is of the associational sort. In January of 2015, just as their books were
gaining prominence, Shin Dong-hyuk, the defector subject of Blaine
Harden’s Escape From Camp 14 and their best-known predecessor on the
defector-with-a-harrowing-story circuit emended parts of his story. He
had not spent the whole of his pre-escape life in Camp 14, the most
John Cussen Review Essay 141
notorious of the sprawling, gulag-like network of penal and forced-labor
institutions that pin down the dynastic Kim family’s DPRK map. No,
from age six to nineteen, he had lived in the less-draconian Camp 18,
and it was there, not at Camp 14, that he had revealed to the authorities
his mother and brother’s plan to escape, there, in short, that he had
caused them to be executed. Also, that horrific part of his original story
in which he was held in an underground prison for six months and, on
the worst day of his life, lowered by rope into a bonfire—those things
had happened when he was twenty, not when he was thirteen. He had
apologized to Harden for ‘‘the mess’’ his enhanced truthfulness would
likely cause, and Harden the journalist for several reasons (see below)
forgave him,5 but the damage had been done. In the year and a half since
its publication, Escape from Camp 14 had sold well in Europe and America;
indeed, it had become a touchstone text for those concerned for human
rights in North Korea. And now its source was changing his story. The
brand—that of the North Korean defector who had suffered abuse all
round—had been compromised.6 Any future story handed in by a North
Korean defector would be received suspiciously. It was in this inauspicious
moment that sales of the memoirists’ books gathered momentum.
Various other cultural and political factors have complicated the
memoirists’ arrival in the forum of public opinion, among them, South
Korea’s pop culture and media zeitgeists. Worldwide, as you know, we
intelligentsia are in a post-Oprah, post–Dr. Phil moment (if not so much
our unreformed friends and families with the remotes). In other words,
we in the know are tired of being told by talk-show personalities, their
guests and sponsors for whom we should feel sorry, whose sufferings
trump our own, and whose triumph we ought to cheer.7 Also, some of
us, though not all,8 believe that our morals are brought low and our sense
of life’s relative fairness and unfairness is knocked akimbo by the media’s
relentless showcasing of victims, down-and-outs, and deviants.9 Impor-
tantly, this fatigue and these beliefs are no less current in South Korea
than they are here.10 Into this jaded media clime, then, have walked the
memoirists, as fetching a collective of human rights spokespersons as ever
TED or Madison Avenue discovered. Further, none of the four have
been particularly bashful in the employ of celebrity status, appearing
in human rights forums and on news channels worldwide.11 And there
has been another phenomenon slowly, osmotically drawing away the
authorial, protagonistic innocence on which the memoirs rely—the three
recently debuted South Korean television offerings whose professed mis-
sion is to humanize North Korean defectors by featuring them in reality-
142 Korean Studies VOLUME 40 | 2016
TV-like settings and situations. Yes, three such counterintuitive shows air
regularly these days on South Korean television—Now On My Way to
Meet You, Moranbang Club, and Let’s Go Together—, generating that
admixture of delighted and suspicious public regard that one would expect,
given the shows’ choice to replace the long-standing, stereotypical image of
the North Korean refugee-defector—beggarly, helpless, and downtrodden-
unto-psychosis—with a youthful, vibrant, glammed-up, female version of
the same.12 Into these programs’ vexed glow, all of the memoirs have been
inevitably drawn; however, in particular, these shows’ mixed public regard
has damaged the reputation of Yeonmi Park, who, with her mother, has
appeared regularly on the best known of the shows, Now On My Way to
Meet You, and who has there uttered some of the statements that gainsay
key segments of her book’s narrative.13
No doubt, too, South Korean politics have contributed to the cloud
of suspicion that hovers over the books. On the perennial South Korean
political question of how best to deal with North Korea, the memoirists
are viewed as apologists for the hard-line, confrontational approach and, as
a result, decried by those who favor a conciliatory South Korean posture
vis-à-vis the North. Some background: The issue of how to deal with
North Korea divides South Korea’s political parties into two camps, a
gradualist, ‘‘sunshine policy’’ group on the one side and a confrontational,
hard-line policy group on the other.14 In practical terms, the ROK’s current
chief executive, Park Geun-hye, and her predecessor, Lee Myung-bak,
both members of the Saesuri Party, weigh in on the hard-line side. Their
predecessors of the Millennium Democratic Party (today the Democratic
Party), Kim Dae-jung and Ro Moo-hyun, meanwhile, were advocates of
the Sunshine Policy. (Indeed, Kim Dae-jung was the Sunshine Policy’s
chief architect.) Inevitably, then, because the contents of the memoirs—
descriptive of horrors in North Korea that cry out for the international
community’s immediate, forceful intervention—would seem to urge a
hard-line approach to the DPRK, the memoirists are identified with
South Korea’s hard-line, militaristic political camp. So, too, their bold,
spoken characterizations of the Kim regime as desperate, last-gasp, and
vulnerable have aligned them with the give-no-quarter approach to
North Korea.15 Predictably, then, the country’s conservative publications
(Chosun Ilbo, Joong-ang Ilbo, and Korea Times) have tended to treat the
memoirs favorably, while publications that urge a gradualist, conciliatory
approach to North Korea (NKNews and The Diplomat) have tended to
critique them harshly. Not to be overlooked is the vociferous, extreme
end of the gradualists’ bench where sit those who see the books not only
John Cussen Review Essay 143
as ‘‘soft war’’ weapons in the contest of legitimacy that perennially pits
North Korea against its southern rival—and that pits, too, the concilia-
tory, gradualist approach against the guns-drawn, hard-line strategy—
but also as an augur of/provocation to real war. An exemplary voice in
this regard is that of Michael Bassett, a gradualist North Korea observer
of modest credentials,16 who sees the defector-memoirists as ‘‘agitprop’’
puppets of the hard-line incumbent South Korean leadership and as insti-
gators of war with North Korea: ‘‘Human rights campaigns are military
campaigns in the Information Era; [they] are used to program [the] global
thinking that perpetuates the notion of an ongoing North Korea problem.’’
For Bassett and for others, it is a dangerous thing that the West should
get so much of its knowledge of North Korea ‘‘from defectors and their
sponsor NGOs.’’17 In short, lest their exaggerated stories incite war, he
and his political group urge skepticism in the reception of the defectors’
stories.
North Korea experts and specialists, too, have been generous in their
contribution to the hue and cry against defector testimonials, and this
phenomenon, too, has a backstory. The backstory is supplied by Bradley
Martin, author of the well-regarded Under the Care of the Fatherly Leader:
North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (2004) and a longtime North Korea
scholar himself. In his Globalpost contribution of early 2015 (days after
the Shin Dong-hyuk confession), he submits that the current tension
between defector witnesses and credentialed North Korea experts has its
origins in the ROK’s several-decade history of the government’s using
defectors as its proxies. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, explains Martin,
when ‘‘South Korea’s military-backed right-wing dictatorship had needed
to struggle to avoid losing the domestic public opinion war to the com-
munists up north,’’ the government was not above conscripting into its
service the small number of defectors then bleeding from the North and
‘‘dispatching them to speak against the Pyongyang regime.’’18 In those
days, it became a given among North Korea experts that defectors’ testi-
monies were not to be trusted. Also, the thought reigned among that
Cold War generation of experts that the defectors, even those who were
sincere, were in over their heads as regards the implications of their testi-
monies. Those opinions continue to hold sway among NK experts today,
say the thoughts offered by several to an NKNews survey-of-experts on the
question of celebrity defectors’ worthiness. ‘‘These exaggerated ‘created
celebrities’ will not be able to understand the moral hazards of their
actions,’’ said Lee Yoon-geol, President, North Korea Strategic Information
Service Center. Meanwhile, Kim Seong-min, Executive Director of Free
144 Korean Studies VOLUME 40 | 2016
North Korea Radio, joined him in this opinion, saying that ‘‘unscru-
pulous behavior and a lack of verification leads to suspicion about all
defectors’ testimonies and even attacks from the North Korean regime.’’
Lastly, lest we imagine that the scorn of the credentialed toward those
who present themselves as life-experience trained animates no portion of
the experts’ animosity toward defector-witnesses, I’ll quote from the same
NKNews solicitation the statement submitted by Kim Young-hui, Korea
Development Bank, Chief of the North Korean Economy Team, a holder
of a Ph.D. in North Korean studies: ‘‘It is difficult to be accepted by
the circle of North Korea experts that are already in South Korea. . . . In
reality, they do not hire defectors, even those who have doctorates. It is
thus hard for defectors that study North Korea to become established in
the field dealing with North Korea.’’19
Common in the literature that is skeptical of the memoirs are dismis-
sive quotations from anonymous sources within the ROK’s now sizeable
defector community. Representative, for example, is the laughing response
that journalist Mary Ann Jolley reports receiving from an elderly female
defector when she asked the woman, a native of Yeonmi Park’s home-
town, about Park’s spoken claim that she had witnessed the execution
of a North Korean for the crime of having watched a contraband DVD
imported from the West.20 Such deprecatory comments are underlain by
two themes: first, that the memoirists are being paid to characterize the
North as they characterize it (see below), and, second, that they have
brought with them from the Kim family’s dystopian North the habit of
lying that is a necessary, survivalist mode in that brainwashed, snitch-on-
thy-neighbor state. That lying for the lie’s benefits and lying to satisfy the
interlocutor’s perceived agenda are reflex practices among North Korean
defectors is scuttlebutt, too, in the community of social workers that seeks
to facilitate recently arrived defectors’ assimilation into a free society.21
Oddly enough, this recognition of defectors’ compromised capacities for
truth telling is also employed in the memoirists’ defense (see below).
Next, other academic groups, apart from North Korea experts: Though
the memoirists haven’t yet been assailed by the bookish crowd who are
not North Korea experts per se, two branches of that large community
are sure to come after them eventually. First, the ‘‘feminist’’ camp (widely
defined), some portion of which will at the very least reject these two
prominent features of their constructed public personae, their gendered
selection and their helplessness in a politically cruel world. Harbingers of
this critique can be discerned in the South Korean scholarly community’s
response to South Korean television’s defector-centered reality shows.22
John Cussen Review Essay 145
Secondly, the Critical Theory and Postcolonial groups that reject paradig-
matic, essentialist representations of non-Western societies, of alterities, as
they say. Premonitory of this imminent interrogation is the work of Shine
Choi—currently a visiting professor in Korean studies at the University
of Mississippi’s Croft Institute. Grounded in deconstructive and post-
colonial theories headlined by names like Spivak and Bhabba, she begins
her book Re-Imagining North Korea in International Politics: Problems and
Alternatives this way: ‘‘The international problem of North Korea is that
North Korea is a work of fiction.’’23 No, for their insistence that North
Korea is one kind of place and no other—repressive, dystopian, night-
marish—, the defector memoirists are not likely to get a friendly reading in
Choi’s heady quarter of academia when their books eventually arrive there.
Lastly, it goes without saying that large among the suspicions held
against the memoirists is the notion that they are making more money
than is good for them.24 And there would seem to be some warrant
for this suspicion, given the discovery of Jiyoung Song, a Global Ethics
Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, that
the prevailing rate for an hour of defector interview time is ranging these
days between $50 and $500, dependent on the ‘‘quality’’ (marketability?
political usefulness?) of the interview.25 Also, various credible sources
report that Yeonmi Park receives on average $41,000 for each of her
speaking engagements, and that, too, should give her audiences and her
readers pause.26
On the other hand, the memoirs have also, as I say, been defended.
The simplest argument is that of Casey Lartigue Jr., an expat columnist
with the Korea Times, who points out the unreasonableness of expecting
those memoirists who are now celebrities to remain consistent in every
one of their stories’ details while answering questions in a second language.
Also, fears of the Kim regime’s reprisals against their families back in the
North may at times cause the defectors to obscure and displace details of
their printed stories. Still, the stories remain essentially unchanged, says
Lartigue.27 Trauma is also a factor, say both Blaine Harden (co-author
with Shin of Escape from Camp 14 ) and Maryanne Vollers (co-author
with Park of In Order to Live). Consciously and unconsciously, as their
traumatized psyches require, the memoirists scramble the more gruesome
and/or shameful facts of their stories. That they do so is not symptomatic
of dishonesty but, ironically, of the gravity of the memories they are
struggling to articulate.28 Importantly, in her defense of In Order to Live,
Vollers notes that Park’s book is more revelatory in its traumatizing
content than were her original oral accounts of her life in China:
146 Korean Studies VOLUME 40 | 2016
But Yeon-mi was also protecting a secret, something she had tried to bury
and forget from the moment she arrived in South Korea at age 15: like tens of
thousands of other refugees, Yeon-mi had been trafficked in China. In South
Korea—and many other societies—admitting to a ‘‘shameful’’ past would destroy
her prospects for marriage and any sort of normal life.
She had hoped that by changing a few details about her escape she could avoid
revealing the full story. But after she decided to plunge into human rights
activism, she realized that without the whole truth, the story of her life would
have no real power or meaning. She has apologized for any discrepancies in her
public record, and is determined that her book be scrupulously accurate.29
The memoirists’ defenders warn, too, of the agency of the North Korean
propaganda machine in the clamor against the memoirs. ‘‘The regime’s
most common weapon against its critics is character assassination,’’ says
Vollers.30 Saying this, Vollers had in mind the many methods that the
regime might employ to smear its detractors—everything from journalists
covertly in its pay to falsely sourced postings on discussion boards—, but
mostly she wished to call attention to the anti-Yeonmi video released by
the regime in January 2015: ‘‘Despite having the production values of a
Stalin-era newsreel, the footage was chilling: some of her uncles, aunts and
cousins still living in North Korea were paraded in front of the camera
to denounce her. The worst they could come up with was that Yeon-mi
was an ambitious child. But it was horrifying for her to see them so
vulnerable.’’ Further, Vollers reveals in her article that just before In Order
to Live’s publication, she herself received email threats warning her not to
go forward with the book’s production.31 Yes, if your enemy is the North
Korean state, no ill that befalls you can be assumed accidental, nor any
word said against you supposed unsponsored.
As I’ve mentioned already, North Korea’s culture of lying has also
been appealed to by the defenders of defector testimonials. Memoirist
Lucia Jang, for example, writing in defense of Shin Dong-hyuk explains:
‘‘The storytelling culture in which Shin and I were born was highly pro-
pagandistic. . . . [All] stories were told to enflame hatred against foreigners
and instill a love of the state and our leader. These stories were told in
an art form that distorted facts, or involved outright lies.’’ Indeed, the
more effective the lies the better, says Jang.32 Similarly, citing incidents
in Hyeonseo Lee’s The Girl with Seven Names and Eunsun Kim’s
A Thousand Miles to Freedom, Harden writes, ‘‘If there’s one truth to be
gleaned from these memoirs, it is about the centrality of lying [in North
Korean life].’’ However, rather than be discouraged in his journalistic
efforts by that knowledge, he takes it as a cautionary understanding in
John Cussen Review Essay 147
his professional interactions with North Korean defectors. Further, when
he considers the impossibility of getting the whole, un-emended truth
from his traumatized and often shamed interviewees, he is honored to
receive the stories he does receive, and, after corroborating their testimonies
as best he might, he writes them down.33
We ought also to remember, says Andrei Lankov, the skepticism that
originally greeted firsthand accounts of the barbarities of the Soviet gulags,
the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the Cambodian Genocide. Before
they were read like gospel, Solzenhitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, Loung
Ung’s First They Killed My Father, and Jung Chang’s Wild Swans were
all in some quarters disbelieved. It’s highly possible, he says, that the
North Korean memoirs I’ve listed above might, too, survive their detrac-
tors’ efforts to bring them down; might, too, become touchstone texts in
the complicated project of knowing North Korean ground realities in the
famine and post-famine eras.34
Indeed, as Harden has remarked, the recent rush of memoirs authored
and co-authored by North Korean defectors has amounted to nothing less
than the staking out of a fresh new literary genre.35 To be sure, this new
genre shares space with other established nonfiction genres: with memoirs
of captivity (e.g., Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness
of God: A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary
Rowlandson), of hiding (Ann Frank’s Diary), of exodus (Csaba Teglas’s
Budapest Exit: A Memoir of Fascism, Communism, and Freedom), of intern-
ment (Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man), and of female life in a maniacally
patriarchal society (Malala Yousafzai’s I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood
Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban). Still, despite this shared
space with other genres, the North Korea memoir of escape, dark passage,
and arrival is also decidedly sui generis—a type of memoir as un-
mistakably North Korean as a Rodong Sinmun editorial or a bowl of
mul-naengmyeon.
We veer in these last paragraphs toward my contributions to the
argument, the pair of reasons I, a student of literature, say the experts
are wrong to disdain the memoirs: first, because the border between
fiction and nonfiction is not the imporous, thread-narrow, determinate
line that they imagine, and, second, because the most prominent, contem-
porary alternative texts on the question of the nature of the enigmatic
North Korean soul—Adam Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Orphan
Master’s Son (2012) and its successor, his 2015 National Book–awarded
Fortune Smiles (2015)—require their antidotal proximity.
As per the first reason, there is little need to review the immense
corpus of lately composed scholarship that seeks to dissolve the notion of
148 Korean Studies VOLUME 40 | 2016
fiction and nonfiction’s antipodal opposition.36 Suffice it to say, as has
Michael Sindling at the start of his 2010 essay descriptive of autobio-
graphy’s and the first-person novel’s shared origins, ‘‘that texts have no
pure genres, or [the best of them] undermine their generic forms.’’37
Nor is there any need to review the broad shelf of scholarly treatises that
have developed since the appearance in 1980 of James Olney’s ground-
breaking Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Suffice it to say,
as does Olney in his collection’s ‘‘Introduction,’’ that when the subject is
autobiography ‘‘all sorts of generic boundaries . . . are simply wiped away,
and we often cannot tell whether we should be calling something a novel,
a poem, a critical dissertation, or an autobiography.’’38 In light of these
understandings, let’s not, then, beat up on the memoirists considered
here, for like Henry David Thoreau, Booker T. Washington, Harriet
Martineau, T. E. Lawrence, Gabriel Garcı́a Márquez, and a long list
of other writers whose autobiographies were on one day or another
challenged for their novelesque features, their books are likely to survive
the challenge. And, most importantly, as we recalibrate our genre tuning
forks, let’s recall the understanding of truthfulness that underlies the long
history of captivity and refugee narratives from the Book of Exodus
forward, namely, that unspeakable fact’s and telling fiction’s real meeting
site is a wider zone than the experts imagine; it is not ribbon-like or river-
like, but, instead, like the miraculously generative DMZ that buffers
the DPRK’s and the free world’s guns-drawn contiguity on the Korean
Peninsula’s 38th parallel.
When, for example, I read in the moving, first pages of Kim’s
A Thousand Miles to Freedom of a starving, eleven-year-old child’s lying
down on the cold, cement floor of her disappeared family’s furniture-
stripped apartment, of her squirreling in among rags, and of her sidling
over pencil and paper as she prepares to write her last will and testament—
in the day’s fast fading light and under the cheery gaze of the side-by-side
portraits of ‘‘Eternal President’’ Kim Il-sung and ‘‘Dear Leader’’ Kim
Jong-il—,39 I know I have in my hands a book conceived in the inspired
zone where heartbreak and memory meet, and I don’t worry about
whether or not it all happened in just the way the survivor-become-writer
describes.
So, too, the bizarrely necessary, late plot detour in Jang’s Stars between
the Sun and Moon, wherein the long-suffering and oft-abused narrator steals
away from her Christian rescuers in order to return to the remote Wuthering
Heights–like redoubt of a parentally bullied, provincial Chinese farmer,
and there gets with child with the guy (the child to whom the memoir
will eventually be addressed);40 yes, that portion of Jang’s book also, it
John Cussen Review Essay 149
seems to me, springs from a psychic DMZ of sorts, wherein trauma and
remembrance cobble, stitch, and blend their stories together.
Lastly as regards this topic, I call your attention to the most con-
troversial of these memoirs, Yeonmi Park’s In Order to Live, specifically,
to that late China episode in which she, her mother, and some dozen
other North Korean defectors are being prepared for their imminent
transit to Mongolia and to the free world by a Christian pastor. A few
pages later in the book, when we hear of his mission’s being shut down
and of its Christian staff being imprisoned, we will think highly of this
man. Indeed, we will imagine him a martyr. However, in this passage, he
requires of Yeonmi and her mother a fuller, more complete confession of
their sins before he will allow them to travel with the group to Mongolia.41
Many will read these pages and think that the pastor’s zeal for repen-
tance and conversion oversteps privacy’s discrete limits. Others will credit
him with knowing well sin’s lasting mechanisms of bondage. In any
event, despite the minimal further confessions that he gets from the pair,
he lets Yeonmi and her mom travel to Mongolia. So, too, those experts
who rebuke these North Korean memoirists for their stories’ minor incon-
sistencies, who require of them a more literal truth than they have so far
offered—these experts, too, should blink and nod, should acquiesce and
lighten up, as did the pastor. Further, they should admit the memoirs into
the canon of estimable Korean books lately published. For the hard fact of
the matter is that though these defector/memoirists found their physical
exits from North Korea at the country’s northern, breachable, river-
marked border, their stories—burdened, manacled, and muzzled by the
unspeakable abasements of starvation, rape, bride trafficking, sex traffick-
ing, defection, and existential helplessness—needed an exit site more like
the rarely breached, yet preternaturally fecund DMZ. Further, for what
these memoirs tell us of North Korean ground realities, of the horrors
of sex and bride trafficking in China’s northeast, of the psychological
challenges faced by North Koreans who succeed in escaping into the
free world—as well as for what they tell us of human pluck, determina-
tion, and resilience—, we should be glad their authors and co-authors
allowed the stories to choose the route they chose, that of the DMZ-like
nonfiction/fiction armistice area.
As regards the limited helpfulness of Adam Johnson’s The Orphan
Master’s Son (2012) and Fortune Smiles (2015) in the project of knowing
the North Korean soul, I will remark first that in the sea of amazed and
adulatory voices that greeted The Orphan Master’s Son in its first round
of critical evaluation,42 mine was a lonely, dissenting voice. I was put off
150 Korean Studies VOLUME 40 | 2016
by the novel’s length, its clutter, and its hero’s rags to riches life experi-
ence, which seemed to me to give too little regard to that most sovereign,
intractable, and in most cases damning of all social facts in North
Korea—songbun, that is, the bloodline caste system that determines who
is worthy of the regime’s trust, who is given opportunities, who is dis-
qualified from advancement, who works, who lounges, and who begs.
Further, I was dismayed by the aesthetic mode that drove much of
the novel, namely, the arch, faux, postmodern ‘‘realism’’ that Johnson
borrows from graphic novels. This mode, as I felt it, disabled the realiza-
tion of meaningful and credible characters, in other words, characters
whom a reader might take an interest in apart from their adventures and
their symbolic connotations. In particular, the Forrest Gump–ishness of
the novel’s main character, Jun Do, a quality that other reviewers saw
in a positive light,43 I saw as a deficiency of authorial vision, and, more
importantly, as a handicap in terms of delivering what we are most after
in fiction that purports to be about North Korea—a view inside that
most enigmatic of our planet’s human entities, the bullied, brainwashed,
terrorized, and morally compromised North Korean soul. ‘‘Who,’’ in the
top-to-bottom dystopia that is North Korea, asked Philip Gourevitch as
he watched the synchronized grief of the North Korean people at the
time of Kim Jong-il’s death, ‘‘could dare to speak, or even know, his
own mind?’’44 Yes, as Gourevitch’s wonder reminds us, that’s the first
and foremost North Korean question—how the enigmatic North Korean
soul constructs itself and what it says to itself in the lockbox state that
is its home place. Unfortunately, I did not find in Johnson’s admittedly
full, inventive, and well-researched novel much of an answer to that
question.45
Second, preliminary to what I shall say about the titular story of
Fortune Smiles—a fiction in which I do find well-realized characters
and a credible, helpful grasp of the enigmatic North Korean psyche—, I
feel compelled to observe about Johnson’s career drift in terms of subject
matter that it has ever been toward the weird, the transgressive, and the
zany. Think of the most adolescent joke you’ve ever heard, and Johnson
can top it. Straddling the interface between the suburban and the surreal,
his heavier, more firmly planted foot has ever been in the latter zone. As
I say these things, I’m thinking of stories like ‘‘The Canadanaut’’ of
Emporium, his debut collection, a story in which ‘‘Canadian scientists
who are working to identify the sympathetic nature of the universe . . .
send a French-speaking, masturbating, bobsledding trapper on a moon-
shot.’’46 I’m also thinking of ‘‘Dark Meadow,’’ a story included in Fortune
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Smiles. Lauren Groff, who professes to be wowed by Johnson’s work, says
at the start of her discussion of ‘‘Dark Meadow’’ that ‘‘it sets a hurdle
almost unclearably high: It asks the reader to feel compassion for a man
nicknamed Mr. Roses, a person whom most people would find immedi-
ately despicable because of his pedophilic tendencies, who starts taking
care of two little girls who live down the street. This is the sort of story
you read through your fingers, frightened and sickened and moved and
made uncomfortable all at once.’’47 And I’m thinking lastly of all that is
connoted by the title of his second book, Parasites like Us. I do not much
hold this drift in Johnson’s work against him, for large is the school of
postmodern, aesthetical thinking that takes as its watchwords transgression,
deviance, and disturbance. Also, as I read his stories, I see that Johnson’s
wont in general is to make purses out of sows’ ears. Still, I note the
penchant as I read his North Korea fiction, and I acquit it a steering,
creational influence.
About ‘‘Fortune Smiles’’: It features Sun-ho and DJ, a pair of male
defectors who, in their low-life habits, epitomize Johnson’s fiction’s signa-
ture, insistent insight about the North Korean people and about their
society’s defectors—about people, in other words, who are born, grow
up and come to maturity in a racket state. The signature thought is this:
that the people of a society whose most lucrative career appointments
are in ‘‘imitation scratch-off lottery tickets, crystal meth, [counterfeited]
hundred dollar bills,’’48 kidnapping, hacking, and stolen vehicle transfers
(from Japan to China) are inevitably brought morally low by their day-to-
day activities. That’s not a kind characterization of North Koreans, neither
of those who stay in the DPRK nor of those who defect; however, Johnson
is eager to advance it. Consider friends DJ and Sun-ho, who, before defect-
ing together, were criminal colleagues in North Korea, where, thinks DJ,
‘‘crime was state sanctioned; crime was an absolute necessity.’’49 The two
are relative idlers in Seoul, the maximally internet-ized, latte-ized, and
burger-and-fries-ized city in which they now incoherently find themselves.
DJ lives in a men’s homeless shelter, Sun-ho in a skyscraper’s janitorial
closet; both receive food coupons from the government, both attend
infantilizing support group meetings, and, lastly, both come together daily
to eat fast food and trade tales of their supposed sexual conquests among
ROK divorcées and widows. Also, both yearn preposterously for the
North that is behind them. And, lastly, Sun-ho has begun to steal cars,
while DJ has begun keeping company with a female defector who hustles
spare change playing her accordion in subway stations.
These two are no doubt simulacra of defectors that Johnson has met
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in his trips to Seoul, and, for that reason, we are informed as we read about
them. However, no doubt too, they are creations of his darkness-drawn
imagination, and for that reason we should be at least faintly suspicious
of their representative worth. Most importantly, as per the memoirs,
we note that DJ and Sun-ho are the very opposite of the innocent,
upward-bound personae projected by the defector memoirists and their
television cohort. Johnson’s text acknowledges this fact in the contrast
that DJ and Sun-ho see between themselves and the defectors they see
on television:
[DJ and Sun-ho] had seen such defectors on ROK TV. Usually, they were
beautiful young women who wept as they told the most harrowing stories—of
starvation, separation, suffering and torture. Always a baby died. Always there
was a moment when the dark shadow of rape fell across the story, and the
interviewer let the silence linger before shifting to desperate escape.50
This is the feature of this story that I most like: its awareness of its
author’s signature insight about people’s souls being brought low by the
racket regimes that had been their character-shaping existential universe
for too long, and its awareness, too, of the uplifting celebrity-defector
North Korean narrative that is Johnson’s delight to disrupt. Further, the
story has other likable features, most notably, the contrast between DJ
and Sun-ho—the first, slowly adjusting to South Korea, slowly becoming
aware of his former complicity in all that is evil in North Korea; the
second, ill-adjusted, theft-prone, aggressive, and made furious by the
civilized, day-to-day norms that largely pertain in South Korea. As one
watches them in their story’s further adventures, one knows that DJ has
the right attitude, but one knows, too, that large is Johnson’s sympathy
for Sun-ho. Indeed, at story’s end, it is Sun-ho who agonistically does
like Icarus—or better, like ‘‘the winged horse Chollima’’51 —in balloon-
ing from a Seoul skyscraper back to North Korea, while DJ is left standing
on the rooftop, talking to the accordion girl and letting his eyes drift
across the ‘‘horizon of buildings . . . [their] darkened apartments still
making more sense than the lit ones.’’52
In this hapless pair, it’s Sun-ho who is a stand-in for Johnson—who,
for subject matter, has long gone to darkened places and who lately has
gone repeatedly to North Korea. Fine. Nothing wrong with that. Johnson
is a poet and a genius, and he’s on to something deep about us and about
North Korea. But let’s not forget the memoirists who traveled in the other
direction, and let’s not dismiss their memoirs, which tell us that theirs was
the better direction.
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