How I Became a North Korean

Начало книги

Home still begins as an image for me. The Pyongyang subway line dug down as deeply as a bunker. The elderly drunk and dancing by the Pothong River to the brass kwaengwari’s tinsel music. The electric fences circling hundreds of labor camps farther north that we pretended didn’t exist. These images are my home, my prison sentence. But memory is a slippery mirror, a surface that splinters into fragments when I touch it. It moves the way that the poems I used to write changed with each attempt at completion; it haunts me. I find myself looking for clues to the past, repeatedly returning to that mansion floating in light, to our country that the rest of the world calls North Korea.

I’m haunted by what my eomeoni told me. On that last night, she said, no one wanted to be present in the mansion with kilometers of bomb shelter tunnels underneath it. She and my abeoji wore the same smiles as everyone else, the same fur coats and Rolex watches engraved with the name of the Dear Leader, the Great General, the man with dozens of honorific titles. They wore the same Kim family badges over their hearts and, in this way, demonstrated their loyalty to our leaders.

Читать дальше →