Howard, Keith

English

SOAS Research Online

Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studieshttp://journals.cambridge.org/BSOAdditional services for Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies:Email alerts: Click hereSubscriptions: Click hereCommercial reprints: Click hereTerms of use : Click hereMike Kim: Escaping North Korea: Defiance and Hope in the World's Most Repressive Country. xvi, 239 pp. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008. £15.99. ISBN 978 0 7425 5620 1.Keith HowardBulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies / Volume 72 / Issue 03 / October 2009, pp 592 ­ 594DOI: 10.1017/S0041977X09990279, Published online: 21 October 2009Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0041977X09990279How to cite this article:Keith Howard (2009). Review of Mike Kim 'Escaping North Korea: Defiance and Hope in the World's Most Repressive Country' Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 72, pp 592­594 doi:10.1017/S0041977X09990279Request Permissions : Click hereDownloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/BSO, IP address: 212.219.238.14 on 29 Oct 2012Jong Il – whose health and disappearance from view during 2008 made it fashion-able to ask what would happen next – maintained control and therefore allowed onlymarginal, less salient, measures to be implemented. The third chapter, written byKyung Tae Lee and Hyung-Gon Jeong, two Korean members of the KoreaInstitute for International Economic Policy, considers the trends and prospects ofinter-Korean economic co-operation. This is problematic, precisely because somuch altered with the 2008 change of South Korean government that its authorsfailed to foresee. Essentially, the authors situate themselves somewhere betweenthe former (Roh) and current (Lee) governments in Seoul, arguing for the resolutionof the nuclear issue at the ongoing Six Party talks, but for private economic initiat-ives to replace government initiatives, and for co-operation between the Koreas toreplace support by the South for the North. Retrospection is a glorious thing, butLee and Jeong’s five requirements for progressing economic co-operation, and theview given of the prospects for co-operation, need a hasty rethink.There are two additional chapters. Peter Mayer looks at higher education reformin South Korea, an important concern within the country given today’s decliningdemographic of university students, but equally a discussion that has a historystretching back to discussions in the 1960s on the need to train a highly educatedworkforce to provide the backbone of Korea’s development. Finally, Mark Morrisexplores two South Korean films from 2007, The Old Garden/Oraedoenchŏngwŏn and May 18/Hwaryŏhan hyuga. Both films explore the democratic upris-ing of May 1980 in Kwangju, and its brutal repression by the military. Morris notesthat they are cinematic representations rather than documentary tellings (what elseneed they be, if we subscribe to Franco Muretti’s view of Hollywood?), even thoughthey chart a historical event that has left a lasting legacy amongst the population.Indeed, he notes they were less successful at the box office than a monster movieabout an imaginary world made real through special effects. The legacy ofKwangju, he notes, had been explored in an earlier film, Petal/Kkonip, and byprint publications issued when the government was less keen to allow the rawwounds of its oppression to surface, and although not discussed here, hints ofthat legacy remain in the Korean (but not the English) film titles. One mightargue that the author should reflect on shifting Korean consciousness – not leastbecause so many film directors and film critics were part of the student-led move-ment calling for democracy during the 1980s – but that is not Morris’s focus.Rather, he gives us a fine-grained account of the two films, showing just how farKorean cinema has come in the last decade, and concluding that monsters andspectacles are more likely to produce box office success in the next few yearsthan – sadly to many of us – historical and social reflections.Keith HowardMIKE KIM:Escaping North Korea: Defiance and Hope in the World’s MostRepressive Country.xvi, 239 pp. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008. £15.99.ISBN 978 0 7425 5620 1.doi:10.1017/S0041977X09990279The borderlands between academia and popular writing are dangerous places, yetremain essential for the dissemination of information. Vague and opaque though592 R E V I E W Sthey may be, people on both sides, from political scientists to Korean studiesspecialists, and from journalists to members of aid organizations, need reliable docu-mentation of the reality facing refugees from North Korea. There is a ready marketfor their stories of horror, their stories of starvation and mistreatment within thenorthern part of the Korean peninsula, and their stories of escape into servitude,forced marriages or prostitution in China. There is a need to know more aboutthe modern-day “underground railway” that refugees travel across China andthrough one or more third countries to reach South Korea. Hence, while this volumemight from its title appear journalistic more than representative of serious scholar-ship, it provides a vital part of the jigsaw that many of us are struggling to piecetogether in order to understand the tragedy that is unfolding in, and on the bordersof, North Korea.Kim, formerly a budding financial planner from Chicago, spent four years on ornear the physical border between China and its supposedly hermetically sealedneighbour, North Korea. His account sees him planning and executing two escapesfor North Korean refugees, the first involving teenagers who sought asylum in theBritish Consulate in Shanghai, and the second two women travelling overlandthrough China, Laos, and into Thailand. After recognizing the risks of doingthis, he then set up Crossing Borders Ministries, a non-governmental organizationthat has established shelters and orphanages, and provided food, clothes and medi-cines to refugees. It would not be unreasonable to suggest the book needs first andforemost to speak to an audience of potential Crossing Borders sponsors, and thisis suggested by the title: is North Korea really the most repressive place on earth?Maybe, but there are other “rogue” states that also have little respect for humanrights. Again, the emphasis on the unrelentingly grim, on the gulags within theNorth Korean state, on the imprisonment of returnees, on accounts of starvationand death during the food shortages of the 1990s, might be considered to bedirected at this same audience. There is also a sense that the intended audienceis caught in the recently-ended Bush era: personal Christian faith is regularly men-tioned, and the foreword, by the US diplomat Mark Palmer, is full of mantras fromthe recent past about the freedom that came after a sunny Californian (Reagan) pre-dicted the demise of Communist dictatorships, about the way that North Korea’snuclear capability could lead to human losses in Korea, Japan and the USA thatwould dwarf the 2.5 million Koreans who are reputed to have starved to death,and so on.We have to get beyond the rhetoric to see the value. And, there is considerablevalue. Much of Kim’s account discusses specific refugees. Tellingly, therefugees come across as ordinary people who have struggled for years to survivethe hardships of North Korea and who now simply yearn for food, clothing andwarmth. It is the testimonies that are important; these are what we need to hearrather than the polemic. Readers, though, will need to strip the latter away, forKim works hard to incorporate what has been published – accounts of thegulag, accounts of food shortages, and so on – partially, I assume, to substantiatethe testimonies.The effect of incorporating previous publications is that some of the claimsmade are given insufficient scrutiny. For example, if the punishment for refugeeswho return to North Korea is, as Kim states, severe, how is it that some, young andold, repeatedly cross the border? How can the testimonies of ordinary NorthKoreans, the majority of whom are unable to travel and unable to mix with thepolitical elite, prove the oft-cited but highly contentious belief that humanitarianassistance, channelled through the North Korean government, simply feeds theparty leadership or the military? While Kim spent four years working withR E V I E W S 593refugees across the border, how was he able to hold meetings with North Koreanofficials in Pyongyang? Do North Koreans always distrust all foreigners, asthey are said to do here? The last is simply untrue, as those of us who meetNorth Korean scholars and diplomats abroad, and those of us who have walkedthe streets of Pyongyang, know only too well. Again, when one refugeetells Kim how she witnessed the public execution of a returnee, it reinforces anaccount – substantiated by secret film footage – that has been widely circulatedby journalists, but fails to prove the assertion made that such extreme punishmentis commonplace.None of this invalidates the personal stories, or the claims made by the author; Iwould, though, plead for a more closely argued exemplary ethnography focused onthe testimonies of its subjects. There is, still, much ethnography. We hear aboutwomen refugees who suffer when sold as brides for rural Chinese farmers (a prac-tice, incidentally, that involves many Chinese, not just Korean refugees, though thisis not discussed), or who are sold into city brothels. We hear of children born to sta-teless North Korean mothers in China, who as a consequence are unable to attendschool or obtain medical care. We hear that most refugees are sick when theycross the border. We gain insights into indoctrination and the mindset of NorthKoreans after six decades of socialist rule. We learn how refugees initially appearlifeless and rarely smile; that they are usually weak, thin, and malnourished; andso on. And it is here that the volume’s strength resides.Keith HowardAFR I CAELENA BERTONCINI ZÚBKOVÁ, MIKHAIL D. GROMOV, SAID A. M. KHAMIS andKYALLO WADI WAMITILA:Outline of Swahili Literature. Prose Fiction and Drama.(Second edition, extensively revised and enlarged.) xi, 500 pp. Leidenand Boston: Brill, 2009. E119. ISBN 978 90 04 16818 3.doi:10.1017/S0041977X09990280The first edition of Elena Bertoncini’s Outline of Swahili Literature (1989) was themain manual for generations of students of Swahili literature and a standard refer-ence work for scholars working on Swahili prose fiction and theatre. We have allthe reasons to assume that the second, updated edition of this major work, appearingexactly twenty years later, will enjoy the same recognition and popularity. The tur-bulent developments in Swahili prose fiction in the past twenty years make thispublication even more important.The second edition has been thoroughly revised and contains new sections. Thebook is divided into several large parts. Following the introduction, the main textis an account of the history of Swahili literature. It contains three chapters: prosefiction in pre-colonial and colonial times (pp. 11–43), contemporary prose fiction(pp. 45–170) and drama (pp. 171–234). Chapters 2 and 3 are subdivided intothree geographical areas: Kenya, the Tanzanian mainland and Zanzibar. Each ofthese six subsections includes two temporal divisions: from the 1960s to the1980s and from the 1990s to the present.594 R E V I E W S

Review of Mike Kim, Escaping North Korea: Defiance and Hope in the World's Most Repressive Country

Keith Howard

Crossref

Mike Kim: Escaping North Korea: Defiance and Hope in the World's Most Repressive Country. xvi, 239 pp. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008. £15.99. ISBN 978 0 7425 5620 1.

https://soas-repository.worktribe.com/file/346225/1/Howard_review_2009.pdf

Review of Mike Kim, Escaping North Korea: Defiance and Hope in the World's Most Repressive Country

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

SOAS Research Online

Crossref