Writer Delves Into Lives of North Koreans
First dates amid widespread famine, falling in love surrounded by repression, raising a family in the midst of concentration camps ― not exactly the stuff of romance novels.
As far as the worldwide media is concerned, North Korea is a place with only one face: misery and the struggle for survival.
But according to Barbara Demick, the former Los Angeles Times correspondent to Seoul, there is an altogether more human face that is largely overlooked ― and it's not necessarily one wincing in pain or gripped by fear.
Speaking Monday evening in Seoul during the launch of her new book, ``Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea,'' she tried to light a torch on the almost banal aspects of the reality of living on the other side of the Demilitarized Zone.
In the title, she details the lives of six North Koreans, and takes a particular look at day-to-day aspects of living in the North.
``I wanted to bring out the humanity behind the headlines,'' Demick said.
``It was a very simple book to do,'' she continued, although it took ``days and days'' of interviewing.
The idea for ``Nothing to Envy'' came to her after she realized there was no literature on North Korea that looked at people's everyday lives, explained Demick.
``The books always focused on their deaths, the starvation, the prison camps, the executions, not on their lives,'' she said. ``I'd read everything I could find in English about North Korea and still didn't have a sense of how people actually lived.
``I think of this book as a series of love stories. And the underlying love story of course is the love that these people had for Kim Il-sung and the way their hearts were broken when they realized that everything they had been told was a lie.''
Demick, a longtime former resident of South Korea, said she decided to write about the North rather than the South because of its mystique.
``North Korea was more of a mystery ― that made it intriguing. It reminded me of novels I'd read like `1984' and Aldous Huxley's `Brave New World,' except that this was a real place with real people,'' she said.
Demick, a U.S. citizen, hopes the book provides an insight into North Korea and further highlights the issue of human rights in the Hermit Kingdom.
``I hope to get more people interested in North Korea,'' she said. ``At least in the U.S., the issue of North Korean human rights has been somewhat marginalized (because) of the right wing. I would like to bring it into the mainstream.
``North Korea is an extraordinary place. Nowhere in the world ― not Cuba or Myanmar ― do human beings have to live under the level of political, economic and social oppression that they do in North Korea.''
``Nothing to Envy'' focuses on the city of Chongjin, an area of North Korea that is off limits to foreigners _ something which she acknowledged had an effect on her ability to form an understanding of the place she was writing about.
``I think a lot was lost not being able to go to the place I was writing about,'' said Demick. But her firsthand experience in North Korea ― Demick has visited Pyongyang ― helped her greatly. ``I don't think I could have written this book without being in parts of North Korea.''
When asked if she was recreating the style of her first book, ``Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood,'' which followed the lives of the families on Logavina Street during the Bosnia-Serb conflict ― Demick acknowledged the ideas behind both books were the same, but she wasn't ``consciously recreating'' the earlier title.
``In both cases, I wanted Americans to identify with people in a faraway place with names they might find hard to pronounce,'' Demick said. ``The point is to get readers to think about how they would react if they were in the same position as North Koreans.''
Comparing the differences between writing the two books, Demick spoke about the difficulties when trying to create a ``sense of place'' when working on ``Nothing to Envy.''
``I actually lived on Logavina Street. Although I've visited North Korea, I have not been to Chongjin. To create a sense of place for the book, I needed to use not only the descriptions provided by the people, but photographs, videos and whatever else I could get to fill in the blanks,'' she said.
Demick, now the Los Angeles Times Beijing bureau chief, keeps in touch with all the defectors that helped her with her book, and whilst in South Korea has met with many to show them the finished product.