On the Brouhaha Over Defectors' Memoirs

By John Cussen

They are, of course, wrong ― the more finical sects of North Korea experts, that is, those who advise us to set aside as unreliable North Korean defectors’ memoirs. Too novelesque to be trusted, they say. Too infrequently backed up by corroborative testimony, they say. Too often controverted in their plot details by the memoirists’ own spoken accounts of their childhoods in North Korea and of their lives in peril in China. In short, not to be relied upon in the all-important project of knowing what everyday life is like in North Korea, they say.

As readers of this newspaper, you know of these experts’ complaints because The Korea Times columnist Casey Lartigue, Jr. has been the memoirists’ chief defender. Meanwhile, here in Pennsylvania, I know of them because my efforts to place a combined essay review of Yeonmi Park’s “In Order to Live,” of Lucia Jang’s “Stars Between the Sun and Moon,” of Hyeonseo Lee’s “The Girl With Seven Names” and of Eunsum Kim’s “A Thousand Miles to Freedom” in scholarly journals based in North America have been frustrated by rumors that the books are at least in part fiction.

Fortunately, as I say, the experts and editors are wrong, for all of the several reasons already advanced by Lartigue and others, as well as for another reason ― a literary reason ― that I’d like to introduce here.

First, however, let’s recall the arguments in favor of the books that have already been offered: first, the unreasonableness of expecting those of the memoirists who are now celebrities to remain consistent in every one of their stories’ details while giving interviews. Also, says Lartigue, fears of regime reprisals against their families back in the North may at times cause the defectors to obscure and displace details of their printed stories; however, Lartigue insists, the stories remain essentially unchanged. Trauma is also a factor, say both Blaine Harden (co-author with Shin Dong-hyuk of “Escape from Camp 14”) and Maryanne Vollers (co-author with Yeonmi 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.

Not to be overlooked, too, in the nitpicking critique of the narratives is the agency of the North Korean propaganda machine. “The regime’s most common weapon against its critics is character assassination,” says Vollers.

We ought also to remember, says Andrei Lankov, the skepticism that originally greeted firsthand accounts of the barbarities of the Soviet gulags, of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and of 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 possible, he says, that the North Korean memoirs I’ve listed above might, too, survive their detractors’ 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.

Indeed, as Blaine 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. 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 (“The Diary of Ann Frank”), of exodus (Csaba Teglas’s “Budapest Exit: A Memoir of Fascism, Communism, and Freedom”), of internment (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, the new genre is also decidedly sui generis--a type of memoir as unmistakably North Korean as a Rodong Sinmun editorial or a bowl of mul-naengmyeon.

And here, finally, is my contribution to the argument, the reason I say the experts are wrong to disdain the memoirs: because the border between fiction and nonfiction is not the imporous, thread-narrow, determinate line that they imagine. No, the whole history of captivity and refugee narratives from the “Book of Exodus” tells us that the real meeting site of unspeakable fact and telling fiction is a wider zone, one 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, 11-year-old child 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 ― 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); yes, that portion of Jang’s book also, it seems to me, springs from a psychic DMZ of sorts, wherein trauma and remembrance cobble, stitch and blend their stories together.

Lastly, I call your attention to the most controversial 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 staff being imprisoned, we will think highly of this man. Indeed, we will imagine him a martyr. However, in the passage I have in mind, 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.

Many will read this passage and think that the pastor’s zeal for repentance and conversion oversteps privacy’s discrete limits. Others will credit him with knowing well sin’s subtle 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 inconsistencies, 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 trafficking, 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 to the free world ― as well as for what they tell us of human pluck, determination, 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.

Dr. John Cussen, who now teaches at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, taught in South Korea from 1995 to 2000. Contact him jcussen@edinboro.edu.