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More reviews by Peter Gordon
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The Aquariums of Pyongyang by Kang Chol-Hwan
Many years ago, after I had read the gamut of Russian writers from Lermontov through Pasternak and had embarked upon Solzhenitsyn, I set The Gulag Archipelago aside. I figured I knew all about it and it would just be depressing.
But after it sat on my shelf for a couple of years, I did read it. And yes, I did know the story from newspaper reports and histories, but knowing the story is not the same as having it told in day-by-day detail.
North Korea is much in the news these days, as part of President George Bush's "Axis of Evil", as a problem child of Asia, as the East Germany's to South Korea's modern democracy that hasn't yet crumbled and come back to the fold.
Yet, while anyone who reads the papers is aware of what goes on in North Korea, one doesn't know everything. Countries are not just geo-political situations.
KANG CHOL-HWAN spent ten years from pre-adolescence onward, in Yodok, a North Korean labor camp. His grandfather, a wealthy Japanese-resident Korean who returned with his family to assist the cause, was targeted for unspecified crimes and the entire family, with the exception of the author's mother, was bundled off to camp.
The deprivation and depravity are, of course, beyond comprehension. But it is, to use an overworked phrase, the banality of the evil, the pettiness and arbitrariness that ultimately strikes home. Kang writes largely without rancor, remembering the small pleasures - a helpful teacher, a friendly guard, running into a bear while in the mountains, his success in making traps to catch rats to extend the meager rations, the one or two candies he was given during an entire decade - as much or more than the hardship.
The aquariums of the less-than-illuminating title refer to Kang's hobby as a (free) boy. He was allowed to take it with him to camp, but the fish soon died, as did all connection with the relatively privileged past.
One the one had, there is little new here. Man's inhumanity to his fellow man, dressed up in political slogans, has been an all-too-common feature of the last century or two. The emergence of people from these nightmares literate enough to write about them is also increasingly common. There are similar stories from Africa, the Balkans, China, Cambodia and a depressingly large number of other places.
But the events told in this book were not happening in the middle of a World War or even a Civil War, nor under the cover of the Cold War. They were neither the result of rogue military units nor a result of tensions from the breakup of Cold War states or colonial regimes or racism. They pretty much happened yesterday as an instrument of state policy. There is no prospect of NATO cavalry riding in to prevent further abuses, no prospect of trials at The Hague.
Kang hardly comments on politics, except in the Epilogue where, given his experiences, his statements not entirely expected:
- Anyone who has stood as I have beside a person slowly dying of hunger - who has seen the horror with his own eyes - will never linger to debate the pros and cons of food aid. Who knows how much aid is siphoned off to buttress the army? One often hears such objections, even among people who want to see more food go to the North.
- It's true that in North Korea the army comes first. But it is not a professional army cut off from the rest of the population. It is made up entirely of volunteers - legions upon legions of them. Frequently, the requests outnumber the openings.
Anyone would deal with North Korea, in politics or commerce, should read this book. The book can arguably be used to bolster arguments for either engagement or sanctions. Nor will it answer questions about the stability of the regime or whether the country is cheating on its various international commitments. But it will remind us that behind the posturing of governments and activists on all sides and of all political persuasions are millions of people, with families and children, and normal hopes which they keep alive in the worst of circumstances.
Peter Gordon
03/04/2002
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Peter Gordon is editor of The Asian Review of Books. |
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