[late]

I want to suggest a book.

A CIA guy spent much of his career working NK, and he wanted to talk about what it was like there. He did it by writing an excellent detective novel called A Corpse in the Koryo.

I've read it a couple times, it's good enough to be worth a second time around.

"Like Philip Kerr's Berlin Noir trilogy and the Inspector Arkady Renko novels, A Corpse in the Koryo introduces another unfamiliar world, a perplexing universe seemingly so alien that the rules are an enigma to the reader and even, sometimes, to Inspector O. Author James Church weaves a story with beautifully spare prose and layered descriptions of a country and a people he knows by heart after decades as an intelligence officer."






https://www.amazon.com/Corpse-Koryo-Inspector-Novel-Novels-ebook/dp/B003JMF9DY/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2UF4F8396M61A&dchild=1&keywords=a+corpse+in+the+koryo&qid=1587667766&sprefix=the+corpse+in+the+koryo%2Caps%2C154&sr=8-1

[SolarCross]

It is a bummer that Amazon has slashed their affiliate commissions. Do you think it is still worth the trouble selling books for them? I am phasing them out myself, there are plenty of other affiliate programs out there that pay much better.

[late]

It is a bummer that Amazon has slashed their affiliate commissions. Do you think it is still worth the trouble selling books for them? I am phasing them out myself, there are plenty of other affiliate programs out there that pay much better.

That's nice, but it doesn't have anything to do with NK, or the novel.

[ThirdTerm]

Yeonmi Park shocked the world with harrowing tales of life under the repressive North Korean regime and her perilous escape to freedom. Korean defectors have published interesting novels about their ordeals in North Korea. In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom (2016) recounts her life story. Her father was imprisoned and tortured by the regime for trading on the black-market to provide for his wife and two young daughters. During the Cold War, every Eastern European country actually looked like North Korea and they were living behind the Iron Wall.

When Park was nine, which would have been around 2002, she says she saw her best friend’s mother executed at a stadium in Hyesan. But, according to several North Korean defectors from Hyesan who didn’t want to be identified for fear of reprisal, public executions only ever took place on the outskirts of the city, mostly at the airport, never in the stadium or streets, and there were none after 2000 – the last they recall was a mass execution of ten or eleven people in 1999.

Park’s account of the mother’s crime changes constantly, depending it seems on her audience. In Europe recently she claimed the woman was executed for watching a James Bond movie and sometimes, less specifically, a Hollywood movie. But in Hong Kong a few months ago, she told an audience the woman had been caught watching South Korean DVDs. Irish Independent journalist, Nicola Anderson, in a recent online video interview with Park seemed confused and asked her, “It was a movie from South Korea wasn’t it?” Park’s response was, “No, Hollywood movie, James Bond.”

One of the world’s leading authorities on North Korea, is Andrei Lankov, a professor at Kookmin University in Seoul. Born in the Soviet Union, he was an exchange student in North Korea during the 1980s and has interviewed hundreds of defectors as part of his research. He says, “I am very, very skeptical whether watching a Western movie would lead to an execution. An arrest for such action is possible indeed, but still not very likely.”

He says the sorts of crimes that result in public execution are, “Murder, large-scale theft, especially of the government property, sometimes involvement with large-scale smuggling operations, including human trafficking.”

A 59-year-old woman from Hyesan who escaped in 2009 laughed when asked was anyone ever executed for watching an American movie. “How can you be executed for watching an American film? It sounds ridiculous even saying it. That has never happened before. I go to church with around 350 defectors and you ask any one of them and they will say exactly the same thing,” she told us over the phone from South Korea. Other defectors confirmed this. The Hyesan woman went on to say that people who were caught watching South Korean dramas were not executed, but were sentenced to three to seven years in a correctional center where the treatment was horrendous. “You don’t know when you will die,” she said.

In 2003, when she was ten, Park tells of how her world came crashing down when her father was arrested in Pyongyang for illegal trading. According to Park’s mother he’d begun trading illegally between China and North Korea in 1999 when Kim Jong Il stopped providing rations and ceased spying on businesses. His conviction meant other family members were also criminals and their position in society plummeted. “Then our destiny was clear, I was going to be a farmer. There’s no way I can get into university,” Park told us.

Park says her father was sentenced to 17 or 18 years in prison. Her mother told us he was initially sentenced to a year, but later it was increased to ten years. The discrepancies between the lengths of sentence are neither here nor there, but the family story does become murky and rather mercurial from here on.

Park’s mother told us prosecutors interrogated her on and off for about a year – sometimes at home in Hyesan and sometimes elsewhere, because she had worked in her husband’s trading business. But, in a recent BBC radio interview, Park claimed her mother was imprisoned for six months because she went to live back in her hometown after her husband was jailed and “because in North Korea there is no freedom of movement, not freedom of speech… it was against the law for the movement and that’s why she went to prison for half a year.”

https://thediplomat.com/2014/12/the-str ... onmi-park/