Solomonia Archive: The Real Gulag, North Korea Version

Thursday, December 1, 2005

A few days ago I finished reading The Aquariums of Pyongyang, by Kang Chol-Hwan. The book is the memoir of a young North Korean boy who, along with his entire family, is shipped off to the North Korean gulag of Yodok. He describes their time there, their subsequent release and his escape over the border into China and finally to freedom in South Korea.

The reading experience was reminicent of Anne Applebaum's, Gulag : A History-- both books extremely important, though Kang's is more personal and shorter. I excerpted small selections of Applebaum's book in a series of seven entries you can find here if you missed them.

In that spirit, here is a very short quote from Kang's memoir (p. 87):

...There were only seven outhouses with four places each for an entire village of two to three thousand people. We did our business Turkish style, squatting over a tank we did our best not to dwell upon. No paper, of course. Each visitor had to come prepared with his own supply of sufficiently wide leaves. Bean and sesame leaves worked best. In July, during the rainy season, there was the danger of overflow; but it was much worse in winter, when the excrement froze and gradually built up toward the lip of the latrine. The detainees then were forced to choose between chiseling away at the growing mountain of excrement with a pickax or getting up in the middle of the night and diffing a new hole of their own. If you chose the latter, it was worthwhile keeping track of the location, because you might later want to retrieve what you buried and use it to fertilize your vegetable bed.

Applebaum's book is a tribute to memory, but Kang's book is the story of life as it is being lived right now. His description of life in North Korea -- one of the world's largest open-air prisons -- is hard to imagine, and this is before the famine of the late 90's. To give you an idea of how tough life in the North was and is, when Kang crosses over into China, he's amazed by the extraordinary wealth and freedom he finds there.(!!)

Consider giving The Aquariums of Pyongyang a try. It's a quick, but important, read.

Update: Just noticed this timely post at Mick Hartley's.

Posted by Solomon at 8:07 PM on Thursday, Dec 1, 2005
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