Suki Kim's Blog
September 14, 2015
On the subject of "lover"
Since some readers have questions about the "lover" inclusion, I wanted to address it here. The book is "literary nonfiction". For straightforward facts and figures on North Korea, you can look up the UN's latest report on their human rights violations or those books by news reporters or the transcripts of defector testimonies. This book, however, mixes political reporting with narrative lyricism, written by a professional writer about her own undercover investigation -- the only one of its kind, written from the inside that country. It was imperative that my book be from a personal perspective.
The tragedy of the divided Koreas is ultimately a human one where millions of real human beings were separated and died missing their loved ones, as my grandmother did with her son. The very existence of the 70-year-long division suggests an entire generation having been sacrificed missing their "loved" ones. I needed to embody that horror and sadness in my own way. I needed to miss someone I loved no matter how tenuous that missing becomes from a forced disconnection. Humanizing the young North Koreans and bridging the distance between the subject and the journalist meant that I had to also humanize myself and be stripped bare. I was not some impenetrable journalist looking at my students as the other. My students were not just the sons of the elite but also 19-year-old lovable, scared boys. I was doing my job there to write the truth from the place, but was also only human and vulnerable, and thus my missing became my anchor, not as some superfluous gossip about a "boyfriend" but a greater reflection on the missing, thus "lover" -- the beloved. Because a real human connection was one thing feared in that world.
The book is based on the hundreds of pages of detailed reporting but also from a personal lens, perhaps because the Korean division was not so much a problem for me to solve but a heartbreak I was born into -- to understand and feel and ponder and empathize. Perhaps it's because I come from a literary novelist & narrative journalism background and am not a traditional nonfiction/ news reporter that the writing renders itself to those quiet loaded reflections.
One review that seemed to understand this well is from the New York Review of Books:
The tragedy of the divided Koreas is ultimately a human one where millions of real human beings were separated and died missing their loved ones, as my grandmother did with her son. The very existence of the 70-year-long division suggests an entire generation having been sacrificed missing their "loved" ones. I needed to embody that horror and sadness in my own way. I needed to miss someone I loved no matter how tenuous that missing becomes from a forced disconnection. Humanizing the young North Koreans and bridging the distance between the subject and the journalist meant that I had to also humanize myself and be stripped bare. I was not some impenetrable journalist looking at my students as the other. My students were not just the sons of the elite but also 19-year-old lovable, scared boys. I was doing my job there to write the truth from the place, but was also only human and vulnerable, and thus my missing became my anchor, not as some superfluous gossip about a "boyfriend" but a greater reflection on the missing, thus "lover" -- the beloved. Because a real human connection was one thing feared in that world.
The book is based on the hundreds of pages of detailed reporting but also from a personal lens, perhaps because the Korean division was not so much a problem for me to solve but a heartbreak I was born into -- to understand and feel and ponder and empathize. Perhaps it's because I come from a literary novelist & narrative journalism background and am not a traditional nonfiction/ news reporter that the writing renders itself to those quiet loaded reflections.
One review that seemed to understand this well is from the New York Review of Books:
