Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag
Where to buy Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag books online?
Product Description
The first personal documentation of life in the North Korean labor camps from a survivor and escapee of the communist regime’s prisons.
North Korea is today one of the last bastions of hard-line Communism. Its leaders have kept a forceful grasp on their one-party regime, quashing any nascent challenger movements and sending all suspected dissidents to its brutal concentration camps for “re-education.” Kang Chol-hwan is the first survivor of one of these camps to escape and tell his tale to the world, documenting the extreme conditions in these gulags and providing a personal insight into life in North Korea. Part horror tale, part past document, part memoir, part political tract, this record of one man’s suffering gives eyewitness proof to an ongoing sorrowful chapter of modern history.
Buy Cheap Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag Online
Related posts:
This is a very poorly written book.
To be honest, it could be that the book suffers from a double translation: from Korean to French, then from French to English. It could also be that the book seems to have been dictated (during meetings with the original French translator), then place into narrative form. Nevertheless, the prose itself is rambling, unfocused, and full of interludes, both long and fleeting, that lead nowhere.
The information about the North Korean “gulag” system (if one can appropriate this term for hard-labor camps outside the USSR) is really nothing new. It certainly nothing that isn’t publicly available on one of the many, brilliant on-line journals documenting human rights abuses in North Korea (i.e. nkhumanrights.or.kr). Really , this presents very few insights.
What is appealing, but, is the leader’s description of his evocative, childhood views of life in Pyongyang, and the efficacy with which children are brainwashed to worship Kim Il-sung and his son. It is also informative to read about the rampant corruption in North Korea, which the leader learns to manipulate after his relief from the “gulag,” as well as the mundane, everyday violence born of the ennui of North Korean life. Apart from that, there ain’t much to recommend it.
Since these passages represent maybe 10% of the book’s 200-plus pages, the reader would be much better served by skiming the book at the library, rather than adding this title to his library.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
The greatest crime of the West has been to stand by while brutal regimes by Kim Il Sung and others flourish. If there is any charge to level against liberalism in all-purpose, it is that as a movement, it has never thought to take brutal and swift action against the Sungs, Mao Tse Tungs, and Stalins of the world. In fact they have have permanently mocked conservatives for wanting to do so. Liberals permanently wait for the hammer to fall and then they act. Things are not evil to most liberal politicians until they take place to Americans. This lack of species loyalty is what characterizes the American liberal (again language generally. Their ire falls mainly on conservative or fascist regimes.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
The tale of K.Chol-Hwan isn’t rare. There’s several published accounts of cases such as his, mostly persons be from the ex- Soviet Union.
Besides the obvious fact that this account being from extremely-isolated North Korea has intense interest, his book draws many parallels to the Soviet gulag tales.
K.Chol-Hwan’s family tree was basically lured back to N.Korea from Japan where they were leading a very prosperous life, a lure made simpler partly because his mother was ideologically a “communist”. Despite the reservations of the rest of the family tree they relocated to N.Korea where they were supposed to help in the “revolution” and the “development” of the country.
As a replacement for, they establish themselves in a backwards isolated environment, a personal cult under Kim Jong-il, and a system that may call itself “communist” but is nothing more than a hardcore dictatorship. Hwan’s account relates how slowly but steadily they were forced to give up their wealthy possessions, and how they learned that the definition of being “reactionary” is reasonably open in that country, not only that, but it could land you in some seriously uncomfortable places.
Like for example, one of the countries copious concentration camps, Yodok.
Hwan, along with his entire immediate family tree (!) find themselves incarcerated in that hard-labour camp, where descriptions of appaling conditions abound. Inmates resort to eating bugs, frogs and rats. The sanitary conditions are as close to pure horror as it gets, inmates are punished for the slightest of pretenses, death looms heavy in all kinds of forms, and hope may die last but for most of the incarcerated that doesn’t take long either.
Daily and downright hilarious but force-fed propaganda is the order of the day, and the inmates find themselves in a micro-world of incredible ridiculousness, cruelty and darkness.
He and his family tree spent an unbearable 12 years in Yodok, and after that they were miraculously and unexpectedly unrestricted. Certainly more miraculous is the fact that they lived at all.
After a fleeting spell where Hwan tries to lead a “normal” life in the outside, he desides that wherever efforts he invests are basically pointless considering the increasingly aggravation situation in the country, a situation that can at best be described as utterly hopeless for millions of N.Koreans. His plot to escape goes through some obstacles and close calls, but it eventually succeeds, and via China he finds himself in South Korea, N.Korea’s “despised enemy”.
After a period where he relates his tale to the authorities who seek as much information as they could possibly get, he becomes an overnight celebrity of sorts, perfect with countless interviews, lectures etc, all of course accompanied by a handsome income that his new-establish status makes.
Perhaps predictably, Hwan comes fleeting to declaring this a paradise. There in lays naturally the weakness of the book. While his account before his escape is not exactly a literary masterpiece (dry, colorless, even if intense and emphatic in all its horror and misery) , Hwan’s understanding of the world is lobsided to say the least. He captures easily the obvious, dramatic and excruciating failures of N.Korea but fails equally to capture persons in the new system where he’s establish refuge.
This in itself is also not rare. It does undermine the book as a whole in my opinion, but not his account of Yodok which must be read if only to learn to what limits humans can spectacle bestiality.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
I bought this book to help me know the life of a North Korean; by one of their own who could verify the horrors I had heard existed. It is not a lengthy, in detail, or novel like tale. It is a cold, stark, very glad I don’t live, there type of tale. It indeed sustantiates the inhumanity and horrors of living under a failed communist state.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
I have spent reasonably a bit of time in South Korea this year, and have had discussions with people about reunification. South Koreans see this as absolutely inevitable. I had suggested that there would be fantastic difficulties because the people in the North are living in a primitive and medieval lifestyle. South Korea is a completely modern country, and people from the North will have a hard time integrating. Reunification in Germany was hard because of the different viewpoints of persons raised in communist systems. The South Koreans dismiss this and say, “It is one people.” After reading this book, I agree with them. The North Koreans sound just like the South Koreans I know. When the time comes, Korean reunification will likely be swift and result in far fewer problems than the German reunification.
The description of life in a concentration camp for a young child is stunning. In spite of the severity of the guards, the death and despair all around, the leader still had moments of joy and saw beauty in his surroundings.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5