Ordinary Lives in a Hidden World

North Korea has been in the news a lot in the past year (due to its recent skirmishes with South Korea and its continued drive to build nuclear weapons).  But I’m guessing that the average American doesn’t know much at all about the country—and especially about its citizens.  Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea provides a wealth of information.

Demick—who lived and worked in Seoul, South Korea, as a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times—conducted extensive interviews with North Korean defectors to construct this book.  She wisely focuses on the stories of just five or six former North Koreans, using rich detail to capture the lives of ordinary citizens in one of the world’s last communist regimes:  a young pediatrician, a university student at the country’s top college, a mother and model citizen, an orphan who turns to crime, a kindergarten teacher who rises above her family’s “tainted blood” to a respectable profession.

Working from the Korean War in the 1950s (which ended with the separation of the Korean peninsula into two countries, an act which suddenly separated family members) to the present, Demick traces her subjects’ lives through the rule of Kim Il-Sung, through devastating famine, through the loss of jobs and electricity, through hunger and homelessness, through black market capitalism, and finally through escape.  (All of this while South Korea becomes one of the most technologically-advanced countries in the world.)

Nothing to Envy is incredibly informative, but it is also incredibly touching.  Perhaps one of the most powerful stories in the book is that of Mi-Ran and Jun-Sang.  She was a young woman from a “tainted family” (as Demick explains, North Korea under Kim Il-Sung still had a strong caste system) who lived with her parents and siblings in a two-room apartment in an impoverished town in the north of the country.  He was a young man from a better family who earned the rare privilege to attend a top university in Pyongyang.  When the couple fell in love, they couldn’t risk being seen together (for fear that Mi-Ran’s low family status would damage Jun-Sang’s future).  For over a decade, their only “dates” were long walks through the dark city (which—due to the lack of electricity for all but an hour or two a day—was truly dark); their only physical contact was holding each other’s hand on those walks.

As a reader, you can’t help but care about these men and women.  You will learn, but you will also feel. 

 

Absolutely Enjoyable

Sherman Alexie’s foray into young adult literature, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, is the story of 14-year-old Arnold Spirit, known as Junior to his friends and family on the rez.  As a high school freshman, Arnold throws a textbook at his math teacher, accidentally hitting him in the face.  (Arnold loves math, and he’s furious when he discovers that his math text is so old that his mother once used this exact copy.)  Rather than becoming angry with Arnold, the teacher encourages him to strive for better things in his life. 

Inspired by the teacher’s comments, Arnold decides to leave the reservation school so that he can attend the (slightly better funded) ”white” school twenty miles away from his home.  This means struggling to find a ride to school each day, facing a school full of unfamiliar (and unfriendly) faces, and confronting his ex-best friend on the basketball court.

Alexie creates a warm, humorous, wise voice for his protagonist, and Ellen Forney adds frequent cartoons and sketches throughout the novel.  (Arnold aspires to be an artist and cartoonist, so the drawings represent Arnold’s take on his life, his family, and his friends.)  This was a book that I was eager to return to each evening, and it’s a worthy addition to young adult literature (especially for male readers).

 

Everything Old is New Again

I don’t know how it happened, but somehow I missed out on The Aeneid in my schooling.  When I ran across a recent review of Stanley Lombardo’s translation of Virgil’s classic epic, I decided that I needed to remedy that problem.

I have always enjoyed mythology, and I recently finished teaching The Odyssey again, so the terrain of The Aeneid is familiar.  As the Greeks destroy the city of Troy, Aeneas (with his aging father, his son, and a small band of warriors) sets out to find a new homeland.  He receives a prophecy that Jupiter will allow him to build a new city in Italy and that his descendants will build an empire there.  Before he can reach Italy, though, he and his men wash ashore in northern Africa, where the love of Queen Dido tempts him to stay.  When Aeneas does finally reach Italy, he has to engage in a bloody battle to win the land that Jupiter promised.

While the story occasionally becomes bogged down in long lists of names, The Aeneid is an amazing adventure.  In this new translation, Lombardo does for The Aeneid what Seamus Heaney did with his translation of Beowulf—he makes an ancient epic fresh, full of life, readable, and relevant.