Reddit reviews Dear Leader: My Escape from North Korea

This book https://www.amazon.com/Dear-Leader-Escape-North-Korea/dp/1476766568 written by a defector has a part where he mentions that the common speech of Chinese Koreans is pretty much the same dialect as that of the northern North Hamyong province of DPRK.

I'll throw in another recommendation - "Dear Leader" the story of Jong Il's personal poet who fled. Unbelievable tale of how the top 1% lives in NK versus the abject poverty of the other 99%.

It has a lot of info that was new to me, as an example, there are people whose job it is to look for attractive girls in junior high schools who are sent (their consent is never asked for) to special resort hotels as slaves. A depressing fact for sure, but if you listen to Robert Evans you probably will appreciate the book.

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https://www.amazon.com/Dear-Leader-Escape-North-Korea/dp/1476766568

Well, thanks for the advice then!

I just wish that the particular subset of Western society that considers young men like yourself who have grown up with a strict, fundamentalist family as having ideals fundamentally opposed to their "western values" had a chance to meet or interact with you.

Here you are, living in a place and surrounded by values that are so unlike anything many of us in the Western world have experienced and you're cracking jokes about 'fursonas' on Reddit. If you didn't tell us in this TIFU post, I doubt anyone would be able to tell that you're not some 20yo from New Jersey.

I know the world is unfair, but it seems to be almost cruelly so when -- based on your interactions with people on this site -- someone like yourself, who clearly would fit perfectly into a society whose values align with your own is not in a position to actually become a part of that society.

I've enjoyed our conversation and not to harp on this point, but please continue to consider leaving your country. Any other place would be lucky to have you. I know that family ties are strong, but you didn't pick your family and ultimately you do not owe your life to them.

You truly do not need to live the rest of your life unhappy, feeling like you don't belong, married to someone you have to "learn to love." There is so much shit in the world but there is a lot of good too. I know it seems impossible to leave, but that's an illusion. It would be hard and dangerous as fuck, but not impossible. (Edit: as I wrote here, claiming asylum is absolutely something you can do and your situation is exactly the kind of thing it was designed for)

There is a fascinating book I read some time ago called "Dear Leader: My Escape from North Korea", written by a high-level North Korean official who does something like what you've done: he accidentally gives a prohibited magazine that he signed out from a "restricted" NK library to a friend who then forgets it on the subway, leading to the magazine being turned into the secret police and the author interrogated. He talks his way out of the interrogation for the moment, but knows that his life as he knows it is over and that he'll be re-arrested and likely killed the next day.

He ends up on the run and eventually ends up in China, with no money, no family and no friends. It's an absolutely fascinating read and I highly recommend it.

I figure it might be difficult for you to purchase books online, so I've uploaded my epub copy (and a PDF conversion if you have trouble opening the EPUB). I'll PM you the link so the mods don't delete my comment if they stumble across it.

Have a good life and like I said, if you ever need anything feel free to PM me.

Dear Leader by Jang Jin-Sung

https://www.amazon.com/Dear-Leader-Escape-North-Korea/dp/1476766568

Great book.

Here is the mobile version of your link

China would likely move south in order to expand their borders and create some sort of buffer zone. They would also secure their border to contain refugees. They are not fond of North Korean civilians. This book talks about it, as the guy escaped and travelled through China to get to South Korea, all while being hunted by authorities who would have sent him straight back to the North.

Amazon link to the book. If you "look inside" and search for the word "paper", on page 3 it says,

> After [Kim Il-Sung's] death [...] the status of novelists changed. Poetry became the literary vogue. This was not due solely to Kim Jong-Il's preference for the form. The phenomenon was reinforced, if not triggered, by a shortage of paper when the North Korean economy collapsed and people scrambled just to survive. When there wasn't even enough paper in the country to print school textbooks, not many people could afford to own a hefty revolutionary novel. With poetry, however, the necessary tenets of loyalty to the Kim dynasty could be distilled potently into a single newspaper page. Thus poetry emerged as the dominant literary vehicle through which Kim Jong-il exercised his cultural dictatorship.

Of course, it's probably not easy to independently confirm Jang Jin-Sung's version of events. Someone with more knowledge of North Korea than me should probably answer that.

This is an incredible book on this exact subject. The author worked in the heart of the propaganda machine and was responsible for coming up with the stupid, mythological stories about the amazing feats of the Dear Leader that are taught to North Korean kids as fact. He knew it was all nonsense but his life was relatively great so it wasn't in his interest to rebel. He did start to doubt the regime though, inevitably, and eventually escaped.

I read this book in about two sittings - I couldn't put it down, it's so gripping! What was incredibly fascinating was how he explained the ascent of Kim Jung-il, the son of Kim il-Sung. Kim Jung-il hated his father and wasn't actually chosen to succeed Kim il-Sung, as it's commonly believed. Kim Jung-il orchestrated a power grab before his father's death using his relatively low-level job in the propaganda office. In his job, he realised the true potential of propaganda and how it could be used to manipulate and control. He used his position to control the flow of information to his father before eventually cutting him off completely. This allowed him to set up an alternative centre of power around himself, the real power, alongside the pretend power of his father. Fascinating stuff.


https://www.amazon.com/Dear-Leader-Escape-North-Korea/dp/1476766568/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1492589026&sr=8-1&keywords=Dear+Leader%3A+My+Escape+from+North+Korea

Let me cross check my library when I get a little more awake but off the top of my head you HAVE to read Dear leader by Jang Jin-sung who now runs New Focus international. He was a poet laureate with access to outside media and let one of those pieces get caught on a citizen who shouldnt have had access to it. It led to both them fleeing and ill leave the rest for you to read. I STRONGLY suggest you get it. Most NK books are hard for me to put down, but this was one so hard to put down I believe it was read over 2-3 days.

The rest of your list seems close to mine, I know I have read 15 books on NK, so let me cross check and see what we have read jointly vs. the differences and we can compare. I also have (like the Hidden Gulag) various reports written that may or may not interest you.

The gullibility and smarmy naivete in this thread is just pathetic. Yes. War is bad. What a revelation. Why hasn't anybody else thought of that before?

If you want to feel all warm and fuzzy inside go buy a Hallmark card or go browse /r/aww.

People living in the real world understand that geopolitics is a game of advantage that you can't circumvent by pleading for everyone to join hands and sing Kumbaya. When you appease dictators and cede ground to them you simply enable and embolden their behavior. Furthermore, the South Korean president is hugging and holding hands with a mass murderer who has enslaved over 20 million people, condemning them to a live a life of near starvation and physical/psychological imprisonment. You're the leader of an extraordinarily prosperous, democratic country; have some dignity. You're meeting a piece of human excrement who is feeling on top of the world right now. You shake the man's hand for diplomacy's sake. You don't hug and caress him.

It's just so god damned pathetic how naive people are. What's happening here is that South Korea learned to live under a nuclear DPRK a long time ago. What they can't abide is constantly ratcheting up brinksmanship that is eagerly stoked by a senile reality tv star with the strongest military in the history of the world at his beck and call.

China, RoK, and DPRK have cooked up this appeasement scheme to dupe Trump into thinking he's quelled the DPRK threat. DPRK will keep its nuclear weapons (the announcement that they've completed their nuclear weapons program and no longer need the facility they're shutting down should have been a good indicator of DPRK's intentions for people that were too blind to them up until now) and as we can see here, the Kim regime gets boatloads of photo opportunities, diplomatic prestige, increased security internally, increased legitimacy externally and inevitably sanctions relief. China will benefit from further DPRK stability and increased trade opportunities (and leverage on Trump as well). And South Korea gets to see the sabre-rattling cease and they receive the same benefits China does from prolonged security for Kim regime. They don't want to deal with that humanitarian crisis either. Trump gets a plaque on his wall that says "Best Negotiator Ever" and a polaroid of a North Korean testing facility with a "closed" sign on the gate.

But don't let me get in the way of everyone "awwwwww"ing over this like it's a picture of a cat hugging a golden retriever. Bunch of rubes.

edit: Can't wait to see all the memes come out of this. Kim Jong Un is gonna have his image rehabilitated the same way GWB did lol... But I don't want this to just a useless rant yelling at silly people. So, before you guys start memeing up KJU let me give you guys a short reading list of DPRK books I've greatly enjoyed (I've been fascinated with DPRK for at least a decade):

• Dear Leader: My Escape from North Korea. This is a great firsthand account of an "inner" party member who lived the relatively high life in Pyongyang as a propagandist.
  
  
• Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea Exactly what it sounds like: biographies of normal people who live(d) in DPRK over the last 30 years. This book is shocking, sickening, heart wrenching, triumphant, and any other superlative descriptor you can think of. Can't recommend it enough.
  
  
• Aquariums of Pyongyang. Nothing to Envy describes gulag life in detail but this book delves into it exclusively and I found myself enthralled but revolted at the same time. You'll have to take breaks to process the horror and atrocities it describes.
  
  So yeah, check any of those books out then come back here and see if you're still inclined to "oooo" and "awww" and talk about how sweet this is.