This Is Paradise! My North Korean Childhood by Hyok Kang

When the famine comes so too does death by starvation of friends and close ones, and Hyok Kang watches as his classmates drop out of school one by one, too weak to attend. His shocking and moving portrayal bears witness to this spirited young boy's resilience and survival in a society forced to operate under the shadow of labour camps, public executions and the deception of UN representatives by Korean officials.

This personal, illustrated account of school days in a rigidly communist institution and everyday life with his family and community provides a rare glimpse of this secretive nation.

Their difficulties continue in South Korea, where prejudice against North Koreans is high, verbal, and indicative of the deep culture of mistrust between the two nations.Hyok Kang was eighteen when he escaped from North Korea, a country locked away from the outside world. The decision to leave is agonizing for the mother, who is fearful of the unknown, and the journey the family takes, living in various parts of China, then through Vietnam and Cambodia, and finally to South Korea, is difficult. During that period, though constantly watched (visited ten times a day or more by cadres and informants), he manages to escape once again to China, this time with his son (Kang) and wife. He tells his son about cannibalism, and death upon death from hunger. He avoids the certain death of the local prison in his village by having typhus, and is sent home to finish his sentence. Eventually he flees to China, works for several months and returns with bags of food only to be arrested and imprisoned for half a year.

Kang’s father, once photographed with the “Great Leader” Kim Il-sung, manages to avoid arrest though his temper and ambition often get in the way of a subservient life.

Kang himself is a bit of a ruffian, and steals food, as do many many others. Children abandoned by their parents’ death, or by parents who cannot feed them, live pitifully on the streets, begging, crawling the floor of the train station for any crumb that resembles something edible. Kang describes his youth and schooling, and the gradual descent of the country into hunger and deprivation, where the social structure, based on suspicion on idolatry, begin to show its weaknesses as neighbors and family members turn against each other to have another few cobs of maize. Because so little is written from eyewitnesses who have survived the famines of North Korea, this book has its place in informing and revealing the closely held secrets of the DPRK regime.

This Is Paradise! My North Korean Childhood by Hyok Kang