Book review by Gavan McCormack
For ABC Radio National, 'Book Talk' (Jill Kitson: presenter), for broadcast Saturday 1 March 2003, 1:30 pm, repeated Thursday 6 March, 2:30 pm

Kang Chol-Hwan and Pierre Rigoulot, The Aquariums of Pyongyang - Ten years in the North Korean Gulag, translated from French by Yair Reiner, New York, Basic Books, 2001.

Suh Sung, Unbroken Spirits: Nineteen years in South Korea's Gulag, translated by Jean Inglis and with introduction by James Palais, New York, Rowman and Littlefield, 2001.

After Iraq, North Korea, or so at least it seems is likely. North Korea is part of the 'axis of evil', a 'rogue state', 'a looming threat to all nations', that may possess nuclear weapons and missiles capable of reaching Alaska or Australia. What little is known about it is mostly dark: it seems to be a kind of Confucian-fascist family state, built around the cult of the father, Kim Il Sung, and his son, Kim Jong Il. It is steeped in famine and poverty, given to extraordinary political rhetoric and bizarre mass games and rituals. Now we have for the first time in English an account of its gulag system, a detailed memoir by a survivor who lived in one for a decade from 1977.

Kang Chol-Hwan, the main author, was born into a well-to-do 'Korean-in-Japan' family headed by grandmother, a committed communist, and grandfather, a successful capitalist with some gangster connections who had grown rich in postwar Japan on running something described as a 'gambling saloon' opposite Kyoto station. Bartering the wealth into education and improved social status, the family was, nevertheless, insecure. Japanese citizens during the imperial period from 1910, Koreans had been deprived of their Japanese citizenship in the wake of the war; their status in Japan was uncertain. Their country of origin was divided after 1945 into separate northern and southern systems, from 1948, states, which were at war from 1950 to 1953. The line of division drawn at the end of the war has remained to this day. Koreans, though born and raised in Japan, were not Japanese citizens.

During the 1960s the North looked an attractive option and there was a steady flow of such 'Koreans in Japan' who 'returned' to it, to a country they did not know, to join in construction of the North Korean fatherland as a socialist paradise. The Kang family packed everything, even their 'late model Volvo (which at that time indicated quite extraordinary wealth), and sailed for North Korea as part of this movement.

Chol-Hwan's grandmother became a deputy to the Supreme People's Assembly, and for a time the family retained a great deal of privilege, as well as their Volvo, and lived near the embassy quarter. Chol-Hwan was born in Pyonggyang around 1968, and his childhood and early boyhood seem to have been happy-enough. He writes warmly of his primary school teachers at 'The School of the People' in the Pyongyang of the early 1970s. In 1977, however, all of this ended. His capitalist grandfather disappeared, apparently arrested for treason, and shortly afterwards the whole family (with the exception of grandmother) was sent to the countryside. Chol-hwan was then 9 years of age. Yodok camp was to be his home for 10 years.

Yodok was, says Kang even a little guiltily, 'by no means the toughest camp' (75). Mostly, it accommodated returnees from Japan. Other camps housed 'members of landowning families, capitalists, US or South Korean agents, Christians, or members of purged Party circles deemed noxious to the state'(76), most likely between 150,000 and 200,000 people in all. Things may indeed have been worse in some of them.

At Yodok, Chol-Hwan spent his boyhood, from age 9 to 19, first in a school more noted for its brutality than for any educational quality, then in various work gangs. Throughout, however, his energies were devoted to surviving: stealing food from the camp kitchens or fields, searching out wild berries or hunting and catching snakes, fish, frogs, or rabbits to supplement the starvation rations. It was a hard and unrelenting life. It was occasionally terrifying - he witnessed 15 public executions - but there were also times that uplifted his boyish spirit: the encounter with a bear in the mountains, his shared feast with friends on a snake, his joy at the wondrous scenery. In his later years in the camp, by then a teenager, he found himself at various times the camp custodian of rabbits, bees, or sheep, and hunter for wild ginseng. His uncle became manager of the camp distillery and seems to have wielded considerable power. Eventually, inexplicably, the family was released, and after some years surviving on his wits, trading on the black market and on moneys sent him from Japan, Chol-Hwan escaped to South Korea.

The story is scarcely a classic, though readers will be moved by its grim, sad, angry, honest account of the life of the child survivor. For this reviewer, the problem of the book is not the moving descriptions of camp life but the frame within which it is presented, as one more example of the atrocity of communism. One assumes that this is the contribution of co-author, Frenchman Pierre Rigoulot, a contributing editor to the Black Book of Communism.

By an odd coincidence, however, another Korean gulag story was published in the very same year, 2001, also in New York, also dealing with a former Kyoto resident, one who endured not 10 but 19 years of horror under even worse conditions including torture, before being released just a little after Chol-Hwan, in 1990. This account, however, is of a gulag in South Korea. Unbroken Spirits: Nineteen years in South Korea's Gulag tells the story of a political prisoner in South Korea, Suh Sung, now a professor at a University in Kyoto, who was convicted on trumped-up political charges in 1971 and not released from prison till 1990. When Kang arrived in Seoul, which seemed the epitome of freedom, Suh was still in his gulag.

Kang and Rigoulot present their picture of wickedness and cruelty, roguishness or 'evil', in simple terms that even George W. Bush would understand. What is missing is any sense of Korean history, the half century of Japanese colonialism, the externally imposed division, the terrible civil war, turned by external intervention into a catastrophe, the prolonged Cold War. Paradoxically, the picture presented by Suh Sung is almost the reverse image of this: of brutality and oppression under anti-communism. Even writing in 2000, ten years after his release, Suh can focus only on his South Korean gulag, seemingly blind to the problem of North Korea's gulag system. Both accounts, in other words, remain steeped in Cold War thinking.

As for Kang Chol-Hwan, his escape into South Korea almost coincided with the victory of the democratic revolution in that country, yet he seems to have been unaware of the huge transition that had just taken place. All he tells us is that when he got to Seoul around 1989 he found freedom, coca-cola - his first swallow was so wonderful that it cured his cold (191) - and a job. At the time, Suh Sung was still in prison, released the following year. Freedom was a fresh shoot in South Korea, but for Kang, enjoying his coke, it is as if the free world, being non- and anti-communist, was unconditionally and indisputably free. Suh could tell him that democracy was all too recent, and had been won at a high price.

One dearly wishes therefore for a book that would offer us a dialogue between Kang, prisoner in the North Korean labour camp for 10 years, and Suh, political prisoner in South Korea for 19 years. When each can feel grief and outrage over the brutality and violence inflicted on the other, perhaps then Korea north and south will be able to move towards its democratic future, one without gulags of any kind.