In 1946, Kornel Chang’s Korean grandparents fled south from Pyongyang across the border at the 38th parallel, leaving the zone under Soviet military occupation for the one occupied by the US military. Years later, his family left South Korea for the United States. This book is born of conversations heard by Chang growing up in New York City.
North Korea
Millennials: The word conjures the tired cliches of internet ragebait: avocado toast and participation trophies. For a long time, millennials were a stereotype of feckless, tech-addicted youth, yet the oldest of us are now in our early 40s. But what of millennials in North Korea? Here, stereotypes of a coddled generation do not apply, and reliable information is not easily accessed. How has North Korea reacted to the information age, the ubiquity of the mobile phone, and the millennial development of its neighbor to the south? These are the questions that Suk-young Kim, author of numerous books on the cultures of North and South Korea, sets out to answer in her most recent book.
North Korea is, to this day, still one of the world’s most mysterious countries. What little we know about daily life in the country comes from defectors or foreigners who’ve spent time there—some of whom have been on this show. But both camps present narrow, if not slanted, views of what life is like in the country.
Washington officials have long found Pyongyang a bedeviling problem. Much of their frustration has come from a lack of information on a country that Donald Gregg—a Korea expert who served in Seoul as US ambassador and before then as chief of the CIA station there—called Washington’s “longest-running intelligence failure”. Without information, as Gregg argued in his 2014 autobiography Pot Shards, “we fill our gaps of ignorance with prejudice, and the result is hostility fueled by demagoguery, and damage done to all concerned.”
The Korean War “ended” exactly fifty years ago at Panmunjom. On July 27, 1953, United States and United Nations commanders on one side, and the North Koreans and Chinese commanders on the other, agreed to an immediate cessation of hostilities. Most histories of the Korean War stop there.
Monica Macias, the youngest daughter of Equatorial Guinea’s first president at just seven years old, lands in Pyongyang, North Korea in 1979. Her father had sent her to the country to study, but what was meant to be a shorter visit grew to a decade-long stay when her father was ousted in a coup.
Korea was a unified, homogeneous country from the seventh century CE until 1945 when in the wake of the Second World War it was partitioned by the United States and the Soviet Union and formally became two separate states in 1948. Since that time, writes James Madison University history professor Michael J Seth, Korea has been a nation divided into vastly different social systems and “perpetually at war” with itself. Seth’s new book Korea at War attempts to describe and explain this geopolitical transformation.
Tales of love, loss and survival set in the war-torn Korea of the 20th century are cleverly linked in the life of one female “trickster” in this debut novel from South Korean writer Mirinae Lee. Seven individual stories are connected through the device of an elderly lady, Mrs Mook, recounting her experiences. Listening carefully is Lee Sae-ri, a middle-aged divorcee who works at the Golden Sunset retirement home where Mrs Mook lives. In a bid to ease the residents through their final years, Lee Sae-ri has taken it upon herself to write their “obituaries” by recording their personal histories.
Socialist women have been erased from the history of the international women’s movement. When we write them back in, and center Asia in the process, we arrive at a richer, more complex, and more accurate understanding of global feminisms.
In 1960, the Soviet Union founded a university in Moscow—soon to be called the Patrice Lumumba University—with the aim of educating students from newly independent states, many of whom came from African countries. Now called the People’s Friendship University of Russia, the university has a famous list of alumni including former heads of state of Central American and African countries, among others. But the Soviet Union wasn’t the only socialist place to offer educational opportunities to students in the developing world. Cuba, China, and North Korea also did and it’s the last that forms the subject of Monica Macias’s new memoir, Black Girl From Pyongyang: In Search of My Identity.
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