Trash or Treasure: The Girl With Seven Names by Hyeonseo Lee

From the get go, I was hesitant to read this book, not because I thought it was trash, but because I was wondering how to judge it. In the end, I decided to give it a try. I must confess, it is a very interesting autobiography.

Hyeonseo Lee is my kind of person. She's an unabashed patriot, and her autobiography provides a perspective on one of the most repressive regime known to man. North Korean society, she informs us, is divided into 51 different rankings, depending on perceived loyalty to the Kim family. Your ranking can go down, but it's impossible for it to go up. People in the highest rankings get to live in the capital. People in the lowest ranks spend their lives in prison camps or labor camps.

Your ranking is determined by your family's actions during the Korean war.

Given the hellish conditions they live under, why don't they rise up and rebel? I'll let Hyeonseo Lee answer that one:

I thought life in North Korea was normal. Its customs and rulers only became strange with time and distance.

In short, they've been conned into thinking the entire world is shit, too.

What makes the book appealing is that Lee is her self-evident love for her homeland. She finds it painful living abroad and fears that by the time she is able to return to home:

I will probably be a stranger in my own land.

 Aside from detailing her live in North Korea, she spends a third of the book discussing life as an illegal immigrant in China, and a third of her book discussing life in South Korea. I hope someday she can return to her country, and I hope America does its utmost to liberate the North Korean people.

Verdict: Insufficient Evidence
Related books: The Logic of Political Survival and The Dictator's Handbook  

If you want to learn more, watch the video below.

Comment

In Shanghai, I once went to a Korean restaurant, which was a very uncomfortable experience. My wife and her coworkers were conversing in Chinese. The waitresses Chinese had an obvious accent. So they asked, are you Korean? To which the waitress replied, yes. Trouble is, in Chinese when you ask about the ethnicity of a Korean person, you use the word that also refers to North Korean. So I spent the entire meal wondering if she had said she was ethnically Korean or North Korean.

Happily, I latter clarified the issue, but it was a very uncomfortable, thinking you were being served by someone in such a precarious position. If she had been North Korean and found out, the Chinese would have deported her in a heartbeat.