[For those totally unfamiliar with this book --- it is about Robert Jenkins - an American soldier stationed in South Korea in 1965 who defected to North Korea. In 2002, he was allowed to leave the North and went to Japan to live with his wife after he was court martialed by the US military and given basically no time for the desertion.]

I highly recommend this book for anyone remotely interested in Korea.

It is highly readable.

Only 192 pages long - it is told in an oral story-teller fashion you often find in biographies where a reporter/author writes working from hours and hours of conversation with the person. It isn’t as oral as similar biographies I’ve read (like Larry Bird’s) but the text moves along in a very smooth fashion.

It is almost too smooth…

I found myself having to step back in the reading to realize just how horrible or bizarre the reality was that the words were describing.

The harsh scenes the story tells actually begin before Jenkins made his fateful decision to cross the DMZ. (On that decision, Jenkins says he wanted out of his duty in South Korea and avoid being sent to Vietnam and thought he could go to North Korea, be shipped to the USSR and then be exchanged with communists from the West as he had seen happen in divided Germany when he was stationed there).

In talking about his childhood, Jenkins tells the story of how his alcoholic, hard working father took out a pistol and barely missed shooting a black man who had dared to refer to his father by his first name rather than Mr. Jenkins.

Given the distance contemporary society has traveled since those dark days before the Civil Rights Movement had successfully changed American society, this scene should be fairly shocking to us, and in the early reading of the book, it might be for the average reader, but once you are lulled into the flow of the text, and the story is talking about life in North Korea, and scene after scene is bizarre, you have to keep reminding yourself to actually envision the scenes described to make sure they register an appropriate level of horror.

What I’ll do in this review is give you a taste of it by quoting from a few scenes:

One day I was in my room [at a military school where he and another run-away GI were forced t teach the English language to would-be officers] and was called to the school’s clinic. When I arrived, a doctor, four or five cadets, and Dresnok were standing there. The doctor looked at my tattoo [of a military symbol with the words US Army] and prodded the skin. He said, “This has got to go. The English faculty said so.”

…He gave a nod, and the cadets grabbed me. They pushed me down onto a stool and held my arm on one of those preachers’ benches that are common when you are giving blood or a doctor is working on your hand. They held me down, and the doctor moved in. He cut above and below the “US Army” with a scalpel. That part didn’t hurt so bad, actually. But when he lifted up the flesh and started cutting all the connecting tissue away with a scissors, that was one of the most excruciating things I had ever felt. I screamed and nearly passed out, gritted my teeth, closed my eyes, and breathed as deliberately as I could. I clinched my jaw hard in a kind of instinctive reaction, I think, to transfer some pain somewhere else.

The doctor told me calmly and without regret or sorrow at all as he was working that he couldn’t give me anything for the pain sine they save all the anesthetic and pain killers for the heroes on the battlefield. The cadets holding me down were laughing the whole time….Dresnok, for once, did not seem to be enjoying my suffering as much as usual. He told me later that he knew they were cutting the tattoo off and had come for the show, but he was surprised and even angry when they did it without anesthetic.

Nice, huh?

But honestly, by the time you get to that story, and others in the book, you might be too lulled by the narrative into not appreciating the full weight of what is being described.

Shortly before this scene, we get to see why Jenkins said that Dresnok “for once” didn’t enjoy seeing him beaten, but first I need to set the background of that scene:

In the bizarre category, we learn just before the tattoo episode that — the North Korean government gave them, the 4 American GIs who had defected at different times, Korean concubines to live with.

These North Korean women were specifically chosen, because they had proven infertile in a previous marriage and thus could lay down with the non-Korean without fear of tainting the Korean national blood.

Unfortunately, one of women did become pregnant and was quickly disappeared.

This sets up the Dresnok story. Jenkins was over at the other American’s house with one of the government minders, and the Korean and Jenkins got into an argument about how little Jenkins was screwing his concubine:

Finally, I just told [the cadre] to go to hell and to stay out of it. Well, that did it. He practically started to shake, he was so furious. He called the driver over and told him to go to the car and get some rope. He tied my hands behind my back and told Dresnok to beat me for my insolence. I still cannot believe it today, but I’ll be damned if Dresnok didn’t step right up and do as he was told. He did not even hesitate. And I will never forget the look in his eye. The sick bastard enjoyed it. He took solid, square-knuckled cracks at me across my face, one after another. He must have landed thirty or forty punches in a row, every time looking at the Tall Cadre to see if he should continue. My nose began to gush blood after the first few swings. By the time he had finished, my top lip had split in two places and my bottom teeth were sticking out of the skin between my lower lip and my chin…..That was the first of approximately thirty similar beatings over the next seven years at the hands of Dresnok.

Nice, huh?

The fact that the concubine who got pregnant was spirited away is also disturbing - if you know what happens to the mixed babies of North Korean refugees who are repatriated from China…(they are killed)…

Then there is the fact that Jenkins’ second concubine had been unfit for marriage to a man of Korean blood stock - because she had frequent severe seizures…

Nice, huh?

But one of the most bizarre and interesting items in the book isn’t about the horrors of daily life in North Korea — but a Hollywood-style romance:

In as many ways as I could think of, I tried to make her as comfortable as possible. I would bring her cider and small sweets when she was studying in her room alone. Another thing I would do was spend a few minutes killing as many mosquitoes as I could in her room before she turned in for the night. The mosquitoes are so big and nasty there, they will practically carry you away. With her permission, I would sit in the corner with a flashlight pointed toward the floor. Between the light and my scene, many of the mosquitoes that would have been bothering her came over toward me. I would swat as many as I could see for as long as it took, so that she could have a more undisturbed rest. And then I would creep out of the room. Usually, she was already asleep by the time I left.

That is a sweet story. Somewhat bizarre - but sweet.

It is even more bizarre when you consider he is talking about a Japanese woman who was kidnapped from her homeland and forced to go to North Korea to teach Japanese language and customs to would-be North Korean spies….

It is this love story amid a picture of day-to-day poverty in a surreal society that sounds more like science fiction than reality that was the most surprising aspect of the book for me.

Around the second or third week Hitomi and I were together, I started teaching her English….Bust she kept holding the pencil like a calligraphy brush. I would try to correct her form by putting my arm over hers and my writing hand over hers. At first, she was having none of that, flinching at the very touch. But over the next few weeks, as she got more comfortable with me and more comfortable with my instruction, she would let me teach her this way, with my arm and hand moving hers to make the strokes. Not long after that, during a similar lesson, I was teaching her a new word, my hand and arm on hers, my cheek right up close to hers. I turned to look at her, and she turned into me, and we kissed.

And later:

…we decided to play cards after we had finished dinner. I was out of writing paper, so I ripped the white inside lining out of the pack of Kulak-sae cigarettes I was smoking and told her to make a scorecard out of that. She was hunched over the table, writing on the paper for a minute or two, and then started giggling. “What are you laughing about?” I asked her. “How could there by anything funny about a scorecard?” Still giggling, she got up, turned around, and ran into her bedroom. I unfolded the piece of paper she had left, and it said, in English, “I love you.” I got up and went into her room. “Is this true?” I asked. She nodded. I said, “Okay, if you mean it and this is still true in the morning, give me the note again then….when I woke up the next morning, there the note was, sitting on my pillow

That is a sweet story in any environment, but in the demented world created by the Kim Il Sung family, it is — I don’t really know how to describe it — it is sweeter - but in its environment in North Korea - it can make the bitter stand out as well.

The fact that the former GIs were given sterile Korean women to satisfy sexual desires is bizarre. The fact that those women were taken away and new, foreign wives were provided for them is even more so.

But then you also have what Jenkins had to say earlier in regard to how the Korean officials thought he should handle his new concubine:

To be honest, more than one of the leaders told me to simply claim her as my own. By that, they meant rape her, and usually they used language far more graphic.

As I noted at the start, this book can be enjoyed by most any reader and would make an excellent movie in the hands of a Spielberg:

The stories told are so outside the norm of experience - it can seem like science fiction.

There are moments of terror along side incredible moments of heart.

And for the reader, it is told in a highly readable fashion and not too many pages…

The book is good for people who know nothing about North Korea but would like an adventure story in the surreal.

For those who know something about North Korea, you can pick up pieces here and there that others will miss:

For example, how Jenkins and his first concubine, though they despised each other, managed to reach an accommodation: The woman had a hive of bees from which she could sell the honey and Jenkins could go to the foreigner’s only shop in Pyongyang to buy things she could not which she could use or trade.

Those who know something about North Korea will see this as an example of the underground economy in an ass-backward nation where markets are shunned and the women were often the entrepreneurs — and in the 1990s, as famine spread and factories were long since dead, it was the women setting up open but still-illegal markets who kept the family alive through barter and trade.

The picture Jenkins draws of dire poverty and having to survive on what little you could grow on the side in the 1970s and 80s as the government cut rations is also something to note for a Korea watcher.

For example, the story of how the ex-GIs would have to sneak around to scrounge enough material to make fishing nets so they wouldn’t starve — or how they discovered you could make those nets highly durable through an intricate process of soaking them in pig’s blood…

….or how a hog they had fattened after the government gave it to them and announced their rations would be cut…only to have the officials return when the hog was ripe and slaughter it in front of the Americans to only cart the meat away….

There are many other tid bits like this throughout the book.

Like Jenkins and the other ex-GIs staring in propaganda movies.

The North Korean movie industry is a joke, of course. The studio, called the Korean Feature Film Studio, was near Manyongdae, by one of my old houses (and Kim Il Sung’s ancestral homeland)….They didn’t bring any common sense to planning the filming. For example, they would often film the scenes in the order that they appeared in the script rather than in the order that made shooting the most efficient. If, say, there was a scene at Claus’s office, then a scene at my office, and then a third scene at Claus’s office, they would film it in that order, breaking down Claus’s office set and rebuilding it after filming my scene…I knew nothing about how movies were made, but I knew that filming in sequence was not how real filmmakers did it.

The book really does have something to offer for just about anyone.

And it would make a compelling movie — right down to the manner in which Jenkins and his family made it out of North Korea as part of an international media firestorm…….A happy ending Hollywood would not have to manufacture….

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For those interested more reviews of the book can be read at Amazon as well.

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