In North Korea: An American Travels Through an Imprisoned Nation

By Nanchu and Xing Hang

Book Overview

This is an account of an American woman's recent travels through North Korea. Throughout her journey, she continually witnessed rundown villages, starving children with hollow eyes, haggard women crawling in the fields for single grains of rice and civilians unloading food aid at the point of bayonets.

The author predicts that North Korea's economic reform, which has just started, will progress slowly, but that the country will one day be open to the outside world. It may, however, take another twenty years for this reform to be complete. Small, reluctant changes have already happened though, and this book expresses optimism that one day the North Korean people will end their isolation and join the world's mainstream.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0786416912
• ISBN13: 9780786416912
• Release Date: August 2003
• Publisher: McFarland & Company
• Length: 197 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.3"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Important Insights!

The primary author is a Chinese-American who used her Chinese language skills to take a short trip into North Korea. Formerly North Korea greeted Chinese as welcome comrades; since China has moved in a capitalist direction this relationship has become quite strained, at best. The great famine unfolding in North Korea at the time of Nanchu's visit (2001) reminded her of childhood in china during a 3-year famine caused by Mao's ordering peasants to put down their hoes and set up shabby furnaces to produce iron. The fields became deserted and no good harvests were realized during that period. (Problems include drought, shortage of fertilizer, limited incentives for the farmers, and bureaucratic meddling.) The author was also a former Red Guard leader, and thus her comparisons are particularly meaningful. Early on, "Inside North Korea" compares two cities separated by the Yalu River. Nanchu remembered China's Dandong as lacking basic necessities (cooking oil, soap, sugar) in the 1960s, and was impressed with its current tall buildings, shining cars, and overflowing markets, especially compared to Sinuiju (no cars, buses, most windows without glass, shared rooms and toilets. Chinese (and other) visitors must turn over their cell phones, and are very limited in what can be photographed. The North Korean train moved at only about 10 mph, and foreign passengers were closely inspected - especially their written material. Readers almost immediately also are confronted with a major problem - starving N.K. citizens. The U.N. estimated about 4 million N.K. children were near death in 2002. Non-productive investments (large-scale monuments and exhibition halls; omnipresent security police and the world's 4th largest army) are an obvious drain on resources. Pyongyang citizens, among the best treated in N.K., receive only 12 kg grain, 30 grams oil, 20 grams soy sauce, 20 gms salt, a tiny piece of meat, and a few eggs per month. Most factories were shut down due to energy shortages or workers out looking for food. Nanchu observes that N.K. people revere Kim Il Sung greater than the Chinese did during the Cultural Revolution. Foreign visitors are not allowed to visit with North Koreans. Citizens with special trust are carefully picked and rewarded with extra food and other items (eg. TVs). Only government radio and TV stations are available; having a receiver capable of broadcasting other sources is an extremely serious offense. Few in the city even have refrigerators, elevators frequently don't work (even if the electricity is on). Pyongyang is also home to the world's largest subway, though little needed because the streets above are almost empty. Children must undertake several hours of war training every week. A nationwide curfew takes effect at dusk. Inter-village travel requires both an ID and a permit. Much of "In North Korea" consists of pitiful stories of how families cope (or fail to) with starvation, treatment of prisoners (religious prisoners

Great hard to find information

This book is chock full of hard to find anectodal experiences in North Korea. It's a good place to get a feel for the people, common day experiences, and inner workings of the North Koreans. It's also a very chilling account of the hardships that overcome the NKs. Nanchu has made many risks in preparing the information for her book, including carrying a camcorder into NK. Such acts could have gotten her detained.

Very good travelogue and overview from a unique perspective

This was a fascinating book. I recommend it highly. I find myself referring back to it again and again, because author Nanchu has, within its pages, summarized a lot of hard-to-find information from varying sources. The information is accurate, as far as I could see. She mentions many little things that I don't think have been published elsewhere, although one can find them on the Internet if you look enough.She also goes into length about the current situation with North Korean defectors in Northeast China. Few books contain anything on this subject, and this book contains quite a bit, including many stories from the defectors themselves. It was *very* interesting to get her perspective on North Korea as a Chinese-American who was brought up in China. She would not have been able to write this book if she was still living in China. No way. And obviously, no North Korean, except for the very few who are living here in the US, could have written this book. (Not many Americans realize that even the several thousand North Korean defectors in South Korea, who are theoretically in a 'free' country, are kept on pretty short leashes these days by the Roh regime. Why? Because the current South Korean leadership doesn't want the world knowing just how bad things are for their Northern bretheren, for reasons I can only guess.)From the beginning, it was clear to me at least that the North Koreans Nanchu met on her trip were significantly more open and forthright with her - more than they would have been with other outsiders. Perhaps Chinese people enjoy a level of access to this extremely closed society that no other outsiders (or even few North Koreans!!!) enjoy. Their experience is still tightly controlled, but perhaps with less attention to detail on the part of the NK authorities - which seems to have made a difference.Nanchu brings to the table a very great deal, much more than most other Western journalists who write about North Korea, even those who have been there a number of times.If you are more than a casual reader on North Korean subjects, buy this book!

some important observations by a visitor to north korea

To rework a familiar phrase, it might be said that it takes a library of books to know North Korea. And one of those books is surely "In North Korea: An American Travels through an Imprisioned Nation." The primary author of this book is Nanchu, a Chinese emigre now living in the United States, who travelled with a group of Chinese tourists to North Korea. The good news regarding this book is the ground truth provided by Nanchu's detailed observations and the perspective she brings to her task by having experienced Communist rule in another country. Even though her group was confined to sanitized, prestige sites deemed appropriate for tourists, she still observed the ravages of food shortages, even in the case of privileged soldiers, the grim state of city infrastructures, and the Orwellian controls imposed by the state's security apparatus. In addition, if you follow North Korea's radio broadcasts regarding the activities of Kim Chong-il, you will find in the book information that brings to life his penchant for micromanagement and illustrates some of his preoccupations, such as introducing catfish breeding and erecting buildings with extraordinary shapes. "In North Korea" is less successful when it presents--often without critical assessment and sometimes with badly mangled details--information culled from the internet and other books.