Ashley Reber &
The Aquariums of Pyongyang by Pierre Rigoulot

Growing up in Japan, the author's korean family gets duped into believing all the South Korean propaganda about returning to the homeland, and he finds himself leaving his well-off life behind in exchange for something much more grim. The family attempts to make do as best they can following this poor decision, but the family ends up getting thrown into a re-education camp for ten years. The bulk of the book takes place here, where the author describes the horrific conditions, punishments, and daily life they endured for those ten years. I thought this book's perspective was unique and interesting, as this was the first book I've read which describes the inside of these re-education camps. For obvious reasons, once you're released (as this author was), you're discouraged from talking about your time there. But I also thought the writing felt flat, unemotional, and distant, which may be a product of the author's experiences. I just didn't feel as drawn in or as emotional as I've felt reading other books on this subject. I thought Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea and In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom were both better reads, both in terms of depiction and in terms of writing style. I don't think I'd recommend this book to someone new to the topic of North Korea, but it's a nice, new look at something that isn't depicted very often in other books for people who are familiar with the topic.

A quote from my favorite passage: "I think the camp also changed me psychologically. As a child I was outgoing and restless. When people meet me today, they find me reserved and somewhat distant. Growing up in the camp made me shut myself off from the world. I learned about suffering and hunger, violence and murder. For a long time I was angry at my grandfather. Only around 1983 did I begin to realize that not he but rather Kim Il-sung and his regime were the real causes of my suffering. They were the ones responsible for the camp and for filling it with innocent people. All during my childhood, Kim Il-sung had been like a god to me. A few years in the camp cured me of my faith. My fellow prisoners and I were the wayward sheep of the revolution, and the Party's way of bringing us back into the fold was to exploit us unto death. The propaganda, which exalted North Korea as the people's corner of paradise, now struck me as revolting." An important book, and a great one to read if you're at all interested in the human rights atrocities taking place within the Hermit State of North Korea. Aquariums of Pyongyang provides a look at Korean political history from the end of the Japanese occupation, through the Korean War, into the cult of the Dear and Great Leaders -- an amount of background which I found greatly helpful in sorting out the order of events, and making sense of how the current, oppressive dictatorship came into being. From an affluent family in North Korea disgruntled by the oppressive nature of the politics and embittered they were hoodwinked into moving back from Japan, Kang Chol-Hwan was sent into Camp 15, a North Korean prison camp, at the age of 9, after his grandfather was arrested for making comments that were not wholly supportive of Great Leader Kim Il-sung. As is custom in North Korea, three generations of the transgressor's family were arrested and taken to the camp, so that they may be "reeducated" until they were deemed worthy of being citizens, and of being treated like human beings, again. Kang spent a decade, his most formative adolescent years, in Camp 15, fighting starvation, ruthless violence, widespread disease, and insane amounts of physical labor in freezing conditions, until his family was released in 1987. After returning to a life in North Korea constantly under surveillance, the authorities once again threatened Kang, who had been caught listening to forbidden South Korean stations on his radio. It was then he decided to escape North Korea and head through China into South Korea, where he was taken in by the government and finally allowed the kind of freedom, to live where he wanted, eat what he wanted, dress how he wanted, speak and think however he wanted, most in the world expect from the day they're born. Beyond simply telling the narrator's story, Aquariums exposes the corrupt, hypocritical, teetering house of cards the North Korean state has become. I would suggest supplementing your reading of this book with the biographies Escape from Camp 14 and maybe This Is Paradise! My North Korean Childhood, which give a more recent perspective of the state of North Korea. Leaving in the mid-1990s saved Kang from some of the harsher realities of the North Korean famine, and if you want to fully understand what North Koreans are going through today, you'll want to check out some of those books too. There are a lot of good points raised in this book about the hypocrisy of the DPNK's government: For example, that they call themselves communist and abhor capitalism, and yet money, bribery, and that kind of power attained by greasing palms is what runs day to day life! Even as they condemn capitalist nations like the United States, North Korea runs on a corrupt system that can appear a lot more capitalist than it does communist, though at the end of the day, it's, more than anything else, just plain broken. Anyway, I'm getting kind of rant-y. One more point, though. I'm writing this review January 24, 2013, and I woke up today to some troubling headline news on CNN. In regards to today's headlines, that "North Korea says it plans to carry out a nuclear test in a new phase of confrontation with the U.S." I have to say this: It's astounding to me that a country that does not currently have the electricity to consistently fuel its cities, nor the food to feed its people, is so stubbornly persisting in maintaining this façade of power and might, to the point where it is challenging the world's strongest military force. This kind of confrontation cannot end well, and my first thoughts go to the poor prisoners of the many North Korean gulags, who will undoubtedly be among the first casualties if this posturing leads to something far more serious. As Kang Chol-Hwan says in this book, the prisoners of Camp 15 were told time and time again that if North Korea fell, the prisoners in the concentration camps would be slaughtered, as the North Korean government maintains to the international community that these people, these starving, dying people, do not exist at all. That's why telling, and reading, and sharing their stories are so important -- maybe right now more than ever.