To begin with: \u00a0a pet peeve. \u00a0Many years ago, I read a book called A Mother\u2019s Ordeal<\/em>, by Steven Mosher. \u00a0The topic was forced abortion in China, told from the vantage point of someone who was both perpetrator, eyewitness to babies being aborted just as their mothers went into labor, and victim \u2014 having later come to the U.S. with her husband on his student visa, a pregnancy brought demands by the Chinese government to abort, and, ultimately, a successful asylum claim. \u00a0The narrator also experienced the famine as a child and the Cultural Revolution as a teenager, and, if memory serves, was sent to the countryside and clawed her way back.<\/p>\n In the introduction, Mosher says this (paraphrased): \u00a0\u201cI helped Chi An in her asylum claim, and she told me her life story in detail. \u00a0To better tell the story, I chose to write in the first person.\u201d \u00a0 In the year 2015? \u00a0You bet it\u2019d be \u201cby Chi An with Steven Mosher\u201d \u2014 or even more extreme, leaving Mosher\u2019s name to be thanked in the acknowledgements. \u00a0And I\u2019d like to see, as a matter of ethics, full disclosure about how much writing the purported author actually did, vs. simply sitting for interviews with a ghostwriter. In this case, it\u2019s not terribly important, but in the case of a politician, I do think it matters \u2014 when they write a book with their name on the cover, they are making claims about their abilities to write, and to formulate their ideas.<\/p>\n But back to Joseph Kim (whose co-writer at least gets his name on the cover). \u00a0It\u2019s the story of his life in North Korea, before escaping to China and ultimately arriving in America. \u00a0It won\u2019t surprise you, if you\u2019re reasonably well-informed about world affairs, to hear that he suffered through years of famine, first with his family moving to progressively worse living conditions (with a brief respite during a modest and temporary economic recovery), then with homelessness interspersed with stays with relatives or friends, until they kicked him out as one more mouth to feed. \u00a0His father died of cirrhosis (with no medical treatment of any kind available) compounded by starvation. \u00a0His mother was in and out of his life, as she tried to earn a living with various trading schemes, and ultimately by trading goods smuggled from China, but inevitably lost money on deals gone bad. \u00a0One of those deals? \u00a0Selling his treasured sister to a Chinese broker, \u00a0for an unknown fate \u2014 that of an enslaved \u201cwife\u201d to a poor villager in the best case, far worse otherwise. \u00a0He describes learning to beg, then learning that begging doesn\u2019t produce enough food to stave off starvation, and learning to steal \u2014 off merchants\u2019 stalls, then as a pickpocketer, from farm fields, and ultimately breaking and entering with a group. \u00a0He lands in an \u201corphanage\u201d \u2014 where homeless kids are locked away, used as free labor with woefully insufficient food, but later escapes while on a work detail, only to track down his mother and find her on the verge of starvation, so he returns to supporting her by theft. \u00a0Later, she recovers enough strength to return to smuggling but is caught and imprisoned, and here, at the age of 15, \u00a0Joseph makes a decision, on impulse, to cross to China himself, to attempt to earn money to rescue his mother. \u00a0And throughout he describes that dog-eat-dog mentality of North Koreans, along with additional petty cruelties such as the government requiring its people to \u201cdonate\u201d scrap metal for yet more statues of the Great Leader, even if that means surrendering their cooking pots.<\/p>\n Now, the region of China which directly borders North Korea is populated, to a large degree, by an ethnic Korean minority who, in fact, speak Korean, so he is able to go from house to house, and town to town, begging. \u00a0Back in North Korea, he had been told that Christians, who can be found in buildings with crosses on them, are willing to give money to strangers, so he goes from church to church, collecting funds, but he eventually is taken in and stays with a \u201cgrandmother\u201d who takes care of him. \u00a0He is then, out of the blue, offered the chance to go to America, which occurs by means of going to a consulate, and after 4 months, arriving in the U.S. \u00a0After endless details on his life in North Korea, the story of how he ended up in the U.S., and how he made it through his years in the U.S., as an older teen and a young adult, is oddly brief. \u00a0Given that most North Korean refugees who make it out of\u00a0China, do so through an \u201cunderground railroad\u201d via Thailand and end up in South Korea, his arrival in the U.S. instead merited an explanation; even if at the time it was a bit mysterious to him as well, there was no reason not to provide the context later. \u00a0 Really, it felt a bit as if his ghostwriter just gave up the ghost and he completed the remainder of the text himself. \u00a0He also discusses his conversion experience in China, but he was brought to the U.S. by a secular group (LiNK \u2013 Liberty in North Korea) and there\u2019s no indication of whether Christianity continued to be a part of his life once he arrived here.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve read a number of Holocaust biographies and memoirs, and I have the impression that memoirs of escapees from North Korea (and Kim\u2019s book is one of a growing number) are, in some way, the \u201cHolocaust memoir\u201d genre for the next generation. \u00a0I\u2019ve read a number of these, too; the stories themselves are gripping, and page-turning, even in cases where the writing isn\u2019t as artful as it might be. \u00a0(By the way: \u00a0Anne Frank in hiding in a \u201csecret annexe\u201d? \u00a0In Clara\u2019s War<\/em><\/a>, teenager Clara Kramer, along with a dozen others, lived in a small basement, not much bigger than a crawl space, under their protector\u2019s home in Poland.) \u00a0I find it extraordinary, the degree to which human beings can survive even the most inhumane conditions \u2014 starvation, brutality \u2014 and always wonder, is there something built into each one of us that pushes us towards survival, even in these most extreme circumstances, and it was just luck, or skill, that gave survival to some but not others, or are there some who have, and others who don\u2019t have, this drive to keep pushing forward? \u00a0And would I have had that drive?<\/p>\n