My doomed career as a North Korean novelist | Hacker News Reader

My doomed career as a North Korean novelist

theguardian.com

157 pointsbillybuckwheat117 comments

It's always fascinating to hear about the cultural structures within North Korea. The image in my head is one where 5% are comfortable party officials and 95% are starving labourers. Of course that's not true: there are intellectuals and scientists in the middle, like in any other society.

A related article was posted a few months ago regarding North Korean sci-fi. Also fascinating!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37291007

In around 2017 I had a scholarship at Wuhan University. During that time the university hosted a cultural fair for international students. What was most interesting to me (as someone from the UK) was that I met for the first time ever students from North Korea.

These students were smartly dressed (suited and booted), which in comparison to everyone else in casual clothes, made them stand out. They spoke excellent English and Chinese, they were polite and thoughtful. Each international group had to give a stage performance, to which the NK students performed a piece similar to Beijing Opera; it was without doubt the most well rehearsed, costumed and, vibrant performance of the lot.

It made me realise I had a very narrow perspective of NK.

That's how propaganda works, they are trained to project that image of NK abroad

That's how propaganda works, we are trained to believe an image of NK.

I wonder what other intelligent things you believe. And it’s not “NK” it is DPRK.

In that case, its not UK, its United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

NK or North Korea is a common name used by many to refer to that country, DPRK is the official name. Anyone is free to use whichever one they want.

Those people are literally North Koreas elite.

NK is 60% urbanized, higher than many ex soviet bloc countries. My uncle goes there for business, and other global south countries as well. In his assessment, everyday NK living conditions better than most of global poor. Compared it to a clean tier3 PRC city from the 90s, pretty ordered, few cars, lots of bikes, few advertisement, clean. Sterile and boring but in his opinion, preferrable to filthy urban centres else where. Same with the rural hamlets he went to. Sucks during winter. He found it charming enough over all. Reality is NK still holding on to residual industrial prowess - it takes some competent state organization to build nukes - and that translates into other parts of civil structures. More countries can't do what NK does, than can. There was a survey where 1/5th of NK defectors in SK were willing to return north, citing nostalgia. Anecdotally that's more than my experience talking diasphora from ex soviet republics in Canada. Of course uncle wasn't there during periods of crisis where gov whent full Juche.

You might be interested in or have already read the Inspector O series by “Frank Church.” To the degree it is accurate (or not) it was fascinating to think of all the things that a mostly stable but alien-to-me society must contain. Cops, municipal workers of all sorts, and the parallel world of a Communist party.

https://www.amazon.com/Corpse-Koryo-Inspector-Novel-Novels/d...

Of course, you only need municipal workers, if you have municipalities.

Eg a nomadic society wouldn't have them.

I like the Inspector Chen Cao novels, too; they're crime novels that usually involve corruption in the Chinese Communist Party https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/126606.Death_of_a_Red_He...

The author Qiu Xiaolong lives in exile in the US.

Not surprisingly, popular ideas about life in North Korea are simplistic and exaggerated. I'll just make a few comments based on casual study while living in South Korea.

First, popular support for the regime is much greater than Westerners typically realize. My wild guess is that at least a third are true believers and much less than that would consider lifting a finger toward regime change. When characterizing North Korea, it is more accurate to call it a brutal society rather than a brutal regime.

Second, a large contributor to this situation is the demographic outcome of the civil war and population management afterwards. During the war, massive numbers of anti-communists were killed or migrated south, and massive numbers of pro-communists were killed or went north. On top of this segregation, the Northern regime established residence zones such that populations were relocated according to their perceived loyalty.

Third, due partly to the relocations, the northern part of the country has the population with the least love for the regime. They also have the greatest opportunity to escape, being close the China. It is often noted that North Korean refugees in China and South Korea have accents from this region. When these refugees tell interviewers that they would like to return home but can't, my interpretation is that they miss their hometowns, but fear punishment by the regime.

This story reminds me that education is a privilege and I'm probably not enjoying it as much as I should.

I was a horrible college student when I was younger. For a variety of reasons. I quit school, got lucky, and fell into a good tech career.

Many many years later after age 40 I was laid off, wanted a new career path / job, I took a few classes and eventually a bootcamp and changed careers. I was really nervous as far as how it would all play out knowing how terrible I was previously.

It was completely different. The idea that I would go into a room each day and someone would drop some knowledge on me was thrilling. A few other older students like me felt the same way. We were always up front if possible, active, it was a JOY to go to class each day.

Meanwhile I was surrounded by younger folks who reminded me of me as far as being perfectly capable, but low enthusiasm, effort, attention and interest level.

Education, and youth is sometimes wasted on the young. I only wish I could have gone back to school more.

I go to the local university now and then. Despite all the challenges, those folks don't seem to know how good they have it, but I can't judge, neither did I.

I think the biggest difference is feeling like you're in control of your life: Are you in college because someone told you to go, or did you go voluntarily?

I really wanted a break halfway through college, so I went on co-op. This forced me to go back (to college at the end of the co-op), and I never lost my status as a student (during the co-op). But, for a little more than 6 months, I was an independent adult, working, in charge of my life, at a place where I wanted to be.

School was so much easier when I went back.

A friend of mine dropped out of Caltech due to bad grades. I ran into him a decade later, and he said he'd recently graduated from Caltech, having gone back and gotten A's.

I asked him what changed, did you get smarter?

He laughed, and said no, this time I was willing to work.

I’m an alum and know several people who did the same thing - dropped out and came back 10 years later and finished.. Caltech was often nice about it and I believe they didn’t have to reapply.

Did he have to reapply? Acceptance rates have gone pretty steadily down at most worthwhile colleges since the 1970s. It would be surprising if a candidate got more attractive to a school as time went on.

I'm kind of curious about the process of applying to Caltech overall, as someone who didn't have the opportunity to apply to anywhere at 18, but would very much like to when I get the chance. If a person wants to get into an elite university like it or MIT, what should they optimize for? I've known people with near-perfect SAT scores that didn't get into either. Is it mostly luck-based, after what few obvious things you can control?

Sorry, I know this is probably the most frequently asked question you get any time you bring up your alma mater.

Thanks for making D, by the way!

He did not have to reapply. Caltech's stance is once you're admitted, you are welcome to come back and keep trying. I know one who came back multiple times. Your credits don't expire, either, like they do other places. It's one of the great things about Caltech. The administration was just made up of nice people.

I can only speak for the process that was in place when I applied back in the 70s. I sent them a letter asking for an application, which they sent to me. I filled it out, and sent it in with a check for the application fee. Nobody helped me with it, nor was I coached.

They had some specific requirements, like you had to graduate from high school, but I knew one person they waived that for.

What they looked for was a triad:

1. high school success 2. high SAT scores 3. evidence you're a highly motivated person

You had to have all three. And it worked for Caltech - being around smart people can be fun, being around motivated people can be fun, being around smart and motivated people means you're going to have more fun than you ever thought possible.

Caltech wasn't a place where you talked about football. If you wanted to have Carl Sagan drop by the dorm and talk about silicon giraffes, that was what was fun. If your room was next to Hal Finney's, that was fun. If a couple doors down was a guy who designed and built a working computer out of NAND gates, that was fun. If the guy 4 doors down built a powerful amplifier, and set up a giant set of speakers at the nodes of the hall and hooked it to a signal generator to emit sound below the hearing range, but was at the resonant frequency of the building, so it soon would start to go whump whump whump ... hahaha I was never bored for 4 years. Never.

I'd be a bit careful about optimizing for it. You really have to want to go there, and for the people who thrive there, it just is who they are. Caltech just wanted to be sure that the ones they admitted would be a natural fit, not an optimized fit. If you're not a natural fit, you won't be happy there, and will drop out. Nobody wants that.

I was told years later that they were skeptical about my application, and so sent someone out to interview me. He couldn't get a word in edgewise as I went off on all the projects I was working on, showed him diagrams of them, etc. He told the committee he thought I was worth taking a chance on.

I was rejected by MIT, Harvard, and Stanford, despite being legacy for MIT and Harvard.

> Thanks for making D, by the way!

You're welcome! Working on D is a great pleasure of mine. The way Caltech was run is how I've tried to run the D Language Foundation. In many ways the DLF community is our very own Caltech :-)

I've heard stories, my dad went there in the early 60's as a physics major, dropped out and then got a PhD in asian history from a different school, then lived in Japan for a while, taught university history for a while, then came back to the US and became a computer programmer (Cobol mostly) until he retired. He told stories like that but I didn't really believe it until the movie "Real Genius (1985)" put it on film. From what I hear, the pranks in the movie are lame shadows of the real ones but it's a movie and it gets the vibe across for me. Trying to understand my dad a little, that movie helped. Anyway, Caltech sounds cool. And the guy living in the closet would be doing crypto or AI now. :)

His last project was trying to write a comprehensive history of Japan for wikipedia. I helped him upload it and it's buried in Wikibooks somewhere now and I like to think that some of his work is going to end up in the training material for some future AI like a ghost.

Yes, Real Genius gives a sense of what Caltech life was like (except for the absurd ending). The director wanted to film it on the campus, but Caltech (normally very accommodating to Hollywood) refused, thinking it would be bad publicity. So the director found other buildings built in the same style, so it looked like Caltech anyway.

When I was there, one year we built a railroad that ran through the dorm, and another year a jungle cruise with boats.

Doing the homework and showing up to class do wonders for academic performance. Many people (me included) have learned this the hard way.

I learned it the hard way, too.

Having been young more recently I can help you remember what you may have forgotten. Being young comes with a lot of stressors that take away from your agency, and your ability to see any positive outcome from effort. Whether that is relentless potential demand from a parent, inability to choose what to eat or do, or study, where to go, no car, no money, mate competition, etc. I found education to be very enjoyable in elementary school, then horrible in my teens, but very enjoyable in my early 20s when i had a bank account with even just 10k in it. Teachers treated me like shit in middle school by default, and in high school it was definitely harrassment. The material was often not rich enough to support the duration I was required to sit and stare at it. I was required to ask permission to urinate. The teachers may not have been intelligent enough to understand a persuasive argument in an essay. Math was the only consistently good outlier.

In university the worse a teacher ever was to me was bad or ambivalent, but the educational resources were so deep personal pursuit felt like it had infinite potential.

Im assuming at 40 years old these things have all been forgotten. Im sure the same is happening to me.

Yeah, it's weird how I didn't care about school at all when I was younger, but now I feel like it would be absolutely amazing to be able to learn all of this as it is. I think it's mainly though because I've experienced more of "actual life" and trying to survive on my own so all of that speaks more to me. Otherwise it seems like it's clueless theory I am forced to learn, but now I can relate my own life's experience with it.

The thing about experience and hindsight are clearly stated within their names. You don't accumulate either without being time served.

You may have some times where you actually decided to "carpe diem" and when you look back on those days, you will realise you made the best of things. As you get older, hopefully those positive experiences gradually accumulate, rather than being drowned out by negative experiences, which sadly make themselves up.

Sadly, bits tend to fall off or sag as we get older. It is the way of things. However, with luck your mind stays reasonably sharp for longer than the rest of you!

I think the best part about going to university while young was not yet having to worry about how to support myself (and my family).

I guess the lesser incentives mean it’s easier to ignore anything said as well though.

Though to be fair “graduate in 5 years or you have to pay it all back” (imposed by the government) was a fairly powerful motivator.

Part of the reason Western countries are so successful is precisely because we don't treat it as a privilege, but as a given.

So appreciate it as a privilege where it's not a given, like in shithole countries, but please do treat it as something that should be a given, that's what separates shitholes from beacons of light and truth, i.e. the West.

> is a privilege

Why are you watering down the word "privilege"? Historically privilege was an exemption from taxes due to the fact that one of your ancestors helped some king in a war.

How exactly is education a privilege? At least in the US, everyone has access to public education. My kids go to public school, and while I can't say their education is perfect, it's not that bad either. You could probably say that private education is a privilege, but education in general? Why?

> How exactly is education a privilege? At least in the US, everyone has access to public education.

The article is literally about life in North Korea...

Should we then conclude that freedom of speech is a privilege because people in North Korea don’t have it?

Yes it is if the context is global.

Oxford dictionary:

privilege - a special right or advantage that a particular person or group of people has

1st example there: Education should be a universal right and not a privilege.

Globally, it's a privilege. Worldwide many girls can not get it. Or poor.

Even clean water is a privilege on a global scale. Perhaps in USA as well, ehm see Flint.

Language evolves. It's 21st century, privilege isn't about feudal taxes anymore. Queue meant tail and gay happy.

There's a danger when playing with words like this.

Privilege is bad. It's something we, as society, should strive to eliminate. When you say education is a privilege, what is the message there?

I understand that the OP, and you, are trying to convey a message of this type: I should be thankful that I get X, not everyone in the world gets X, and I will try to remind myself that X should not be taken for granted. Where X is education, but it can also be clean water, or maybe just the right to live, or the right to not go to a reeducation camp if you criticize the "dear leader".

I subscribe to that type of thinking.

I just don't think that using the word "privilege" is the best way to express this idea.

Reading this brought back a vivid memory of listening to Voice of Korea about 20 years ago.

I had a shortwave receiver in my Honda Civic - a Sony AM/FM/shortwave/cassette that was a drop-in replacement for the factory radio. On the way to work at Adobe in San Jose one day, I tuned in North Korea's English-language broadcast beamed to North America.

One news announcement stuck in my mind so vividly that I remember it word for word to this day:

"Scientists are studying the brain of Respected Comrade Kim Jong-il, because the Respected Comrade is capable of feats of mental power beyond the ability of ordinary human beings."

Brainwashed: Growing up in North Korea:

https://medium.com/@penguinpress/tears-of-blood-life-in-nort...

Voice of Korea official site and Wikipedia page:

http://www.vok.rep.kp/index.php/home/main/en

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_Korea

I heard Dear Leader plays 4D chess.

Hard to disagree. Am curious to see what they found. I imagine most powerful/manipulative peoples brains are shaped differently and excel in ways we mere mortals don’t necessarily consider.

High demand for stories from North Korea and no way to verify them makes me wary of what a fiction writer has written.

This author is also living in South Korea which by law bans you to speak positively about North Korea. Not to say NK isn’t bad, but you are unable to have an honest and balanced discussion about it in the media while you live in SK.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Act_(South...

Indeed, there actually was a conviction of an elderly man via the NSA within the past few weeks. 14 months in jail for a poem.

> In this latest case, Lee Yoon-seop was accused of submitting a poem in 2016 to the Uriminzokkiri website, which is a state-controlled North Korean website. Submitted as part of a competition run by the website back in 2016, it praised North Korea, stating that “if the two Koreas were united under Pyongyang’s socialist system, people would get free housing, healthcare and education.” The sentencing court said that Lee had glorified and praised North Korea and had threatened the “existence and security of the country or the basic liberal democratic order over a long period of time.”

https://www.jurist.org/news/2023/11/man-in-south-korea-jaile...

Americans that want exceptions to freedom of speech must have no idea what countries that have them use them for.

On the other hand, Americans lack the perspective of a society that has been invaded multiple times in the last century. And remains under threat from one such dangerous and hostile invader.

Framing it as violating a noble ideal of “free speech” I think gives it more importance than it deserves.

Seems plausible such a trade off is a net good for South Korea. We live in the misinformation age. Look at the crazy stuff some people believe. South Korea has effectively outlawed pro North Korea propaganda. Hard to quantify the averted harm of such a policy, but the price seems minimal.

Balanced against the science fiction that Koreans could be programmed into welcoming an invader with open arms is the real life fact that somebody was put in jail for the crime of writing poetry.

Since you don’t seem to be aware, propaganda could have negative real world impact influencing (not even mind control!) a small group of people. Imagine the impact is only a group of 5 people “defect” to North Korea under the belief it is some paradise. Thats harms.

That's just bad advice. How can you ban bad advice? I can't imagine what society would be like if nonprofessionals had liability for the harms that came to other people as a result of acting on their opinions, the way we have liabilities for doctors or lawyers in a client-provider relationship. Yeesh, you'd be putting people in jail for the crime of being dumb online.

All you've been doing is mischaracterizing things to the point of absurdity and then pointing out how your mischaracterizations are absurd.

Propaganda can be harmful even if hasn't programmed anyone to welcome an invader with open arms.

Nobody was put in jail for writing poetry. They were put in jail for praising North Korea.

Banning the praise of North Korea isn't banning bad advice.

If the person had been speaking into a microphone instead you'd be telling me how South Korea outlawed talking.

Yeah, but he could also just not have said anything, right?

Username checks out.

You should read my profile!

I'm exhausted by catchy headlines that don't prep me as to whether I'll be interested in reading the piece. This article is about:

Kim Ju-sŏng was one such aspiring writer. A “zainichi” (Japan-born ethnic Korean), he “returned” to North Korea in 1976 at age 16 as part of a wave of emigration encouraged by pro-North Korean groups in Japan and lived in the country for 28 years before defecting to South Korea.

Damn, I wanted to read more. Felt like the article received a brutal snip from the editor there.

you might like "Without You There Is No Us," a memoir by a foreign national hired to work at a boarding school for the children of the NK party elite

Sonds great, I'll check it out. Thanks!

Note that it's practically illegal for someone living in South Korea to publish anything positive about the DPRK (North Korea)[1][2][3].

> [Amnesty International] described the National Security Act as a tool to harass and arbitrarily prosecute individuals and civil society organizations who are peacefully exercising their rights to freedom of expression, opinion and association.

It's important to understand voices like this in the broader context of the Korean War, which is technically still ongoing, and manifests today largely as an economic and propaganda war, as well as an entrenched territorial stalemate.

DPRK "defectors" often get international media attention, and then their claims are surprisingly commonly debunked in following years[4].

For example, Yeonmi Park became famous in 2014, making startling claims about living in the DPRK— children being forced to eat mud, not taught basic math (even 1+1=2), and had no access to world maps or ice cream. Many of her claims were debunked, even by other defectors[5]. Despite her seemingly clear lack of credibility, many US media figures continue to host her for interviews.

Sometimes defectors even admit they lied after becoming internationally famous and publishing a best seller, such as Shin Dong Hyuk[6].

The claim of the OP's author (couldn't get recognition for my work in DPRK) is especially ironic for this reason. In South Korea and the West, there is a thriving media industry focusing on the harrowing stories of people from the North.

Also note, South Korea pays a reward of $860,000 to cooperating defectors[7], and has been accused of trafficking and forcing DPRK citizens to defect against their will[8][9]. When defectors arrive in South Korea, they are put through a rigorous interrogation, deprogramming, Christian indoctrination, and naturalization program at an institution called Hanawon. One defector noted, "At Hanawon, it seemed that I was being brainwashed again, even though I had arrived in freedom."

1. https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-korea-debat...

2. https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/05/28/south-korea-cold-war-rel...

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Act_(South_K...

4. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/13/why-do-north-k...

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeonmi_Park#Veracity_of_claims

6. https://www.businessinsider.com/a-north-korean-gulag-survivo...

7. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-39170614

8. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/10/world/asia/north-korea-wa...

9. https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/8...

> A writer’s life is highly competitive

I wonder how it is in US. Are there obscure writers living only from writing ? Where I live, a lot of writers have a daily job as journalists or NGOs so they don't seem to make much money from writing. And the bookstores are filled with "cheap crap" noone reads.

I got intrigued by the "Proof of the Man" book but failed to find an English translation. Anyone knows if it exists?

Unfortunately no, Goodreads says it’s only been translated into Korean and Chinese. I’d say buy it from Amazon or wherever, but then the paperback needs OCR and afaik Amazon.co.jp doesn’t sell ebooks outside Japan… Or perhaps try the movie, which is available with English subtitles.

I wish I could read the rest of the memoir, alas I do not speak Japanese.

I'm unable to determine if the rest of it was published somewhere.

I mean, it's published, 跳べない蛙, you can buy it on Amazon or wherever. But in Japanese.

Can ChatGPT translate a whole book now? Without too much inconvenience

I used it to read some webnovels a few months ago. It's much better than other machine translators (like google or deepl) but it's a bit tedious to use because of the character limit.

Sceptical that an LLM would produce good literary translations - that requires a nuanced understanding of the author's rhythm and style. Maybe if the model was trained only with writing from that one particular author.

Deepl might do a decent job and it supports pdfs and other document formats. We use it a lot for translating business documents and contracts. Mainly between German and English. But they support Japanese too.

Wonder if someone will pick this up and publish it in English.

Negociating with a Japanese publishing house is probably 3 times the effort of translating the text itself. I'm interested in the book myself and I can read some Japanese (and know people more proficient than me who could translate it), but that's a no go because of intellectual property.

In communist country, as an author, you have to praise some ideals and ideas because otherwise you are being ostracized and dying from hunger. In a modern "democratic" society you have to praise some ideals and ideas because otherwise you are being ostracized and dying from hunger.

It's so nice to have choices and to be able to freely write whatever you think or you fancy...

Nah, that's a load of horsecrap. In a modern "democratic" society you can praise staunch leftist ideas (Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Tariq Ali) or very right ones (Ayn Rand, Roger Scruton, Milton Friedman) and be respected. Liu Cixin supports Uighur concentration camps and is widely popular.

You can literally self-publish and sell almost anything on Amazon or similar sites. Very fringe opinions still find they readers and buyers.

Of course if you start spilling vile racist, misogynistic and hateful slop you might get shamed. Rightfully.

I grew up in a communist country and you have no idea about the censorship back then. And North Korea is way worse.

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