The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag

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The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag

4.06 of 5 stars 4.06 · rating details · 2,020 ratings · 251 reviews

North Korea is today one of the last bastions of hard-line Communism. Its leaders have kept a tight grasp on their one-party regime, quashing any nascent opposition movements and sending all suspected dissidents to its brutal concentration camps for "re-education." Kang Chol-hwan is the first survivor of one of these camps to escape and tell his story to the world, documen...more

Paperback, 272 pages

Published August 24th 2005 by Basic Books (first published January 1st 2005)

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Feb 20, 2013 Michael Brooke rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Much of Kang Chol-Hwan's memoir of life in North Korea's notorious Yodok prison camp is eye-opening stuff, especially when he tells the story from the inside - he served a ten-year sentence there from the age of nine, as an innocent by-product of being part of an allegedly subversive family.

A lot of it, unsurprisingly, is classic misery-memoir, albeit enhanced considerably by the insight that it gives into North Korean society, particularly from within institutions that even North Koreans aren'...more

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Aug 05, 2009 Rose added it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2009, biography-memoir

I already knew that North Korea was a crazy place, but this book underlines how its regime is both terrifying and utterly odd. I won’t even get into the logic of naming a man as President for eternity, four years after his death. In one of the most powerful images in the book, the author looks across the Yalu river one night. On one side is noisy, busy, lit-up China. Across the bank, North Korea is dark and silent - as North Koreans describe it, “calm as hell”.

Some interesting snippets of infor...more I already knew that North Korea was a crazy place, but this book underlines how its regime is both terrifying and utterly odd. I won’t even get into the logic of naming a man as President for eternity, four years after his death. In one of the most powerful images in the book, the author looks across the Yalu river one night. On one side is noisy, busy, lit-up China. Across the bank, North Korea is dark and silent - as North Koreans describe it, “calm as hell”.

Some interesting snippets of information I gained:

1. Most cars in South Korea are painted silver.

2. Traditionally, Koreans are born aged 1. They get a year older not on their birthdays, but every January 1st. However, this is no longer used officially in N. Korea.

3. When the author was a child, children in every class displayed a league table showing the physical strength of each child. Fights were then organised between the top-ranking students from different classes.

4. In the Confucian tradition, a woman who marries joins her husband’s family. Even if they then divorce, she still belongs to that family, and her own parents will probably reject her if she tries to return home. If the man marries again, he and his new wife have to live with the ex-wife.

5. The camp inmates were so desperate for clothes that if they were sent to bury someone, they would always strip the body naked first.

6. Teachers in the camp school were all armed, routinely referred to children using terms like “You son of a whore,” and routinely beat and humiliated the students (a favourite punishment, for example, was making them spend the whole day standing naked in the courtyard). The author points out in an understated way that, “Trust between student and teacher was utterly impossible under such conditions.”

7. Each inmate was allotted one pair of socks to last a year. They ended up wrapping their feet in rat skins most of the time. However, the children have a special pair of socks given to them on Kim Il-sung’s birthday, which they can only wear when entering a room dedicated to him.

8. Before China and South Korea established diplomatic relations in 1992, accepted practice for ships travelling between the two countries was for them to bear Honduran flags.

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Jan 19, 2009 Osho rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: around-the-world, 2009

North Korea (but not my first from there).

A memoir by a child whose family, though highly politically active on behalf of Kim Il-Sung's government, was interned in Yodok, one of North Korea's labor camps. He was there for 10 years, through his late childhood (age 9) and adolescence. Though then released, he remained under observation. Threatened with a return to the camps because he listened to South Korean radio, he fled to China, then to South Korea.

The memoir is interesting and serviceable, i...more North Korea (but not my first from there).

A memoir by a child whose family, though highly politically active on behalf of Kim Il-Sung's government, was interned in Yodok, one of North Korea's labor camps. He was there for 10 years, through his late childhood (age 9) and adolescence. Though then released, he remained under observation. Threatened with a return to the camps because he listened to South Korean radio, he fled to China, then to South Korea.

The memoir is interesting and serviceable, if not literary. Although there are many statements about emotions, the narrative is more expository than demonstrative. I particularly would have liked to know more details about the family's interactions in the camp (for example, did they share food they stole, or was it everyone for himself?) and about how he manages the emotional and psychological consequences of fleeing the country, knowing that this would bring potentially extreme negative consequences to his remaining family.

It could have uses a better editor, both for narrative flow and structure. In addition, it would have benefited from further attention to details. For example, Kang reports that his first detail as a child detainee was on a team that carried meter-long logs from the mountains to the village 3-4 kilometers away. He says that it took 12 round trips (72 to 96 km, or about 47.5 to 63 miles) to meet the daily quota from 1:00 PM on. Assuming they worked from 1:00-9:00 PM, probably an overestimate, with no breaks, the children would have had to cover 6 miles an hour at a minimum, on foot, carrying "terribly heavy" meter-long logs half the time. It's simply not possible. He then goes on to say that it added up to 40 kilometers in 12 round trips.That's still over 26 miles in a shift, with logs, but makes each leg of the trip 1.67 kilometers, not 3-4 (p. 71). If you assume that, though difficult to miss, this was an editorial error, that's fine. If, like some reviewers, you think he's exaggerating in a more general way, it is worth taking a look at other escapees' (and Amnesty International's) accounts of oppression in North Korean and similar dictatorships, which substantiate his assertions even if some details are suspect.(less)

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Apr 04, 2008 E rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2008, bodies, memoir-bio

I'm not sure what it says about me that I can fail the memoir of someone who survived a decade in one of North Korea's most infamous prison camps, but that's exactly what I'm doing. From the very beginning I was somewhat skeptical. The back cover promotes the book as what George W. Bush read when he wanted to learn more about the DRPK prior to dubbing it part of the Axis of Evil, and the author writes in the Preface that "I now realize that the Lord wanted me to use President Bush to let the bli...more

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Mar 31, 2008 Ebookwormy rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, biography

An easier read than I expected, the cold, hard, truth is told in this biography without sensation. Documenting the struggles of his (South) Korean family after they were lured from Japan to the magnificent ideals of the socialist kingdom of Kim Il-Sung, rare insight into the "Hermit Kindgom" is provided. I learned a lot about the timeline of history in Korea, and Korea culture. It is important to note that the author's experience is limited to his life before his escape (which took place in the...more An easier read than I expected, the cold, hard, truth is told in this biography without sensation. Documenting the struggles of his (South) Korean family after they were lured from Japan to the magnificent ideals of the socialist kingdom of Kim Il-Sung, rare insight into the "Hermit Kindgom" is provided. I learned a lot about the timeline of history in Korea, and Korea culture. It is important to note that the author's experience is limited to his life before his escape (which took place in the 90's); things have gone from bad to worse in North Korea under the leadership of Kim Il-Jung (son of the leader during the author's time). While the cultural and ideological foundation is most likely not significantly altered, many aspects of his observations (such as about the economy and standard of living which are largely believed to be much worse by the international community and the author himself) should not be considered current.

Topics include: politics, ideology, indoctrinization of children, self-policing society, snitching and denouncing, criticism and self-criticism, relationships between men and women, the concentration camp (in which he was interred for 10 years), and the pervasive control of the state over all aspects of life - except when it choses to look the other way (in the understanding it can come after you at a later time, if desired).

He explains how it is that a capitalist commerce system exists (and indeed is necessary to North Korea's survival) as a stronger economic exchange than the socialist (legal) market.

His insights about how the society shapes the character of individuals were interesting, and indicative of the evil active in North Korea. He communicates how the system grooms people into selfish (via the struggle for personal survival), violent (via desensitization to human rights and abuses of power), greedy (via coveteousness for positions of power that provide advantages such as money, clothing, cigarettes, etc), self-policing (via criticsm/ self-criticsm sessions required in schools, quotas, and snitches), followers of the regime.

The book closes with the renegade's perspective on the role of South Koreans in recieving North Korean refugees, the challenge of the refugee's adaptation to a free society and his perspective on international aide to North Korea.

I'm glad I read this book. I want to know what is going on. I cannot say I learned much beyond the background of Korean history and culture, as most of the methods employed have also been used by Hitler's Nazis and Stalin's Communists. The worship of the Kim Il's and the cult of personality they have constructed is particularly creepy (even seeming step beyond Hitler to me), and the human rights abuses horrific. I feel somewhat limited to help aside from prayer for North Korea, and possibly supporting the efforts of a ministry like Voice of the Martyrs that works directly with North Koreans and along the border region.

I would recommend this book for those who want to be informed of the situation in North Korea.

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Dec 31, 2007 Lars rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: anyone who cares at all about freedom or human dignity

As a trained Korean cryptolinguist, I was aware of some of the ways in which the evil regime of Kim Jong Il represses its citizens, but this book painted a clear and detailed portrait of a people so crushed beneath the boot heel of their gov't as to make any lover of liberty despair.

Living in the freedom of the U.S., it's hard to even conceive of a place where the gov't seems to be trying to map out new territory in the abuse of human beings. Written from the first-person perspective of a man wh...more

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Jan 04, 2013 Craig Phillips rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

To say that reading this, I got a sense of what it must've been like growing up in North Korea, would be ridiculous. But I hopefully got little inklings.

The isolation from the outside world and the hero-worshipping of the dictatorship, seemed to trick the Kang into accepting his lot when he was younger - what else did he know? But when he was sent to Yodok, and witnessed the horrors of the camp, that was when he seemed to realise that all was not right in the state of the North.

I think the way t...more

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Nov 16, 2008 Andrés rated it 5 of 5 stars

For those who think evil doesn't exist or is a word that shouldn't be said out loud, this memoir is a useful introduction to reality. How else can the North Korean regime be described? How else can a political system that brings out the worst in people be described? Kang's writing is direct and rather without sentimentality, which adds to its force. And in the end, there is the realisation that North Korea's evil political system was created by humans, so it represents the possibility for evil w...more

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Aug 25, 2008 Kris rated it 5 of 5 stars

Unlike reading the past events of the WWII holocaust, The Aquariums of Pyongyang reveals the current conditions of North Korea and the North Koreans' prision camps. Through this author's bravery we are able to see Kim Jong Il's perfect communist society for what it is-- a people not unlike a horribly beaten dog-- starved, punished for little or no rule violations, and fearful of its master. This book, brought me up to date on the past history and current events of North Korea. Startling.

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Jun 17, 2013 Rubina rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: autobiography, political

While much has been reported about North Korea's one-party regime and how its leaders keeps a tight grip of its citizens, quashing any opposition movements and sending suspected dissidents for re-education in its concentration camps, it remains to be one of the most opaque nations. This griping account by Kang Choi Hwan of his 10-years of imprisonment exposes the true brutality of life in the camps where total disregard for human life and suffering reigns, and man at times are capable of behavin...more

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Jun 01, 2013 Stefanie rated it 5 of 5 stars

If George Orwell's 1984 was real, it would be North Korea. After reading Blaine Harden's account of Shin Dong-hyuk's life (being born and "raised" in Camp 14 because his parents were sent there as enemies of the state), I turned to the Aquariums of Pyongyang. Which gives a rather different perspective on these camps.

Kang grew up in Pyongyang as a young child, raised in an environment of propaganda, whorshipping Kim Il-sung and King Yong-il. Kang's grandmother had persuaded the family to move fr...more If George Orwell's 1984 was real, it would be North Korea. After reading Blaine Harden's account of Shin Dong-hyuk's life (being born and "raised" in Camp 14 because his parents were sent there as enemies of the state), I turned to the Aquariums of Pyongyang. Which gives a rather different perspective on these camps.

Kang grew up in Pyongyang as a young child, raised in an environment of propaganda, whorshipping Kim Il-sung and King Yong-il. Kang's grandmother had persuaded the family to move from Japan to North Korea out of zeal for the communist idea. She realized the horrible mistake too late. Kang and his family were suddenly sent to Camp 15, called Yodok, in 1977. There, ten years of hard labour followed - five hours sleep at night, not nearly enough or adequate food, thin rags to wear and no shoes in winter weather well below freezing point, and guards who randomly beat them. Work accidents and malnutrition and punishments killed prisoners, adults and children alike, every day. They ate rats and worms to survive.

Kang was only nine years old, his sister Mi-ho just seven, their grandmother an old woman, when they arrived. Their "crime"? Being the relatives of his grandfather, who one day disappeared from work and was sent to a hard labour camp for being an enemy of the state. Astonishingly in this day and age, the Kim dynasty practices kin liability or "guilt-by association", so the relatives of "traitors" are punished for having the same blood. Even more astonishingly, they were regarded as "redeemables" and their conditions were actually better than that of "irredemables", who are sent to even worse camps for life. They were not told when, or if, they would be released, however.

They were finally set free, in a manner of speaking in 1987. Kang and his sister had grown up ina concentration camp and survived. The whole family had miraculously survived. They were still under close surveillance though and Kang's father and grandmother died within a few years of their release. Kang himself, after being denounced for listening to South Korean radio, fled North Korea for China and today lives in South Korea. His family is still in North Korea.

Most shockingly of all, after finishing this book, I found out that his sister Mi-ho is believed to be back at Yodok - along with her 11 year old son, Kim Jeong-nam. In May 2011 they suddenly disappeared, probably because they had received money from Kang via a broker, who is believed to have denounced them.(less)

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Nov 26, 2012 UChicagoLaw added it

Shelves: 2012-faculty-recommendations, faculty-recommendations

"In advance of a recent trip to Seoul, Korea, I read four books about this remarkable country. The first three were about North Korea. Nothing to Envy is an account of day-to-day life in the North pieced together by an American journalist who interviewed defectors to the South. It is gripping and tragic. You will not be able to put it down, and it will change your perspective on the world. The Aquariums of Pyongyang is a first-person account of a young boy who, simply because of his grandfather'...more

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Oct 22, 2012 Kelly rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: biography, book-club

This book was fascinating and disturbing all at the same time. I am so disgusted that this type of suppression is still occurring in our world today. It makes me sick that people who profess to be leaders of countries can blatantly disregard human life the way the political leaders of North Korea have done and are doing now. The story is about a man who spent ten years, from age 9-19, in a concentration camp in the northern part of North Korea. While he was allowed to live with his family, the t...more

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May 04, 2012 Douglas Mason rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book is a horror story about unspeakable suffering and human evil and it is hard not to be moved by it. North Korea as totalitarianism incarnate can easily be imagined although the scale actually dulls perception. At the other end, there is simply caricature about the regime and its leading lights (ie: Team America). Reading this book brings home just how horrific life in the gulag is. The author was imprisoned, as a child, together with his entire family--mother, father, uncles, sister and...more

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Oct 02, 2011 Христо Блажев rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

“Империя на ужаса” или какво е да си затворник в Северна Корея – разказ от първо лице
http://www.knigolandia.info/2010/06/b...

Зловещото име на книгата “Империя на ужаса” на Канг Чхол Хуан и Пиер Ригуло винаги ми е пречело да седна да я прочета, не обичам книги с подобни гръмки заглавия. Но и нейното време дойде.

Пиер Ригуло е журналист, който е помогнал на севернокорееца Канг Чхол да подреди своя разказ. Книгата е именно писание от първо лице за неговите преживелици по време на живота му в Север...more

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May 29, 2011 Steve rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction, history

Kang Chol-Hwan was one of the first people to escape from North Korea after being incarnated in a North Koren gulag and to tell his story. He was a trailblazer in a sense, and a brave man for taking the lead. The story is pretty harsh, from a reasonably wealthy Japanese/Korean family environment to a mud hut at Yodok, it is terrible to read and to experience with him. However, as Kang all but confesses himself he got off lightly. Other families were sent to the hard labour camps never to return,...more

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Jul 20, 2009 David rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is the memoir of Kang Chol-Hwan: a short narrative description of his young life in the North Korean Gulag mixed with his views on North-Korean politics. There is a new preface that continues where the original epilogue leaves off, discussing the plight of the modern North-Korean in an increasingly more interested world.

It was a difficult read at times. Kang Chol-Hwan's story is a brutal one, especially as he was a child, growing up in Pyongyang, and then taken with his family to the prison...more

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Nov 21, 2012 Christopher rated it 2 of 5 stars

The author notes that DPRK defector accounts such have this have come to elicit yawns and disinterest in South Korea and Japan.

Choi-Hwan Kang's "Aquariums of Pyongyang" is not the first such account I've read, nor is it the most gruesome, tragic or horrifying. Where it succeeds, however, is illustrating the barbarically arbitrary nature of the Hermit Kingdom.

In many cases, such dramatic scenery shifts and the mindwhirling character introduction (and disappearance, not to put too fine a point o...more

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Jun 15, 2012 Karyl rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2012, library-reads, non-fiction

This memoir is absolutely heart-wrenching. Kang Chol-Hwan and his entire family is sent to a North Korean concentration camp not long after his grandfather disappeared. He spent the next ten years of his life, the majority of his childhood, in this camp performing hard labor. The inmates were never given much to eat, and the "school" the children were sent to functioned mainly to indoctrinate them more into the beliefs of the North Korean Communist Party. The fact that Kang's family could be arr...more

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May 28, 2012 Allinah rated it 4 of 5 stars

A great read for those interested in the crimes of Communism, past and unfortunately, present. Made me think in orwellian perspective more than world acclaimed herta muller ever did. The author, now a successful writer in South Korea, had the misfortune to be sent with part of his family in a labor/ re-education camp. The book is well written although this could be just as easy a story told anywhere in the world with the only difference of some religious induced elements. The creativity, surviva...more

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Mar 17, 2012 Razvan T. Coloja rated it 4 of 5 stars

Maybe the best book about North Korea I have read so far. An in-detail look into the most gruesome marks left my the bunker that is the DPRK. While reading this, keep in mind that the events in the book take place before the Great Famine of the 90's and that things are even worse now than they were back then.
I live in Romania where we had our share of Communism. Decades of surveillance and lack of goods that ended with the Revolution of 1989. Still, if I were to compare the Ceaușescu regime with...more

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Jan 06, 2012 Justin rated it 3 of 5 stars

I've had this one for a while, but with the recent demise of Kim Jong-Il I finally found the occasion to read it. It was an intriguing book, particularly if one considers how it fits in with other concentration camp memoir literature. You don't learn a lot about North Korea or the concentration camp system there, at least not in an academic sense. And you don't really get an idea of what life is like in North Korea for regular citizens. Chol-Hwan spent the majority of his time in North Korea in...more I've had this one for a while, but with the recent demise of Kim Jong-Il I finally found the occasion to read it. It was an intriguing book, particularly if one considers how it fits in with other concentration camp memoir literature. You don't learn a lot about North Korea or the concentration camp system there, at least not in an academic sense. And you don't really get an idea of what life is like in North Korea for regular citizens. Chol-Hwan spent the majority of his time in North Korea in Camp 15, as his camp was known, and his time in the country that was spent outside the camp was likely distinct from the lived experience of most other citizens of that country given his status as a (relatively) wealthy immigrant from Japan with connections to powerful officials in the North Korean government. Indeed, he takes pains to acknowledge (if not describe) how much worse others had it.

This, of course, is not to minimize the tragic suffering he and his family endured. Such horror is not sport, where we compare who had it worse and declaring a winner (or loser). Instead, reading this book reminds me of a wise comment made by a professor during my graduate studies, noting that we should judge a work based on what it attempts to be, not what we want it to be.

On this scale, I'm still a little unimpressed with this book. I think, however, the blame falls with the original "co-author" (Pierre Rigoulot) and, to a lesser extent, the individual who translated the original French version into English (Yair Reiner). Between the two of them, they waste rich narratives by poorly organizing, structuring, and crafting the chapters used to tell them. There is a great deal of redundancy throughout the book, and the individual chapters zig and zag between various points that are semi-related to the central vignette in each chapter. The prose is bereft of grace, which may just be because of the number of translations made getting it from an interview with a man from North Korea to a book in French to a book in English. (less)

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Feb 04, 2012 Angie rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: authors-of-color, non-fiction, 2012, book-crossing

This book is a bit too bare-bones for me, even though it does go into a fair amount of sickening detail of life in a North Korean camp.

I'll share two important parts:

"I was also terribly sad to be leaving Yi Sae-bong and his stories of Japanese life. There were other prisoners who had offered me their friendship and help during very hard times. With them I had shared rat meat and heaped maledictions on the Wild Boar; with them I had buried the beautiful young girl and taken revenge on the corpse...more This book is a bit too bare-bones for me, even though it does go into a fair amount of sickening detail of life in a North Korean camp.

I'll share two important parts:

"I was also terribly sad to be leaving Yi Sae-bong and his stories of Japanese life. There were other prisoners who had offered me their friendship and help during very hard times. With them I had shared rat meat and heaped maledictions on the Wild Boar; with them I had buried the beautiful young girl and taken revenge on the corpse of the snitch. I had burst out laughing when a prisoner farted at an edifying moment of a revolutionary film, and had shivered in the mountains under the falling rain. The memories of everything that had happened in the past decade were sweeping over me. I think I was actually afraid of leaving that place, of no longer seeing those mountain ridges all around me. Deep down, I had come to love them. They had been the bars of my prison and the framework of my life. They were my suffering and my being, bound indissolubly together. My most poignant memories were attached to the place where I had suffered the most. It was a strange, complicated feeling, for Yodok was a hellish, inhuman place."

"The citizens of South Korea should realize they have an important role to play in welcoming refugees. They aren't just people who have fled something; they are people who have a hard time adapting and hard time forgetting what they have endured. I continues to have dreams in which I am running across the Yalu or in the mountains, North Korean security agents hot on my trail. The are about to catch me and I wake up covered in sweat. It is not enough for people to say they are for reunification. Their actions need to prove it. The rhetoric of reunification is one thing, people's attitudes towards North Korean renegades quite another. I don't question the South Korean population's desire for reunification, even though a large segment couldn't care less one way or another. What I do wish to denounce--based on my own experience--are the countless prejudices that are held against people from the North. Their poverty and economic inferiority are too often taken as a reflection of some natural inferiority. I myself have been the target of such misperceptions: whenever I dress elegantly, people look at me with suspicion. I'm not acting the way I'm expected to. The same goes for work. Money is so important South Korea, I always felt I would never be seen as equal unless I earned lots of money."(less)

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Jun 20, 2012 junia rated it 5 of 5 stars

Recommended to junia by: Christine Myung

Shelves: dprk

Incredibly well-written in the sense that it is straight to the point and tends to understate rather than exaggerate. Also, the books draws sharp correlations between events and actions in NK and those in other countries / historical accounts. KCH makes no apology, but he just shares his account.. and it is so chilling in that these experiences echo that of the Holocaust internment camps and ghettos or cruel imperialism and colonization from other countries and their histories.

What moves me the...more Incredibly well-written in the sense that it is straight to the point and tends to understate rather than exaggerate. Also, the books draws sharp correlations between events and actions in NK and those in other countries / historical accounts. KCH makes no apology, but he just shares his account.. and it is so chilling in that these experiences echo that of the Holocaust internment camps and ghettos or cruel imperialism and colonization from other countries and their histories.

What moves me the most is not just everything that Kang Chol-Hwan had to endure but the fact that this is going on right now. While we know that there is a whole group of people stuck, we do not do much. Of course there are political arguments (China and NK are friends, China owns the US, hence, the US pussyfoots around everything NK related..), there are sociological arguments (if we continue to provide aid, the government counts on that to help its people instead of changing themselves..), and whatever, but it's just true that.. right now, there is gross misconduct and human rights violations.

Furthermore, I'm ashamed that as a Korean-American, I just sort of pushed this to the backseat, more content to read old European history and other more "relevant" current events, and the most I say/think about NK is to laugh at Kim Jong Il's crazy haircuts.

I used to think liberty/activist groups were too extreme, but I feel like bringing issues like this to air is the least we can do.

"In time we got used to telling our story. Yet by repeating it so often, I occasionally felt I was trading my experience for a story that was no longer entirely my own."

"How can we stand by while parents sell their daughters for something to eat? I don't want to see any more skeletal children with wide, frightened eyes. I don't want any more children sent to the camps and their mothers forced to divorce their fathers. I want their grandfathers to be around to tell them stories-- and their giggles on the banks of the Daedong never to be interrupted by the arrival of bureaucrats from the Security Force" (237-238).(less)

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Nov 28, 2012 Skyla rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: dprk

This is the first of a couple books on North Korea--and specifically gulags--I have on my TBR, and despite persistently reading it before bed and giving myself nightmares, I haven't been able to put it down.

Translated a couple times over into English, at times it's a little disjointed, oddly structured, and the writing can be stilted though still serviceable, but it's absolutely worth the read. The tale of daily life for ten years in one of the (apparently) less awful camps as a "redeemable" (ie...more

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Apr 27, 2010 Steven rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: culture, biography, memoir, history, social-sciences

A friend happened to be reading this while I was reading Nothing to Envy , and recommended Aquariums of Pyongyang to me.

As with one of the people whose story is told in Nothing to Envy, Kang's family is part of the Chosen Soren -- Korean residents of Japan who are sympathetic with North Korea. As a relatively well-off member of North Korean society, his childhood seems rather idyllic until the arrest of his grandfather and the internment of many of his family members in the Yodok camp system.

Fro...more

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Apr 27, 2012 Kathleen Cochrane rated it 3 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this book less than Escape from Camp 14, perhaps owing to the fact that this book was written as a first-person account of life in North Korea and its labor camps. As I mentioned in my Escape from Camp 14 review, I believe the mediation of the story through a journalist allowed that book to interpret and provide more perspective on events in the individual's life, while avoiding cultural misunderstandings.

That being said, this book is definitely still worth a read. The subject matter i...more

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Mar 16, 2013 Deena marked it as no-thank-you-racist

I want to read narratives about North Korea, but honestly, so much of what's printed is as much American propaganda as whatever BS the Kim "dynasty" and North Korea's military government spews. The initial statement that DRPK is communist should be the first indicator.

"North Korea is today one of the last bastions of hard-line Communism. Its leaders have kept a tight grasp on their one-party regime, quashing any nascent opposition movements and sending all suspected dissidents to its brutal con...more

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Oct 30, 2011 Alex Smith rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

When you're reading a book like this, I guess you kind of expect to read about atrocities and the cruelty that one person can do to another in the name of some dogma and simultaneously expect a message of some hope, since, obviously, the author escaped to write the book. This is exactly what this book was. But somehow, this book seemed more immediate, I suppose because the things that happened in the book are still going on today in North Korea. This is not a history of an old Russian gulag or v...more

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May 17, 2010 Megan Blood rated it 4 of 5 stars

This gets a 5 for information, 3 for writing. I had to drag myself through this book--it was mostly written in encylopedia-style--lots of telling, some showing. It's got nothing on 'The Gulag Archipelago,' which is not just informative, but a beautiful read.

That being said, I wish everyone WOULD read this book, simply because the subject--life in a North Korean gulag--is far from common knowledge. Most people either don't know how terrible life is under the Communists, or they don't care. I thin...more

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“People who are hungry don't have the heart to think about others. Sometimes they can't even care for their own family. Hunger quashes man's will to help his fellow man. I've seen fathers steal food from their own children's lunchboxes. As they scarf down the corn they have only one overpowering desire: to placate, if even for just one moment, that feeling of insufferable need.” — 2 people liked it

“The only lesson I got pounded into me was about man's limitless capacity for vice - that and the fact that social distinctions vanish in a concentration camp. I once believed that man was different from other animals, but Yodok showed me that reality doesn't support this opinion.” — 1 person liked it

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