![]() ![]() From then on, Jia is the recipient of an amazing string of protectors – the mistress at the orphanage, the director at a national dance school, the director of entertainment at a tourist hotel that allows her contact with outsiders, tips in hard currency, and a Berlitz-like knowledge of English. An attempt to reunite with her other set of grandparents, who are politically connected and might save her from a dead-end existence, fails miserably because of the shame attached to her due to her father’s status, and she’s left an orphan in Pyongyang. When we first meet Jia, the daughter of a political prisoner, she’s a little girl living in the provinces, near the labor camp where her father is incarcerated. The horror is that Kim’s characters know no other life they can envision nothing else. ![]() The utter lack of irony in the way Kim has Jia tell these things is devastating. There’s a hardscrabble quality to survival in Kim’s Pyongyang, where all good things are given to the people as gifts by the Great Leader and all bad things are the ripple effects of outside events. But there’s no desperation here Jia and company approach their fates with a level kind of acceptance. The great famines of the ’ 90s are referred to episodically, personally, as we watch Jia and her acquaintances struggle to find something to eat. For the first half of the book, we experience the hallmarks of North Korean society with deftness and grace. In Jia, Kim never steps outside the narrative to editorialize about Kim Jong II. Jia leaves because of shame, shame provoked, yes, by the political circumstances created by the peculiar policies implemented by Kim Jong II, but whose roots go much deeper, to a caste system that involves very non-Marxist, non-utopian notions of family and honor. That is, she doesn’t flee because of ideological disagreement with Kim Jong II – in fact, she remains remarkably respectful throughout – nor because of pressing material needs, the way her friend Gun feels pressured to ease the terrible existence of his elderly and sick parents. ![]() What is most telling about Jia’s journey from North Korea to just inside China, to a frontier town where the black market thrives on the traffic and needs of refugees, is that its impetus doesn’t stem from either politics or economics. The story might have been better served by letting Jia herself tell them “as told to” her, which would also give the reader a bit of distance from some of the harrowing events. The almost mechanical tone of Kim’s language avoids both sentimentality and sensationalism – though it comes close to tabloidish when the narrative becomes uncomfortably omniscient in telling the stories of a couple of Jia’s friends. #Happy endings 2009 documentary full#This is a fast, oddly flat but hypnotic read, full of tiny but searing details about life in what is commonly regarded as the world’s most secretive and most repressive regime. What it does is paint a composite portrait with small, intimate strokes. There is no happy ending in Jia (Cleis Press), Hyejin Kim’s grim novel about North Korea, no final scene of freedom, no hint about what might happen in a future without the Great Leader there isn’t even the usual scrap of hope that even the bleakest novels about survivors from totalitarian regimes frequently offer.īased on stories Kim heard when working with North Korean refugees in China and told (mostly) in a first-person narrative from the point of view of the title character, a North Korean orphan who manages a comparatively privileged existence, Jia doesn’t pretend to have documentary verisimilitude. ![]()
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