The Hard Road Out of North Korea
BOOK REVIEW: The Hard Road Out: One Woman’s Escape from North Korea
By Jihyun Park / HarperNorth
Reviewed by Cipher Brief Expert Ambassador Joe DeTrani
The Reviewer – Ambassador Joseph DeTrani is former Special Envoy for Six Party Talks with North Korea and the U.S. Representative to the Korea Energy Development Organization (KEDO), as well as former CIA director of East Asia Operations. He also served as the Associate Director of National Intelligence and Mission Manager for North Korea and the Director of the National Counter Proliferation Center.
REVIEW — For those interested in developments on the Korean Peninsula and the human rights situation in North Korea, The Hard Road Out: One Woman’s Escape from North Korea, is must-read. For others interested in human rights and what it’s like to live in a society like North Korea, it will be thought-provoking, as it was for me. The author tells the powerful and moving story of one woman’s escape from North Korea, as told to a South Korean woman, educated in Europe and the United States, an advocate for peace on the Korean Peninsula and human rights.
This is the story of a young, idealistic girl – Jihyun Park — growing up in North Korea, expertly narrated by She-Lynn Chai. It takes you to Jihyun’s adolescent years growing up in the Ranam district of Chongjin city, in North Hamgyong Province. It talks of her father’s work as a tractor operator; her mother’s lower-class status because of her bad “songbun” social status, due to her grandfather’s defection to the South during the Korean War and the difficulty of living in a society whose hierarchy is determined by social status, while pretending to be a “socialist miracle.”
The book is compelling in its narrative of what it’s like growing up in North Korea. The adulation of Kim Il-sung, the luxury of a bowl of rice on your birthday, the pain of never having enough to eat, being taught to hate, the eyes that monitor your every move, and the pain when thirteen-year-old and older students are sent to the countryside each year for forty days of hard labor, with not enough to eat.
It’s a story that captures the famine in North Korea – The March of Suffering – in the 1990s, when for ten years, millions of people died, and the corpses were collected and removed daily. And as a teacher, her exposure to the pain and suffering of her family and students during this decade of pain and starvation. Jihyun’s commentary on this and other issues dealing with the lives of ordinary people in North Korea is chilling – and sad.
Jihyun’s escape into China and the exploitation she experienced from the traffickers who were paid to get her into China, and the treatment she received once in China, are stories that I’ll never forget. Jihyun’s determination to survive and care for her only child, despite the horrid treatment she was experiencing while in China, are lessons in courage and perseverance — hoping that things will improve.
But things did not improve. Living in China as a criminal, under very harsh personal circumstances, Jihyun eventually was captured by the Chinese authorities and sent back to North Korea. The narrative explaining these circumstances reads like fiction, but it’s not. It’s what Jihyun and other North Korean women defectors experience routinely.
Returning to a brutal and harsh North Korea motivated Jihyun to escape and return to China, not knowing what awaited her once again.
Eventually, however, Jihyun makes it to Beijing and the kindness of strangers, especially a Korean American minister who introduced her to the United Nations office in Beijing, that protected her and facilitated her move to Manchester, England as a refugee – and her and her family’s warm and thoughtful treatment as residents of the United Kingdom.
This is a book not only about the courage and determination of a Korean woman who escaped a brutal North Korea, but of two Korean women who shared a common heritage and experienced the trauma of separation – a South and North Korea.
The Hard Road Out: One Woman’s Escape from North Korea earns a prestigious four out of four trench coats.
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