The sounds and silence of North Korea

So I am reading through Yeonmi Park's book about North Korea. Regrettably, I am reading it so slowly that she might come out with a new book before I finish this one. I'm not lollygagging because the book is either boring or dull. Far from it, in fact. The horrors in it are so interesting that I have to pause and listen to some mindless YouTube rant to bring balance to my psyche.

We all know the horrors of life in North Korea, but Yeonmi Park brings the individual touch to the finer details of life in the least-free country on Earth.

When the USSR stopped giving North Korea fertilizer, the North Koreans had to save up the feces of both humans and dogs to fertilize their fields. Some people even thieved the septic tanks of their neighbors. She felt embarrassed about her aunt bragging about how she only used the toilet at home rather than using other facilities. She dryly mentions that she now realizes how different North Korea is from the rest of the world.

My favorite details of the book revolve around music. In perhaps the most fascinating of her anecdotes, she described how she would not have known that people sing love songs if she had not heard them from smuggled South Korean media. Some ethnomusicologists have said that love songs are the most common songs among every human population. If so, this would make North Korea not only unusual but uniquely unusual in the history of the human race.

In North Korea, the party propaganda is so overwhelming that for fun the musical kid who learned to play guitar plays Communist Party songs at social gatherings. Attendees just don't sing the lyrics about the Kim family. I am reminded of this now year-old clip where a Vice Journalist goes to sing Karaoke on his visit to North Korea. I’ve been to karaoke in China, and it was the most apolitical thing in China. From what I’ve seen, it’s the same in Japan. People get drunk and flirt while singing (often badly). Makes me grateful to be in America, where we can listen to music and play video games and watch sports and not think about an intolerant omnipresent and overbearing political ideology… oh wait.

While we should oppose totalitarianism in all its forms, the last example of the full brutality of North Korea is expressed in both a song and a lack of musical variety. Yeonmi Park mentioned how much her father loved South Korean music before he was imprisoned in a work camp. After her father left the work camp, her father never sang South Korean songs. He only hummed to himself a song where the lyrics went, “My life is nothing compared to the glorious Korean state” or something along those lines.

Arthur Fletcher said, "Let me make the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws." A shame that the leaders of North Korea understand this line perfectly. Thankfully, the human heart still wants to be human even in North Korea. While tyrannies seem to live forever, they can’t change human nature, and as long as a regime goes against human nature, it will always be fragile.

If one prefers to listen to the Audible book, the narrator Eji Kim has a Korean accent that is perfectly understandable with the exception of one or two words. I enjoyed the accent in her narration, as it brings home the foreignness of life in the Hermit Kingdom. Unlike some other narrators, she doesn't get overly maudlin at the great tragedy of the situation, which well suits the matter-of-fact tone of the book.

The book is a solid read overall and quite unique, as it describes a strange and alien culture from the perspective of a clever and compassionate human being. It allows the reader to see North Korea through the eyes of the author, but it still illuminates the society through more objective occurrences. However, be warned that this book, much like North Korea, is not for the faint of heart.

Like almost any book of import, people will take away different conclusions. For me, I think North Korea shows how much we underestimate the power of music in modern times.

P.S. While I enjoyed Yeonmi Park's follow-up book, While Time Remains, I must say I should have read In Order to Live first. While the second book contained interesting observations about a newcomer observing America, it didn't fully explain the all-important psychology behind Yeonmi Park's observations.