Ask a North Korean: Defectors Talk About Their Lives Inside the World’s Most Secretive Nation

Tudor (North Korea Confidential), former Korea correspondent for the Economist, seeks to remedy what he sees as a serious lack of literature on North Korea from North Koreans themselves, compiling the testimonies of North Korean defectors to create an intimate glimpse of everyday life in the country. Using a question-and-answer format, the book allows the defectors to discuss various aspects of daily life, including the rudimentary health-care system, the lack of sex education in schools, and the country’s inconsistent electrical grid, in an open and honest way. Interviewees also voice candid opinions of the Kim regime, the United States, and South Korea. While many of the answers confirm outsiders’ impressions of the poverty and oppression prevailing in North Korea, other tidbits about North Korean life are surprising, especially concerning the importance that North Koreans place on family over material goods. The defectors are happy to be living freely in South Korea or Europe, but their yearning for the simpler life in North Korea, as opposed to the competitiveness and individualism of capitalist societies, is unexpected. With North Korea once more in the news, this book will enable readers to empathize with a people often forgotten as a result of the bellicosity of their government. (Mar.)