I never realised how little I knew about North Korea. Or, indeed, how little anyone outside of North Korea knows about the lives of the people living there. I suppose it’s owed to the non-existence of freedom of speech in that country and the tight security that applies to a closed society. Have you read any first-hand accounts of daily rural life in North Korea? If nothing else, you’ve probably heard of the horrific famine that rocked the country in the mid-90s, resulting in more than a million deaths.
Reading Stars Between the Sun and the Moon: One Woman’s Life in North Korea and Escape to Freedom by Lucia Jang and Susan McClelland left me speechless. I was shocked to learn how those people lived: desperately hungry, impoverished, demoralised and, perhaps worst of all, blanketed by a constant beige blandness and a stark lack of variety. With the scramble for survival as one’s only constant, it is probably inevitable that emotional awareness, freedom and choice will fall by the way
side.
It’s an astonishing and eloquent memoir by a woman who, through her bravery, defied the rules of government in order to keep her family alive. Lucia Jang was born in the 1970s in a small North Korean community. Her parents both worked their fingers to the bone, lived in dire circumstances and worshipped at the altar of Kim Il-Sung every night. The family barely survived on small rice rations and herbs from their little garden.
It seems that a society stripped from all independent thought or action almost naturally – and blindly – fall into the same patterns and examples set by their leaders, in this case being that of cruelty and indifference, even in their own homes, showing little or no warmth towards one another. Imagine as a child, celebrating your birthday – when you are one of the lucky ones – with a cup of cooked rice...
What I found most inspiring is the depth of Jang’s emotional strength, courage and resilience. She worked in a factory from a very early age – mostly for a small ration of rice. She is later raped by a man who forces her to marry him when she falls pregnant. While trying to escape from her abusive husband, she learns that her in-laws and her own parents – without her consent – had sold her child for a few won and two bars of soap. They could not feed another mouth.
Rest assured that these are minor spoilers, as it doesn’t cover a fraction of the abuses inflicted on this woman. Her story reads like a horror movie and it keeps you on the edge of your seat as she searches for her child, illegally enters into China to sell goods to feed her family, has a harrowing time in jail and eventually escapes into South Korea before fleeing to Canada.
Reading Lucia Jang’s memoir made me realise how strong women are. We have perseverance and a pool of resilience so deep that it’s seemingly bottomless. No matter how many times we get knocked down, we won’t stay down for long.
Writing this book was a personal risk to Lucia Jang and must have taken immense courage – even while living in the safety of a western country. Yet, by doing so, she has given us a rare insight into the lives of so many other women in North Korea with no voice. We can only salute her.
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