Inside North Korea

While waiting for a friend the other day, I went to Indigo Bookstore to roam the shelves and look at the current selection of literary works. I tend to lean towards fiction, but I've recently started reading more non-fiction because I felt like I needed to expand my literary collection by alternating between fiction and non-fiction. I also noticed that I'm a much faster reader when in comes to non-fiction. I cannot quite decipher as to why exactly I read at a faster pace when it comes to non-fiction, but I can assume that by knowing the story that is told reflect something real ,makes me more curious and eager to know what happens next. When I presented myself in front of the area of non-fiction books, one immediately jumped at me with its big red hardcover and authors names that I recognized. It read Somewhere Inside by Laura Ling and Lisa Ling. I knew of their story that made headlines not too long ago, but never really exposed myself to the event or to the idea of North Korea. I knew about North Korea as much any other person would know about North Korea which is basically nothing except that it is the most isolated country in the world ruled by dictatorship. I still have to understand why we're even bothering with the existence of this country and not just simply bomb them before they bomb us. But I digress, I know about world politics as much as Lindsay Lohan would know about safe driving, which is close to nothing. Nevertheless, I grabbed this quite heavy book and read the first chapter while I waited for my friend to meet me. I was captivated (no pun intended considering the topic of the book) by the amazing story that sisters Laura and Lisa Ling told through alternate voices. While one recounts her journey as a North Korean prisoner who committed the highest level of crime that one can commit in North Korea and endures five months of freedomless captivity, the other tells her exhaustive mission to get the North Korean government to release her younger sister by approaching highly-ranked U.S. government officials.

Laura Ling is a journalist currently employed by CurrentTV, a cable television network owned by former Vice-President Al Gore. Her assignment was to document about defectors who escape North Korea into China through the China-Korea borders. While doing so, she was led to accidentally touch North Korean soil and was immediately caught by North Korean guards. Though she and her colleague Euna Lee was able to touch Chinese soil during their arrest, the guards were not phased by this fact and still manage to drag both ladies back to North Korea. Needless to further to say that this event led to their imprisonment for five long months before they were finally released. They were the first Americans to ever be trialed by the Superior Court of North Korea and were deemed guilty of their crime and were sentenced to 12 years of hard labor prison camp. Lisa Ling is also a journalist who is currently employed by the Oprah Winfrey Show as a field correspondent as well as a correspondent for National Geographic. She also previously co-hosted the talk show The View for three and a half years. Her twenty years in the media industry provided her with an extended list of influential contacts that were instrumental in the release of Laura and Euna. She went on a campaign to get her sister out of the country by approaching important members of the White House to get them to resolve this dilemma through political diplomacy. She was in contact with everyone from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Al Gore and President Clinton. As well as President Carter and finally President Obama. Through her media contacts, she was able to get her family and her to appear on the Today Show and CNN to publicly apologize on the behalf of Laura and Euna for the incidents in the hope that North Korea is watching their desperate plea. Everyone offered their generous help and provided support to the Ling and Lee family during this hard time. Even Michael Jackson offered to go to North Korea and perform for Kim Jong Il and perhaps influence him to release the girls, but alas, MJ died before any further actions could had been done. While the ending is a good one (and a predictable one as we all know what happened at the end), the story told by both sisters is so impressive on an emotional level that I was expressing different feelings while reading it such as anger, sadness, hope, irritation, and finally relief and happiness. The North Korean characters presented were so human and innocent-minded that I feel so much pain for them as they are not even aware that they are living in a country that strips them of all human rights and they have been brainwashed by propaganda all their life. Though Laura was locked in a room and deprived of freewill, she was able to connect with the female guards and the translator. They were compassionate and supportive of Laura's delicate situation. Though North Koreans are wired to hate America and its inhabitant, they connected with Laura and even considered her a friend for the time they were assigned to Laura. Through other circumstances, these people are not any more different than you and I.

I thoroughly enjoyed the book as I devoured it in a span of two days. The 300+ pages were filled with awes and I anticipated the next move as I ferociously turn each pages. It's not a literary accomplishment as we're not talking about fiction work by Jane Austen or Charles Dickens, but the real tragic and hopeful story of two sisters fighting for the right to be free. It exposed me to the "culture" of North Korea and of its very so oppressive regime. For a small country like North Korea, I believe we should not take for granted its size as it can become a dangerous nation capable of everything.

Because I finished the book faster than I thought I originally would, I went and got two new books, one fiction and one non-fiction. The fiction is titled Say You're One of Them by Uwem Akpan, a collection of five short stories about Africa that deals with issues such as poverty, violence, prostitution and so on. The other is titled Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace...One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson and recounts his humanitarian work in the Middle East with the mission of building schools for girls in Pakistan and Afghanistan in areas where the Taliban is most prominent. I have to decide which one to start, but I think I will jump into Three Cups of Tea as the other ones are just short stories that I'm not in a rush to read. Hopefully I will enjoy these summer reads as much as I enjoyed the past books I read this summer including Eat, Pray, Love.