North Korean Literature

Jia, A Novel of North Korea

By Kim Hyejin

2007

Midnight Editions

Jia, A Novel of North Korea, is an interesting introduction to the secret world of The Hermit Kingdom. In her lead-in to the novel, Jia’s narrator tells the story of a chance meeting with a North Korean woman who had succeeded in escaping North Korea through China. The conceit of the novel is that Jia is telling her remarkable story of survival from beginning to end. In actuality, there is no Jia. In the epilogue to the novel, the author explains that her heroine is an amalgamation of escaped North Koreans Kim interviewed while studying for a year in China–hence A Novel of North Korea. Each of the many episodes and details appears to jibe with reports and memoirs of real-life refugees from North Korea. Specialists in North Korean life and literature, confirmed that Kim Hyejin’s work of fiction effectively conveys a realistic and convincing portrayal of life in North Korea. The earliest passage in the novel is especially affecting as Jia tells about the death of her parents and being raised by grandparents in a remote and primitive mountain village. About the time she is to begin grade school, the grandparents give the child to a soldier who is returning to Pyongyang, where they hope she will find a better life. They tell the child to say nothing about where she comes from and give her a picture of her deceased parents. As hoped for, she is placed in an orphanage. Based on the picture she carries, her mother’s parents are summoned, but they deny knowing the child because her father was a political prisoner; worse, they make it clear that they blame Jia’s father for the death of their daughter. But fate is kind to Jia. Over time, she is selected to study dance and finds a place as an entertainer for an international hotel in Pyongyang. She becomes good friends with a former worker at the orphanage and is heartbroken when she begins to hear rumors that the best dancer in the troupe may have been coerced into prostitution. She has a long-running and remarkably tepid romance with a soldier, but when she finally trusts him with the secret of her family’s political background, he betrays her to the authorities, and so begins Jia’s flight to China. Kim charts her course across the Yalu River and the various places she shelters in, as well as the names of the people who help or betray her. At a certain point, her ability to always just escape recapture and somehow avoid being trafficked as a sex slave begins to strain credulity. Kim details those horrors when Jia finds a friend she met during her escape he tells of the tragic life and death of a young woman sold to a Chinese man who abused and ultimately murdered her. Jia, A Novel of North Korea was one of the first books about North Korea to be translated into English and it played an important role in humanizing a people hidden away from the world. Incidentally, Kim Hyejin of Jia, A Novel of North Korea, and Kim Hyejin of the novel, About My Mother, while both young, award-winning South Korean authors, are not the same person

“The station was already crowded with anxious travelers pacing the terminal. A conductor said there would not be a train to Hamhŭng or Onsŏng that day due to an engine problem; some would-be travelers turned back while others decided to wait out the delay in the station. I was afraid that Sŭnggyu would catch me after discovering my escape, and I needed to get out of Pyongyang. Grabbing the conductor’s arm tightly, I asked him if there was no other way to get to Onsŏng. If I hadn’t held him I felt he would have flown away without giving me an answer.”