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A review by sevenlefts
Aquariums Of Pyongyang: Ten Years In The North Korean Gulag by Kang Chol-Hwan, Pierre Rigoulot
4.0
A friend happened to be reading this while I was reading Nothing to Envy, and recommended Aquariums of Pyongyang to me.
As with one of the people whose story is told in Nothing to Envy, Kang's family is part of the Chosen Soren -- Korean residents of Japan who are sympathetic with North Korea. As a relatively well-off member of North Korean society, his childhood seems rather idyllic until the arrest of his grandfather and the internment of many of his family members in the Yodok camp system.
From the age of 9 to 19, Kang manages to survive the horrors of living in this system, surviving hunger, disease, brutality, cold through shear will. It's an amazing story. I found the part of the book that dealt with his internment more compelling than the story of his life after release and after his escape to the south.
It was interesting to compare his story with those of the interviewees in Nothing to Envy. Kang got out in the early 90s, before the famine in North Korea was at its worst. Yet as a camp resident, it's almost as if he went through the horror that the rest of the country experienced, only ten years earlier.
As with one of the people whose story is told in Nothing to Envy, Kang's family is part of the Chosen Soren -- Korean residents of Japan who are sympathetic with North Korea. As a relatively well-off member of North Korean society, his childhood seems rather idyllic until the arrest of his grandfather and the internment of many of his family members in the Yodok camp system.
From the age of 9 to 19, Kang manages to survive the horrors of living in this system, surviving hunger, disease, brutality, cold through shear will. It's an amazing story. I found the part of the book that dealt with his internment more compelling than the story of his life after release and after his escape to the south.
It was interesting to compare his story with those of the interviewees in Nothing to Envy. Kang got out in the early 90s, before the famine in North Korea was at its worst. Yet as a camp resident, it's almost as if he went through the horror that the rest of the country experienced, only ten years earlier.