Volume 50, Number 2 · February 13, 2003
A Visit to North Korea
By Suki Kim
On February 16, 2002, the sixtieth birthday of the Great Leader Kim Jong Il, I was standing in front of a group of Workers' Party leaders in Pyongyang, singing a South Korean protest song called 'Morning Dew.' It was a strange situation for a fiction writer from New York's East Village who is neither a political activist nor an entertainer. I am South Korean by birth and an American, having immigrated at thirteen. The American in me dismisses North Korea as off-limits, the bastard child of the cold war. But I am often haunted by the photographs of famine there that I see on the evening news. When friends ask me whether I think the two Koreas will ever be reunified, I never know what to say. I know as much as they do, or as little. The one thing that sets me apart is that I am certain, no matter how evil North Korea is supposed to be, that I could never hate its people.
Feature, 5509 words
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