Jia:
A Novel of North Korea
Hyejin Kim
As a child in South Korea, Hyejin Kim was taught to fear and revile North Korea. "I had never thought of North Korea as a real country, and North Koreans as real human beings," she writes. Every year, on the anniversary of the beginning of the Korean War, she was required to hand in an essay and painting vilifying North Korea. At fourteen, she learned that her own father, a history teacher who dared to read socialist books, had been falsely imprisoned for five years as a North Korean sympathizer. She had good reasons for regarding North Korea as "both a constant threat and a beguiling Pandora's box" — until a chance encounter on a bus in northeast China led to a friendship with "Jia," the inspiration for Hyejin Kim's affecting debut.
All but closed to outside visitors and influence, North Korea is among the most opaque nations on earth. While most readers know only the bleak outlines of its politics and history — the repressions of this regime, its nuclear armament, and the personality cult of "Great Leader," Kim Jong II — Hyejin Kim illuminates this troubled country from within. Based on true events, Jia is the first novel about present-day North Korea to be published in English.
The gentle, fragile daughter of a dancer who died giving birth to her and a father who was "disappeared" for owning foreign books, Jia grows up in the North Korea mountain gulag where her grandparents have been sent as punishment for their son's supposed treason. When her grandfather manages to smuggle her out of the gulag, Jia's journey takes her first to an orphanage in Pyongyang, and then to a dance school where she performs in the World Festival of Youth and Students in front of foreign dignitaries and the Great Leader himself. As a young woman living in Pyongyang, she falls in love with a soldier, and befriends neighbors, co-workers and teachers, all struggling to survive the famine, the silent darkness, and. the "capricious political winds" of modern North Korea. As life in the capital city worsens and her friends begin to disappear, Jia — like thousand of her compatriots — attempts to illegally cross the North Korean border into China. Along the way, she falls in with beggars, is kidnapped, beaten, enslaved, and finally learns to negotiate Chinese culture and balance her cruel past with the possibilities of kindness and love.
"Vivid and poignantly understated, Jia is authentic and heartbreaking; it is an absolute must read for those who wish to understand the tragedy of North Korea." —Heinz Insu Fenkl, author of Memories of My Ghost Brother
"Reminiscent of Red Azalea, Hyejin Kim's poignant first novel takes us along on a harrowing journey as Jia comes of age in the totalitarian and famine-stricken North Korea.... After the last page is turned, every reader will feel enormous empathy for the plight of the countless North Korean refugees whose brave struggle for freedom and survival continues to this very day." —Mia Yun, author of Translations of Beauty and House of the Winds "As a depiction of North Korean society, it is both terrifying and illuminating. For a South Korean to imagines the lives of North Koreans, requires not just a leap of imagination but a willingness to pierce through a welter of clichés about life on the other side of the border...The stories of Jia's rise and fall, and that of the people she meets on the road, are certainly fascinating. They also ring true, for they correspond in outline and detail to the stories of North Korean refugees that have already been published." —Korean Quarterly
"Kim, who frequently writes on Asian issues, crafts an unsettling account of a North Korean woman caught up in events she neither controls nor understands." —Kirkus Reviews
"There are moments when the adventure could be anyplace where desperation fuels a dream of a better life elsewhere—the U.S.-Mexican border, the Straits of Florida or Gibraltar, the line down the middle of Hispaniola or any crossing into the more prosperous emirates—but Kim makes it particular with hauntingly simple language." —In These Times
"This is an interesting book that opens a window to such a closed-off country" —Curled Up With a Good Book
“Kim has found an inspired way to sing of the fundamental aspirations of the soul and expose human rights abuses without preaching or shouting—just by writing a tale well told.” —Multicultural ReviewHYEJIN KIM has written for numerous publications, including Asia Times. She has a Ph.D. in global affairs from Rutgers University. In 2003 she received the Korean Novelist Association's award for Best Television Drama Scenario. Jia was inspired by her encounters with North Korean refugees in northern China.
$14.95 Trade paper
240 pages
5 x 8
ISBN: 978-1-57344-275-6
Current Events / Human Rights
