見證《逃出第十四號勞改營》中的隱形傷口：脫北者的創傷記憶再現

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(1)國立臺灣師範大學英語系碩士論文 Master’s Thesis Department of English National Taiwan Normal University. 見證《逃出第十四號勞改營》中的隱形傷口：脫北者的創傷記憶再現 To Witness the Invisible Wound in Escape from Camp 14: Representing the Traumatic Memories of North Korean Defectors. 指導教授: 黃涵榆 Advisor: Dr. Han-Yu Huang 研究生: 廖翊鈞中華民國 106 年 7 月 July 2017.

(2) 摘要. 本文以《逃出第十四號勞改營》為主要文本，旨在探討脫北者之創傷記憶再現與讀者閱讀其證言的過程。脫北者所承受的國家暴力不僅摧殘身心，也摧毀了紀錄暴力記憶的結構。語言做為一種結構性的表達，亦無法完整容納創傷，必定有溢出於文字之外且不可言說的片斷經驗，因此《逃出第十四號勞改營》的作者布雷恩．哈登（Blain Harden）整合了文字、照片與圖片，甚至是以脫北者申東赫的身體傷疤作為呈現記憶的媒介，試圖以不可磨滅的感官記憶與身心遺跡拼湊創傷記憶。脫北者的證言往往受創傷記憶的延遲影響，造成細節流失與扭曲，他們飄忽反覆的生命故事，正好引出創傷與見證間的弔詭關係：證言因為創傷而不完整，但卻也因此倍顯真實。在資訊流通快速且形式多元的｢見證世代｣(the era of witness)，證言可以記錄、更可以建構創傷。藉由探討構築脫北者證言的三大要素―見證者、媒介、讀者，本文共可分為三章節。第一章作為本文背景知識探討與往後章節的基礎，主要涵蓋北韓自韓戰後的簡史與其人民的集體記憶，並探究脫北者在國際間的複雜身分。第二章分析《逃出第十四號勞改營》中再現申東赫創傷記憶的方法和媒介，以其訪談內容和手繪圖像作為主要討論對象，並特別關注脫北者記憶之於全球化時代所遇到的困境。第三章探討讀者之於閱讀脫北者創傷證言時所面對的特殊責任，在承受二次見證與二次創傷之餘，讀者能否辨認並填補創傷證言間的空白和沉默，開展出只有讀者才辦得到的證言補述，與見證者一同淡化傷疤。. 關鍵字：脫北者、證言、見證、創傷記憶.

(3) Abstract. Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West (2012), authored by Blaine Harden, is a wide circulated North Korean gulag testimony featuring the life story of Shin Dong-Hyuk, a North Korean defector who miraculous escapes from Kaechon internment camp in 2005 and currently lives in South Korea. This book integrates Shin’s Korean-language diary and the content of multiple private interviews between Shin and Harden. It is not only a rare representation of North Korean gulag memories but also an honest record of a traumatic victim’s struggle for his reconnection to the world. Motivated by the uniqueness of Shin’s testimony and its controversial revision, this thesis aims to explore the questions embedded in the process of reconstructing North Korean defector’s traumatic memories. From the angles of the witness of a traumatic event, the medium conveying the memories, and the reader of a testimony, this thesis argues that similar to Elie Weisel’s concept of “trusted silence” in the Holocaust literature, there are also many silent moments and invisible wounds yet to be uncovered and interpreted in the North Korean defection testimony. These silent moments are the essential sites for the reader to witness the defectors’ trauma; only when these invisible wounds are revealed and witnessed can the healing process begins, and the cycle of memory transference completes. Moving across the stances of the witness (writer), the medium, and the reader of North Korean defection testimony, this thesis can be mainly divided into three chapters. To prepare the ensuing discussion of defection testimony, the first chapter introduces North Korea’s brief history after the Korean War and the common ideologies shared by North Koreans including the collective memories of the country’s heavy historical revisionism, Kim’s cult of personality, and the famine of.

(4) the 1990s. In the second chapter, the narrative strategies of representing North Korean defectors’ gulag memories in Escape from Camp 14 will be the focus. Particularly, this chapter deals with inherent problems that occur during the representation of a local memory in a global context. The final chapter centers on the discussion of the reader/listener’s ethical responsibility in receiving North Korean gulag memories, highlighting the possible overlapping role between a listener and a therapist.. Keywords: North Korean defectors, testimony, witness, traumatic memory.

(5) Acknowledgement I would first like to express my sincere gratitude to my adviser, Professor Han-yu Huang, for his professional guidance and heartfelt encouragement throughout my journey of writing this thesis. Prof. Huang teaches me so much more than how to conduct a literature research. I would always remember Prof. Huang’s wonderful lectures which help me define and refine the person that I have become. He is truly an honorable scholar and a mentor of a lifetime. Also, I deeply appreciate the valuable advice from Professor Yuh-chuan Shao and Yen-bin Chiou. Thanks to their insightful suggestions, I have the inspiration to carry on my writing. It is really my pleasure to discuss my thesis with these supportive professors. Second, my thankfulness goes to my dear classmates and friends. I would like to thank my fellow classmates Charmin Cheng, Lily Chang, Gary Chen, Angel Hsieh, Annie Shao, Kristy Fan, Vivian Lee, White Pak, and Susan Su, for their warm companionship. Thanks to these amazing classmates, my journey of NTNU MA program is full of unforgettable episodes and unprecedented joy. I am so blessed to be in the same class with these good-natured friends. In addition, I would like to give special thanks to Iris Pang, who makes my RA part-time job abundant with beautiful and enjoyable moments. My appreciation also goes to Lily Lee, May Lu, and Tracey Wang, my three bosom friends ever since NTNU BA freshmen year. Thank you for being kind and understanding whenever I am stressful during the journey of writing. Third, I deliver my genuine gratefulness with love to my family. Without the endless cheer and unconditional support given by my beloved family, it is impossible for me to finish this expedition of pursuing knowledge. I owe my deepest gratitude to my parents for giving me enough time and room to finish my prolonged explore; and I would like to give my most grateful love to my sister, for she cheers me up whenever.

(6) I am in doubt of myself and gives me hope and courage to overcome every obstacle. Last but not least, I hope this thesis can be a humble form of remembrance of my friend Angela Wu, to always remember her as a hardworking and earnest individual in quest of inner peace..

(7) Table of Contents. Introduction. 1. I. Background and Motivation. 1. II. Literature Review. 7. III. Methodology. 13. IV. Outline of Chapters. 17. V. Expected Findings. 19. Chapter One: North Korean Collective Memories. 20. I. The Reshaping of North Korean Memories. 20. II. Arduous March: The Famine of the 1990s. 25. III. After the Great Escape: Defectors’ Complicated Identities. 28. Chapter Two: The Analysis of North Korean Defectors’ 33 Traumatic Memories Representation I. Textual Representation of North Korean Gulag Memories in a. 34. Global Context II. Reconstructing North Korean Gulag Memories beyond Words. 40. A. Drawings. 41. B. Body and Mental Scars. 44. Chapter Three: The Reader’s Joint Responsibility for Reconstructing 47 North Korean Defection Testimony I. The Therapeutic Listener: The “Drilling” Process. 49. II. Vicarious Trauma: Shin Dong-Hyuk’s Two Speeches. 56. Conclusion. 59. Works Cited. 62.

(8) Liao 1. Introduction. Convicted that this period in history would be judged one day, I knew that I must bear witness. I also knew that, while I had many things to say, I did not have the words to say them. Painfully aware of my limitations, I watched helplessly as language became an obstacle. It became clear that it would be necessary to invent a new language. -. Elie Wiesel, Night (ix). I have regret. Is there anyone who wants to be famous by revealing their own scars? I feel that no one wants to be famous by revealing their privacy and past in this way. Sometimes I imagine what I would be like if I was born in America or some other foreign country. It’s only because I was born in the camp that it has become my destiny to reveal my past to people around the world. […]It’s both my fortune and my misfortune. -. Shin Dong-Hyuk, 10 Magazine Korea. I. Background and Motivation. Annett Wieviorka regards twentieth century as “the era of witness” due to the booming of countless testimonies in the wake of two devastating World Wars and hundreds of minor but murderous conflicts. Atomic bombings, concentration camps, and many other man-made misfortunes have destroyed humanity on a large-scale, but the survivors of these atrocities still manage to pull through suffering and bear their physical and mental scars to tell the world what they have witnessed. Survivors’ urge to tell their stories, to remember their past is a unique means to withstand death in an.

(9) Liao 2. era when death is omnipresent; and only through giving testimonies can the dead be rescued from nothingness and oblivion, and the silenced cries of victims be spoken out by “a new language.” Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate, writes his Holocaust memoir under a moral obligation to “prevent the enemy from enjoying one last victory by allowing his crimes to be erased from human memory” (Night viii). He says “if the Greeks invented tragedy, the Romans the epistle, and the Renaissance the sonnet, our generation invented a new literature, that of testimony” (Dimensions of the Holocaust 9). Testimony as a new literary genre brings in the inherent doubt of accurately reconstructing traumatic experiences and the necessity to invent a new language, a new medium, to speak the unspeakable trauma. In the preface of Night, Wiesel points out the hazardous triangular relationship among the witness, the reader, and the medium to tell the story, such as verbal and written languages. The witness needs an agency to carry and transfer his testimony, but he is also aware that the agency cannot be fully trusted since every medium has its own limits and some traumatic experiences are bound to be inexpressible and uncontainable by any form of literary structures. Even if a way is figured out to convey the memory, the witness also wonders if the reader is ready to comprehend the atrocity despite the inescapable gaps between experience and expression. Likewise, when the reader engages in the discourse of the witness’ traumatic past, he is risking himself receiving a distorted or even a counterfeit testimony. However, it is worth considering why survivors of trauma might provide inconsistent or incorrect testimony, and what makes a testimony meaningful even if it can no longer convey objective truth. Wiesel’s concern about the possible failure of capturing factual truth in an account of traumatic experience does not mean to limit the testimony to simply providing facts, but, rather, it spotlights the complexity of reconstructing a valid testimony beyond.

(10) Liao 3. empirical verification. Wiesel’s words thus become a convenient parallel and the point of departure of this thesis to explore the testimonies given by North Korean defectors, a group of North Koreans who seek refuge outside of their country since the division of Korea after World War II and Korean War (1950-1953). As South Korean Ministry of Unification1 has revealed to the world, during the end of the Korean War in 1953 to 2014, over 27,000 North Korean refugees and defectors have entered the South to seek official protection, and a few of others establish new homes in Japan, the United States and European countries under the humanitarian assistance of the U.N.. To stop the violation of human rights in North Korea, human rights organizations necessitate the experiences and memories of refugees and defectors about starvation, totalitarianism, and prison camp torture as evidence. Despite the worldwide need of defectors’ testimonies, only a small number of North Korean defectors are willing to make their traumatic memories known to the public, let alone to get involved in any human rights related movements. North Korean defectors are constantly in fear that “their friends and families back home may be punished by the state” (PSCORE 8-9) and their own lives are also under the death threat from North Korean assassins2. As for those defectors who determined to make a difference to their homeland by providing memoirs and testimonies, they often cannot accurately recall the specific details of the incidents of human rights abuse because throughout their lives, “their human rights have been breached to the point that human rights violations were accepted as a natural and insignificant part of their daily lives” (PSCORE 9); and it is difficult for the defectors to fully convince the world of the 1. The Korean Ministry of Unification highlights that the total number of North Korean refugees may be different from the actual numbers because the counts are made only when individual refugees were granted government protection. The specific statistics of North Korean refugees can be found at “Major Statistics in Inter-Korean Relations: Humanitarian Projects” Ministry of Unification. 2016. Web. 8 Apr. 2016. <http://eng.unikorea.go.kr/content.do?cmsid=1822>. 2 North Korean government keeps trying to assassinate “the talkative defectors.” Reference can also be found in the New York Times “South Korea Arrests 2 From North in Alleged Assassination Plot” published in April 2010. <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/22/world/asia/22korea.html?_r=0>..

(11) Liao 4. truth of their testimonies since the severe suffering and privation they have gone through are just beyond cognition and too outlandish to believe. Or sometimes, affected by their survivor experiences, defectors are “preoccupied with shame, self-loathing, and sense of failure” and constantly aware of their “contaminated identity” (Herman 94-95); they just do not feel secure and confident enough to unburden themselves of the terrible pasts. North Korean defectors are the silent minority who witnessed the impossible abuse of human rights and made the impossible testimonies. Shin Dong-Hyuk, a North Korean defector currently living in South Korea, has tried to reorient his derailed life and reconstruct his painful yet unique memories in the Kaechon internment camp, a Total Control Zone3, since his miraculous escape in 2005. Shin’s reconstruction of his life and memories lead to the publication of Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West (2012), authored by Blaine Harden, an experienced American journalist for Public Broadcasting Service and contributor to The Economist magazine. This book is based on Shin’s diary4 and the content of multiple private interviews between Shin and Harden. In addition to Shin’s life story, Harden also presents the process of how he induced Shin to explore deeper into his memories and even to “correct” some of his previous recollections, making the book even more complicated but also more realistic in portraying Shin’s disturbed mind. Escape from Camp 14 is unquestionably a hit all over the world, because it is not only a rare testimony about North Korean political camps but also an extremely 3. There are two types of North Korean Gulag: 1) Revolutionizing Zones, from which prisoners are released after a fixed period of time; 2) Total Control Zones, from which no one is to be released after entering (Hawk 23). In particularly, there was no conclusive evidence regarding Total Control Zones until 2005, when Dong-hyuk Shin came to Seoul, South Korea. 4 Shin began keeping a diary as part of his writing therapy in early 2006, a year after his escape from North Korea, and this diary became the foundation of his Korean-language memoir, Escape to the Outside World (2007), published only in Seoul, South Korea..

(12) Liao 5. influential book that humanizes the issue of the violation of human rights by highlighting the representative victims. With the publication of Escape from Camp 14, “[Shin has] become the face of the North Korean gulag 5” (Harden 195), calling for the international attention to North Korea government’s egregious cruelty against its own citizens. Up to the present time, Shin’s testimony circulates so widely that Escape from Camp 14 is translated into 27 languages worldwide and adapted for the documentary film Camp 14: Total Control Zone (2012) by Marc Wiese. His North Korean gulag experience has caused a global phenomenon that the international media are rushing out to cover more North Korean defectors’ sensational life stories. The publisher of the book, Penguin Books USA, even issues a teacher’s guide6 to Escape from Camp 14, addressing Shin’s story as a globalized experience. However, early in 2015, nearly after three years since the publication of the book, Shin suddenly changes his story. Shin admits that his account of North Korean gulag experiences differs substantially from what he has been telling government officials, human rights activists, and journalists, including Blaine Harden, the author of Escape from Camp 14. His abrupt changes of dates, places and circumstances cause a great disturbance, and also make the world ponder what makes a testimony count beside “truth.” Motivated by Shin’s unique testimony and its controversial revision, this thesis aims to explore the questions embedded in the process of reconstructing North Korean defectors’ traumatic memories. First of all, regarding the topic of the witness’ self-doubt, when conducting memoirs, the survivor often doubts his own reasoning 5. The North Korean gulags, although their existence are denied by the North Korean government, are the classic Stalinist model of limited food and sleep, endless labor and brainwashing, and predicable early death, and as the term “gulag” suggests, North Korean forced labor camps are often seen as the Soviet counterparts (Hollander 573). Similar to the slogan of Nazi concentration camps – “work will liberate you” (arbeit machts frei), North Korean gulags highlight that hardworking is the only way to redemption. 6 The teacher’s guide to Escape from 14 can be found on the official website of Penguin Books USA..

(13) Liao 6. and memory, and, in some cases, hesitates and even resists recalling all the details since recalling equals to reliving the suffering of the past all over again. The process of recollecting and reconstructing traumatic memories thus becomes a site of rupture where the witness recognizes that a part of his self was forever lost in the moment of trauma. What does this self-doubt mean in a testimony? In what ways do (or do not) the doubt and “the loss of self” delimit the representation of trauma? The second question is about the insufficiency of language in reconstructing North Korean defectors’ memories. As Elie Wiesel said in the preface of Night, “while [he] had many to say, [he] did not have the words to say them” (ix). Therefore, Wiesel “trusted the silence that envelops and transcends words” (x), hoping the “trusted silence” can compensate for the insufficiency of language. Similarly, in Shin Dong-Hyuk’s and many other defectors’ case, languages, both Korean and English, have their limits to fully describe what they have seen. Why does this insufficiency happen? And how do they make up for this insufficiency? And eventually, this thesis will explore the reader’s role in a testimony. When a testimony is addressed to an intended reader, the reader is placed as a secondary witness upon reading it. As Cathy Caruth suggests that “to listen to the crisis of a trauma, that is, is not only to listen for the event, but to hear in the testimony the survivor’s departure from it; the challenge of the therapeutic listener, in other words, is how to listen to departure” (Unclaimed 10). Hence, rather than seeking the truth directly from the words of a testimony, the reader is supposed to read beyond the text and form a special relationship with both the text and the witness. What is the reader’s responsibility in reading and interpreting a testimony? In what ways does the reader’s ethical reading of the text make the process of reconstructing North Korean defector’s experience even more complete? These three questions are the overall exploring map for this thesis, guiding the.

(14) Liao 7. discussion of the reconstruction of North Korean defectors’ traumatic memories from the witness’ stance to the reader’s transaction with the texts.. II. Literature Review. North Korean defection testimonies are getting more international attention in recent years. The booming of related autobiographies, documentaries, TV interviews, variety shows7, comics books, and various magazine and news coverage, all attempt to remind the world that the cause of their trauma, the origin of their nightmares, and the abuse of state power, still exist and function smoothly without any obvious hindrance. To tackle the questions raised in this thesis, besides the book Escape from Camp 14 and the film Camp 14: Total Control Zone, I review the following related researches and other defectors’ testimonies, which provide valuable insights and grounds for further development. Since North Korean defection testimonies are not in the focus of recent academic studies yet, I select the witness-related and testimony-related scholarly works to enlarge the research scope of this thesis. Responding to my questions of the self-doubt of the author and the intricate role of the reader in the testimony, Gao Xing-Jian’s opinions of “truthfulness” and the double role of the author supply an unique perspective for this thesis. Gao expresses in “Testimony in Literature: Aspired for Truthfulness (文學的見證－對真實的追求)” that the ultimate principle of composing testimony literature is to render the “truth” to the reader, but Gao ‘s concept of truth, similar to the argument of this thesis, is not. The most notable variety show is Now on My Way to Meet You (이제 만나러 갑니다) since 2011, in South Korea. It is an award-winning Korean talk show starring North Korean female defectors (as the show addresses them as “North Korean Beauties”) to share their North Korea experiences and personal stories. 7.

(15) Liao 8. limited to factual truth. It is a truth that cannot be affected by politics and ideologies from the outside, and cannot be misled by the author’s self-exaggeration from the inside. In other words, to provide a self-reflected version of the truth while writing a testimony as a literary genre, the author must observe both the world and his self and evade any theoretical frames to return to his true emotions in the present moment. Gao’s statement sheds light on the possible overlapping role between the author and reader in conducting the testimony, which means an author must distance himself from the original traumatic event to understand his own emotions and observe himself like an outsider to reconstruct the “truth.” To write about traumatic experiences, the author must be the first reader to understand and interpret his trauma. Huang Hsinya’s “Writing Hiroshima, Writing Trauma: CatastropheTrauma-Memory-Testimony (廣島的創傷：災難、記憶與文學的見證)” sports a rounded theoretical frames on the topic of trauma. Departing from the stance of psychoanalysis and supplying with the theories of Caruth, LaCapra, Casey, and Herman, Huang notes the Hiroshima trauma is actually more like a “taboo” (not allowed to be expressed) and a “denial” (refuse to express). The exact traumatic moment is lost, and ironically captured, in the white blast of the atomic bomb explosion which is similar to the flashlight of a camera (a camera that is meant to record a certain important moment). Originating from Lifton’s reading of Hiroshima trauma memories, the analogy between explosion and the flashlight of a camera brings forth the concept of “mark of absence” (88) in which an important memory is denied, suppressed and finally forgotten under the effect of trauma. The tension among remembrance, understanding and oblivion of the traumatic events echoes the belated traumatic impact experienced by most North Korean defectors. Huang’s intensive exploration on trauma-related theories supports this thesis to examine the remembrance of a traumatic event in a specific way: if an event is scorched into a.

(16) Liao 9. witness’ deepest memories and thus becomes part of the witness, there is no remembrance at all. It is an extreme form of remembrance that the witness becomes the remnant of the event and an essential part of its aftermath. Even if the witness fails or refuses to remember the event correctly, the event is already recorded by the witness’ presence. In this case, when the witness embodies the event itself, he does not need any evidence to prove his testimony. In sum, Huang’s research highlights the possibility for the witness to successfully represent a devastating event by not giving a factually valid testimony at all, which also provides a just inspiration for this thesis to focus on the impossible witnessing experienced by North Korean defectors. In Witness: Memory, Representation, and the Media in Questions (2008), a remarkable book dedicated to the topic of witness from the aspect of visual representation, Ulrik Ekman points out the idea of “impossible witness” based on Derrida’s concept of absolute hospitality. As Ekman remarks, “[T]he impossible witness would be a real witness, a witness taken hostage by but also telling of whoever or whatever comes right in in disclosure” (26). In contrast to previous researches that put emphasis on the unspeakable side of trauma, Ekman’s contention highlights the witness’ unstoppable recounting and retelling of the horror of traumatic events. This book serves as an important window for this thesis to inspect a testimony and the position of a witness from a different angle. To enlarge the understanding of North Korean collective memories and different literary methods of representing North Korean traumatic memories, this thesis reviews Kang Chol-Hwan and Pierre Rigoulot’s The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag (2001) as one of the most influential defection that successfully aroused international attention. Unlike Escape from Camp 14, which is narrated from the third-person perspective and heavy with the co-author’s supplemental comments in each chapter, Kang’s life story is presented in his own.

(17) Liao 10. voice and rich with literary metaphors. His memoir is worth of reference values not only for its literary qualities, but also for its immediacy and drama of the personal testimony. After the end of the Korean War in 1953, Kang’s family was drawn back from settling in Japan with the hope of a better life in North Korea. Upon arriving at the port of Chongjin, the country's third largest city, Kang’s grandparents witnessed the horror of the post-war North Korea. They describe the city as “the city of the dead” with “a feeling of deep sadness” (25), which is totally opposite to the images that Kim Il-Sung had projected to the world of a thriving communist lifestyle. The post-war memories of severe poverty and militarism are gradually transferred to Kang by his family through storytelling; and Kang as the second generation of the witness reconstructs them in his book, providing this thesis an even broader understanding of North Korean defectors’ historical background. Kang and his family are put into Yodok concentration camp for ten year, facing brutal treatment, inhumane living conditions, and severe malnutrition. However, Kang tends to portray these horrifying ordeals in a relatively reserved way by using literary metaphors, which tendency might result from his well-educated childhood as an elite member of the upper social class. For example, as the book title suggests, the aquariums in Pyongyang refers to the political camps, trapping the golden fish (Kang’s favorite pet of his childhood, and also the embodiment of Kang’s carefree life before being sent in the camp) in a pool of dead water and showcasing them to other citizens as a warning; when the golden fishes dies in the camp due to the lack of food, part of Kang’s unsophisticated self is forever lost in the camp as well. Kang’s metaphorical way of reconstructing gulag memories is thus significantly different from any other defectors’ memoirs, opening more possibilities for the reader to understand gulag trauma. Kang’s use of literary metaphors suggests the novelization, and the beautification to some degree, of a testimony, and in Barbara Demick’s book Nothing to Envy:.

(18) Liao 11. Ordinary Lives in North Korea (2010), Demick novelizes his interviews with six North Korean refugees from Chongjin 8, a city which honestly presents the ordinary lives of North Koreans. Their life stories cover the events of the post-war propaganda of Kim's regime, famine of the 1990s, public executions, escaping routes to South Korea, and 2009 currency reform. Specifically, this book offers a very insightful look at the similarities between North Korean defectors and Holocaust survivors, and even juxtaposes George Orwell’s 1984 with the circumstance of North Korea. Through the contextualization, the repetition of tragic history is underlined; and the unimaginable lives of defectors are solidified to the readers who are already familiar with the event of Holocaust or the novel of 1984. Demick’s book thus proposes a different way to reconstruct and understand the traumatic experiences, and emphasizes that the crisis faced by North Korean defectors is at the same level of Holocaust. Among many defectors’ published memoirs, female North Korean defectors’ testimonies about mail-order bride, human trafficking, sexual abuse, specialized torture for female inmates in the camps, and other gender-related issues are often singled out. The Girl with Seven Names (2015) by Lee Hyeonseo and David John, and In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom (2015) by Park Yeonmi are the two memoirs spotlighting these issues and shining a light of hope into the darkest corners in North Korea. Lee’s and Park’s life stories and process of escape echo with each other – they are respectively smuggled across the national border to China and work there as illegal immigrants for several years before they finally trek to South Korea; Lee works in China as a low-profile waitress and was constantly threatened by gangsters who were eager to expose her secrets, while Park and her. 8. In Barbara Demick’s opinion, the national capital city of Pyongyang presents little information about the typical lives of North Koreans, since the capital is nothing but a Potemkin village (a feigned village, built to impress foreign tourists). Therefore, after he interviewed more than 100 defectors, Demick chose to focus on the stories from Chongjin city..

(19) Liao 12. mother are betrayed by the smuggler and sold into sexual slavery. Similar to Shin’s hesitation to recall all the details of her traumatic past, Lee and Park both have the moment when they do not feel comfortable enough for revealing the whole truth to the world. The rupture of the past is even more obvious when Park expresses that “I convinced myself that a lot of what I had experienced never happened. I taught myself to forget the rest” (262). Notably, Park and Lee both give public speeches9 on the topic of North Korean human rights, and they have included the responses from their listeners into the books, which offer this thesis a window to peer into the interaction between the witness and the audience. Aside from testimonies directly written by North Korean defectors, On the Border: We Wanted to Live as a Human Being (2014) by Lee Hark-Joon, a South Korean reporter turned filmmaker, is a book of firsthand account of Lee’s experiences about human trafficking (as a extreme way of defection) between North Korea and its neighbor countries, such as Siberia, Vietnam, China, Laos and Thailand (and ultimately to South Korean). Lee witnesses the tragic lives of North Korean defectors who risk everything fleeting from their homeland. From 2007 to 2011, he has spent four years to closely trace North Korean’s harrowing journeys to freedom and takes many vivid photos along to record the odyssey. Lee’s camera symbolizes both the eyes of defectors and bystanders, highlighting the possible overlap between the roles of the witness and the reader of a testimony. Through the lens of his camera, Lee slowly transforms the reader from a cold-hearted onlooker to a sympathetic participant. In the ending chapter, as a reminder for himself and a suggestion to his readers, Lee brings forward the concept of “breaking the national boundaries of the mind” (292), which means only when the onlooker is empathetic to the North Korean 9. Lee Hyeonseo gave a speech “My Escape from North Korea” at a TED conference in Long Beach, California, in 2013. Park Yeonmi told her life story in North Korea in the One Young World Summit 2014 in Dublin, Ireland. Both speeches were uploaded to the web and have received millions of views..

(20) Liao 13. victims can the national boundaries of the mind (the boundaries that cause distrust and discrimination) be broken, and the distinction between “you (the defector)” and “I (the photographer/the onlooker/the reader)” be blurred.. III. Methodology. This thesis aims to examine the discursive act found in the writing and reading of North Korean defectors’ testimonies. Accordingly, in the attempt to discuss the influence of trauma on rebuilding North Korean defectors’ memories and the reader’s position in North Korean defectors’ testimonies, the following exploration of methodology will be focused on two distinctive but related aspects: trauma and ethical reading. The exact definition of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is still in contest, but most theorists have come to the agreement that the associated responses include “the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviors stemming from the event, along with numbing […], and possibly also increased arousal to (and avoidance of)stimuli recalling the event” (Caruth, Trauma 4). Under the influence of PTSD, trauma theorists put emphasis on the impossibilities of representing the site of atrocity through language to “speak the unspeakable.” The traumatized witness may not know how to reconstruct their past in their state of hallucinating and dreaming, and thus cast the “truth” of their testimonies into doubt. To “speak the unspeakable” and recover the truth of a traumatic event, in the essay “Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching” (1991), Shoshana Felman connects testimony to the aspect of the unconscious proposed by Sigmund Freud. Felman states that “one does not have to possess or own the truth, in order to effectively bear witness to it […] the speaking subject constantly bears witness to a.

(21) Liao 14. truth that nonetheless continues to escape him, a truth that is, essentially, not available to its own speaker” (15). This statement sheds light on the “unconscious testimony” by which a traumatized survivor of an atrocity can make a valid witness (through the symptoms of PTSD and other non-narrative methods) even without his awareness, and this unconscious testimony has an incomparable heuristic value that exceeds the words. In addition, as Cathy Caruth suggests in the book Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995), a “neurotic distortion” takes place after the witness experienced trauma; and in this case, trauma is not merely considered as a repression or defense but as “a temporal delay that carries the individual beyond the shock of the first moment” (10). The delay of comprehending the traumatic event may result in the failure of reconstructing its related memories correctly in a testimony. To overcome this delay, the witness may experience trauma as a repeated suffering by recalling the event over and over again, and put himself in the state of “continual leaving of [the traumatic] site” (10). The ongoing departure from the site is enclosed in the latency period of the trauma wherein “the effects of the experience are not apparent” (7) and “[the event] is precisely preserves in its literality” (8). Therefore, this latency (and the incompleteness and obscurity in the literary representation of traumatic experiences caused by this latency) is the key to grasp how the traumatic event is imbedded into the witness’ mind and why it is difficult to be reconstructed, suggesting the possibility to write and read beyond the text of testimony. Caruth’s concept of continual departure of the site helps this thesis to follow Dori Laub’s notion of “the collapse of witnessing” (80) in the essay “An Event Without A Witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival” (1991). “The collapse of witnessing” expounds a paradoxical condition encountered by the witness: a person may witness an atrocity and at the same time not witness it at all. The collapse brings in the.

(22) Liao 15. realization that one cannot contain, nor fully understand, his own traumatic experiences immediately, let alone fully comprehend the experience of other people since the action of witness is still in question. Laub’s idea of “the collapse of witnessing” is in fact not anti-witnessing at all. Laub assumes, “the loss of the capacity to be a witness to oneself and thus to witness from the inside is perhaps the true meaning of annihilation, for when one’s history is abolished, one’s identity ceases to exist as well” (82). The witness’ testimonies can be seen as a ceaseless struggle against the ultimate elimination. They must bear witness to the atrocity to prove their existence and recover their identities, even if they are trapped in the belatedness of understanding their trauma. The aforementioned methods to read beyond the textual forms (speaking and writing) of testimony manifest schemes for this thesis to further analyze the reconstructed memories of North Korean defectors. Concluding from Felman, Laub, and Caruth’s explanations of traumatic witnessing, we may find trauma in three different stages: 1) the factual site of the atrocity, 2) the aftermath of the event, and 3) the process of writing a testimony of the event. And these three stages are enclosed with three distinctive levels of witnessing: “the level of being a witness to oneself within the experience; the level of being a witness to the testimonies of others; and the level of being a witness to the process of witnessing itself” (Caruth, Trauma 61). Specifically, the second level of bearing a witness to the others’ testimonies places the reader as a secondary witness, who bears witness to the witnesses of atrocity. However, in many North Korean defectors’ situation, their readers often cannot understand and therefore do not believe their life stories, highlighting the questions how can a reader ethically read a testimony? And what is the reader’s responsibility for reading a testimony? Upon reading a testimony, readers may come to the realization that it is.

(23) Liao 16. impossible for one to relive the trauma of another by merely witnessing his/her account, but by reading his/her recollection of the disturbing experience, the reader becomes “a guide and an explore, a companion in a journey onto an uncharted land, a journey the survivor cannot traverse or return from alone” (Felman and Laub 59). The reader thus takes on an essential role to both the witness and the testimony, because without an empathic reader, or an “addressable other” in Laub’s term (68), the witness will fall into the abyss of ultimate annihilation and the atrocity cannot be witnessed at all. To read a testimony ethically is to recognize the embodied life behind every presentation. Like Elie Wiesel says in the preface of Night, when the pain and agony results from an atrocity which cannot be expressed by any language, a “trusted silence” that “envelops and transcends words” (x) makes up the deficiency of language, and it is the reader’s responsibility to notice and fill in these silent moments. Nevertheless, we should also notice that being empathic to a survivor and his/her account is different from identifying with his/her life story. For literary critics such as Robert Eaglestone, a reader’s identification to a testimony can be considered as an immoral act since this identification will “normalizes” the survivor’s experience by reducing an incomprehensible event into one’s common understanding (98). Eaglestone’s concern highlights the reader’s paradox of comprehending a traumatic experience. To read a testimony ethically, the reader must not simply compare the witness’ stories to his everyday life occurrences. To read a traumatic life story is much more than merely understanding the facts provided by the survivor, since the reader is immediately engaged in a process of co-experiencing and co-reconstructing the testimony upon reading it..

(24) Liao 17. IV. Outline of Chapters. In this thesis, I argue that similar to Weisel’s concept of “trusted silence” in the Holocaust literature, there are many silent moments and invisible wounds yet to be discovered and interpreted in the North Korean defection testimonies; these silent moments becomes an essential site for the reader to witness defectors’ trauma, and only when their trauma is witnessed emphatically can the defectors alleviate their pains and heal the invisible wounds. This thesis could be mainly divided into three chapters. The first chapter introduces North Korea’s brief history after the Korean War and the common ideologies shared by North Koreans. Since the defectors’ human rights have been “breached to the point that human rights violations were accepted as a natural and insignificant part of their daily lives” (PSCORE 9), before this thesis dives into the defectors’ traumatic memories, it is necessary to take a look into the origins of their living nightmares and their collective memories. The introduction includes the Kim’s post-war communist propaganda, the famine of the 1990s, and the complicated identities of North Korean defectors, and the gaps between North and South Korea. In the second chapter, this thesis chooses Escape from Camp 14 to be the main texts to analyze the representation of traumatic memories of North Korean defectors. Specifically, the use of a second language to reconstruct a local memory in a global context is highlighted. Since Shin’s stories are considered either fake or negligible in South Korea, to break the language barricade and seek help from the outside, Shin finally decides to collaborate with Harden. To Shin, “[A] book in English would raise world awareness, increase international pressure on North Korea” (Harden 9), and this is exactly what Shin needs if he wants to remember for the living. Furthermore, to locate the invisible wounds in the testimony, the self-doubt of the witness, symptoms.

(25) Liao 18. of PTSD which occur during the interview between Harden and Shin, and the insufficiency of language is brought into discussion. As Frederick Hoffman points out, although the literature of violence attempts to find a proper way “to record fact independently of structural subterfuges, . . . violence tends to destroy structures, to isolate experiences, to force them away from containing forms” (qtd. Young 16). That is to say, Harden’s textual representation of violent events, including Shin’s gulag memories, is not enough, because violence tends to destroy structures, and the written language as a form of structure is no exception. The representation of violence falls outside factual representation (Young 16). The words simply cannot fully contain the violence. Therefore, materials such as drawings, satellite images, photos, animation, and scars on defectors’ bodies (human body as the carrier of the memory) are considered as the possible compensation for the deficiency of language. Exceptionally, Shin’s drawings are in the focus of this chapter. The moments of trauma are frozen in Shin’s drawings. Trauma maybe unspeakable, but it is still possible to be communicated “viscerally and emotionally through the alternative cognitive structures of the visual” (Hirsch 1211). And finally in the third chapter, the discussion of the reader/listener’s role in a testimony is in the focus. In particular, this thesis puts Blaine Harden, the interviewer and author of Escape from Camp 14, in the position of a secondary witness to Shin’s testimony. Throughout the process of Harden and Shin’s interviews, Harden feels that sometimes there is no mutual trust between them: Shin cannot trust Harden, and Harden does not believe in what Shin has said. The doubts about Shin’s gulag experiences exist not only outside the book but also inside the book. Escape from Camp 14 can therefore be deemed as a struggle of rebuilding human interrelationship or a form of therapy through the bond between the witness (interviewee) and the listener (interviewer). Harden even compares himself as a dentist in Escape from.

(26) Liao 19. Camp 14: “. . .Shin seems to dread talking to [Harden]. [Harden often feels] like a dentist drilling without anesthetics. [The drilling goes] on intermittently for more than two years” (9). In this circumstance, Harden plays the roles of not only a journalist and a listener but also a therapist. As he uses the “dentist” metaphor to describe himself, Harden implies that even though the process would be painful for Shin, Shin would eventually get cured by the “drilling.” This role of therapist is extremely important in representing Shin’s memories, for Harden induces Shin to speak out the truth, to correct the hidden memories that Shin did not want to admit.. V. Expected Findings. Since the past decade, North Korean defection testimonies have gradually gained worldwide attention, but few academic researches have been done to untangle the complicated relationship among the witness, the medium, and the reader in reconstructing North Korean traumatic memories. This thesis attempts to unveil the invisible wounds in North Korean testimonies through the analysis of textual representation, drawings, photos, scars on human body, and the paradoxical reader-witness relationship in North Korean testimonies. By the thorough examination in different forms of portrayal of the memories and the reader’s empathetic position in the testimony, this thesis will be one of the first North Korean defection testimony related studies. In the era of witness, horrifying traumatic events and memoirs keep popping up ceaselessly, and they are recorded and collected via different forms of the media. The results of this thesis may serve as a window to a more subtle understanding of North Korean defectors’ struggle, and from an East Asian perspective, as a lens for readers of other testimonies to grasp how to comprehend and what to expect from traumatic events..

(27) Liao 20. Chapter One North Korean Collective Memories. I. The Reshaping of North Korean Memories. By the end of the twentieth century, the fate of Korean Peninsula takes a dramatic turn under the profound influence of the Second World War and the constant interference from China, Japan, the United States, and the Soviet Union. After the end of the Second World War, Japanese military force withdraws from the peninsula (1945), and Korea as a single political entity no longer exists. The 38th parallel north is therefore established as the boundary between Soviet and American occupation zones, and soon the Korean War (1950) erupts as a side product of the Cold War. The ensuing Korean Armistice Agreement (1953) which aims to stop the bloodshed and hostilities ends up tearing the peninsula into two parts: the northern region has been ruled by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, while the southern section has been governed by the Republic of Korea. This official division of the Korean Peninsula breaks apart not only a nation but also thousands of family. Despite the relative peace after the wars, tensions always stay high between the two Koreas, and their national border remains the most heavily militarized frontier in the world. Interestingly, the aforementioned history of Korean Peninsula has a wildly different version in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, commonly known as North Korea. Based on the recollections of North Korean defectors, the two devastating atomic bombs never land on the territory of Japan, and let alone the bombing is the main cause of Japanese military retreat. Instead, their supreme leader, Kim Il-Sung, gallantly drives off all the Japanese invaders and ends the war (Kang and Grangereau 170); and to North Korean people, it becomes a common knowledge.

(28) Liao 21. that the outbreak of the Korean War and the division of Korean Peninsula results from the sly betrayal of South Korea (169) rather than the initial attack from North Korea. To create a perfect leadership illusion and justify Kim Il-Sung’s regime, North Korean government rewrites the country’s history at its own will, totally denying its launch of attack in Korean War and demonizing its Japanese and American enemies. The government’s harsh historical revisionism reshapes its people’s collective memories by feeding them a fairytale-like version of history, and this “fairytale” is amplified by the cult of personality surrounding Kim’s family. Hence, North Korean people deeply believe that without their “heavenly leader” Kim Il-Sung, it would be impossible to put an end to the oppression of the former Japanese rulers and become an independent country. Ironically, the truth is quite the opposite; without the Japanese invasion, it will be less likely to successfully found Kim’s image as a heroic leader and settle his regime. To North Korean citizens, Kim Il-Sung and his successors, Kim Jong-Il and Kim Jong-Un, are undoubtedly godlike figures; under the guidance of these “heavenly leaders,” North Korea is the last pure land in this corrupted world. As one of the pronounced North Korean defector, Kang Chol-Hwan, notes in his memoir, Kim Il-Sung’s demigod image has been installed into North Korean children’s minds at a very young age: To my childish eyes and to those of all my friends, Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il were perfect beings, untarnished by any base human function. I was convinced, as we all were, that neither of them urinated or defecated. Who could imagine such things of gods? In the portraits of their paternal faces I found comfort and all that was protecting, kindly, self-assured. (3) Kang’s impression toward Kims is established through his early education in the grammar school. Similar to many other North Korean defectors’ experience, there is a specific room named Kim Il-Sung Research Institute in every public school, and it is.

(29) Liao 22. built with the finest materials and remained flawlessly clean in order to honor their great leaders. In young North Korean children’s relatively happy school days, their ultimate learning goal is to memorize all the heroic feats and anecdotes of their great leaders. Noticeably, the content of elementary history classes is particularly “alterable,” young North Korean students are already accustomed to the constant revision of history facts. They are taught to accept that it is agreeable to change history if it is for the purpose of glorifying their great leaders (Lee and John 81-82). In every typical North Korean household, Kim’s colorful portrait hangs high up on the wall, silently monitoring and judging every movement of his subjects with his unblinking stare. Kim’s image is always linked to all the best and brightest things in North Korea. In a country that its scenery resembles monotonic ink wash painting, Kim is the only color comforting his people. Like George Orwell’s depiction of a futuristic dystopia in 1984 where vivid colors can only be found on the government’s propaganda posters and wall arts, North Korea has manipulated the colors for political purposes as well. For instance, red is monopolized by Workers' Party, the foundational communist party of North Korea; only official buildings can use the red paints for decoration. On the propaganda posters, Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il are always the most radiant figures; orange and yellow hues are applied around the leaders’ faces, literally making them glow like the “sun” of the country (Demick 31). As Brian Reynolds Myers concludes in his book The Cleanest Race, North Korean public artworks center on specific themes: cult of personality, fighting against foreign enemies, unquestionable devotion to the state, and the glorification of military power; these themes are all dedicated to shaping North Korean collective memories, hypnotizing the people to believe that they are truly living in a heavenly country. Remarkably, when it comes to the theme of cult of personality, the background settings and the color schemes are prone to display a hint of fantasy..

(30) Liao 23. Fig. 1. A wall painting recreates Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il overlooking the crater lake of Mount Paektu, sacred to Koreans by Yeowatzup on Flickr.. Fig.2. A detailed painting represents the ubiquitous iconography in North Korea: Kim Il-Sung carries Kim Jong-Il while his wife, Kim Jong-Suk, stands by (The title page of The Cleanest Race, picture 4).. For example, in figure 1, the wall painting portrays Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il standing close to each other and overlooking the sacred lake and accentuates not only the importance of family bond (the cleanse of bloodline and the justification of leadership heritage) but also the fantasy of immortality. To foil this fantasy, the scenery of the painting unrealistically depicts purple mountains, lush pink flowers, and the pure white pebbly ground. The sense of sacredness and eternity implied by the.

(31) Liao 24. bold color contrast states the demigod characteristic of the two leaders, and further allows North Korean people, who have been long trapped in poverty and hunger, to project their desire to live forever (or at least longer than their relatively short 70-year average life-span) onto their great leaders. While in figure 2, the scene presents Kim Il-Sung and his family leading Korean People's Army to fight against the Japanese invader in Mount Paektu, the sacred mountain and spiritual home to both North and South Koreans. Similar to figure 1, the painting portrays the surrounding with fantastical elements, such as the dissipating fog and blooming flowers on the rocky ground covered by snow. This deliberate setting implies that with the guidance and miracle of Kim’s family, North Korean people will conquer the hardship of wars, symbolized by the harsh winter and high altitude in the painting, and move toward a thriving future. This kind of paintings permeate the everyday life of North Korean (as the photographer notes, the painting of fig. 1 is located right outside the public toilet in North Korea) and serves like a window of hope for the citizens, showing them what a wonderful country and affluent life could be accomplished by following these godlike leaders. For most North Korean citizens and defectors, the values indoctrinated through these paintings and posters are deeply embedded in their memories, sustaining them with a beautiful yet dangerous fantasy to indulge. Kim’s successful cult of personality is credited to the constant using of arts of all sorts. Films, statues, paintings, short novels, and poems all aim to arouse North Korean’s nationalism and allow them to transfer the fear of omnipresent possible death. Myers specifically highlights that North Korean government’s practice of cult personality should not be confused with the simple tricks of brainwashing. Instead, it should be classified as a psychological transference that originates from North Korean’s tradition of worshiping pureness, clean race and mythology (99). This specific North Korean tradition also explains the reason why most portraits of Kim.

(32) Liao 25. Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il present them with chubby cheeks, pink lips and plump bodies. These child-like and somehow female-like body features highlight not only their absolute wealth and power but also their seemingly “innocence,” the imitated pureness of a newborn infant. To further elaborate the combination of the cult of personality and psychological transference, Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death provides a specific perspective on the immortality projects. Becker’s premise of the book is based on human civilization qua a defense mechanism against the recognition that all humans will die, and humans exist in both the physical world of objects and the symbolic world of meanings. To fight against the fear of death, human attempts to create eternal objects (or at least something they believe will last forever), including all forms of arts, religion, nations, and so on. Only through connecting to these seemingly eternal artifacts can human find and project the meanings of life; or else, lacking such an object of projection will lead to mental illness and ultimately the biggest terror of mankind – the death without finding the purpose of life (44). Hence, while admiring the propaganda arts of their great leaders, North Korean citizens experience multiple layers of immortality projects. They project their desire to live an immortal life onto arts, onto the fantastical settings of the paintings, onto the great leaders, and finally their nation, which is always described as the greatest, purest, and happiest country in the world by their officials.. II. Arduous March: The Famine of the 1990s. In Becker’s terms, besides immortality projects, the other way for humans to defend against death is to find a vital position in the universe: The real world is simply too terrible to admit; it tells man that he is a small,.

(33) Liao 26. trembling animal who will decay and die. Illusion changes all this, makes man seem important, vital to the universe, immortal in some way . . . The masses look to the leaders to give them just the untruth that they need; the leader continues the illusions that triumph over the castration complex and magnifies them into a truly heroic victory . . . In group behavior anything goes because the leader okays it— It is like being an omnipotent infant again, encouraged by the parent to indulge oneself plentifully . . . In the group each man seems an omnipotent hero who can give full vent to his appetites under the approving eye of the father. (61) In North Korean’s case, the urge to serve and obey their leaders provides them the essential position to sustain their “meaningful” lives. Furthermore, when their leaders constantly encourage them to join the military force to unite the whole Korean peninsula, North Korean people find an even greater meaning of life: to make the purest race reunite and become the core of the world at any cost, even their own lives. With the comforts of knowing they will not perish into nothingness and living a meaningful life under the caring supervision of their great leaders, North Korean people are able to tolerate poverty and famine in order to carry on the fantasy of lasting their great motherland. Throughout North Korean defectors’ memoirs, the pain of hunger and the struggle for gathering enough food to sustain their families take up most of their North Korean living experience. The country’s history is always accompanied by severe food shortage, and North Korean government takes the constant famine as an opportunity to assign its people to their “vital position.” In 2012, Kim Jong-Un tells his people that they would “not tighten their belts again and enjoy the wealth and prosperity of socialism” in his debut public speech as North Korea’s leader. By mentioning “tighten [North Korean people’s] belts,” Kim is referring to North Korea’s.

(34) Liao 27. history of poverty and famine in the 1990s in which hundreds of thousands of people starved to death. Ironically, the famine in the 1990s does not affect Kim’s reign; instead, it reinforces people’s patriotism toward the country and becomes an iconic metaphor for self-sacrifice. From 1994 to 1998, due to economic mismanagement, the loss of Soviet support, and several floods and droughts, series of economic crisis and famine occurred in North Korea altogether are metaphorically coded by the official as the “Arduous March” to provoke people’s patriotism and evoke the memory of their great leader Kim Il-Sung fighting as an anti-Japanese guerrilla commander in harsh winter in the 1940s. The Korean vocabularies of “famine” and “hunger” are specifically banned in this period, because these words imply the government’s failure to maintain a sustainable economy and agriculture. The North Korean official media even advocates that eating less is part of the citizen’s patriotic duty, and voluntarily having only two meals a day is the best way to serve their country (Demick 69). This event demonstrates North Korea’s typical campaign of telling the crowd to endure short-term hardship for the promise of greater long-term benefits. In other words, if a North Korean citizen can sacrifice his own share of food and embrace the constant hunger, he will become a hero of the country and ultimately fulfill his vital position in the universe. “Arduous March” is central to North Korean collective memory for every household has lost at least one life or more in this disaster. Most defectors spend numerous pages in retelling the euphemized tragedy in their memoirs. The pain of enduring the everlasting hunger, the shame of stealing food or selling valuables (even one’s body) to sustain one’s family, the shock of realizing their blind patriotism, and the rage of being mistreated by their own government become the significant elements to reconstruct the memories of North Korea..

(35) Liao 28. III. After the Great Escape: Defectors’ Complicated Identities. South Korean Ministry of Unification has revealed that over 27,000 North Korean defectors have entered the South to seek political asylum since 1953. Although the population of defectors may appear numerous, there are still many defectors lingering or being held in detention in countries neighboring Korean peninsula due to the fear of repatriation, not enough funds (for traveling expanse, bribing border guards, and human trafficking agency fee) or complicated diplomatic relations between North Korea and its neighbor countries. A North Korean defector has to carry many different identities to complete his journey to freedom. In 2005, to better incorporate the North Korean defectors who entered the South, South Korean government has announced the official form of address to the defectors by using the neutral terms “new settlers” or “people of new land” (새터민) instead of the derogatory term “people who fled the North” (탈북자) that usually implies their dishonest betrayal as a traitor and rebellion as a renegade. By readdressing the defectors, South Korean government attempts to blur the negative association with North Korea. However, the terms “new settlers” and “people of new land” are too ambiguous for international media, reportage and literary works to effectively reconstruct their North Korean experience; hence, the terms “residents who renounced North Korea” (북한이탈주민) and “North Korean defectors” become the mainstream. The addressing for North Korean defectors undergoes several changes and further underlines their complicated identities. They can be labeled as traitors, defectors, refugees, immigrants, social vulnerable groups, and the bottom class of South Korean society who relies on government subsidy. When a North Korean defector is deemed as a former traitor, his identity of a.

(36) Liao 29. witness to North Korean socialism is highlighted, and he becomes an important role in uniting the Korea peninsula. For example, whenever a defector (especially those who have an interesting story to tell) enters Seoul, South Korean government will call a press conference to restate their belief that the free-market economy in the South is more ideal than the North socialism, and to showcase the defector as the living proof. To some extent, this kind of press conference is more like a public interrogation rather than a hearing of testimony, since most of the journalists are skeptical to North Korean defectors’ true intention of telling their life stories. In his memoir The Aquariums of Pyongyang, Kang Chol-Hwan recounts his first press conference as a displeasingly shocking experience: [The journalists] began with typical questions about how we made it to South Korea, life in the camp, and so forth. But then they turned to the agents to inquire when and how we were found, what instructions we had been given prior to this interview, and whether we had been guaranteed freedom of speech. It was a terrible shock. […] Clearly, my address was unfavorable to the North. Clearly, our testimony about the camps and the repressiveness of the Pyongyang regime would bolster the South’s claim that it was the legitimate representative of the Korean nation. But so what? Did telling the truth necessarily mean giving to oppose the government? (223) Kang’s identity as a North Korean traitor makes him an excellent pawn in the battle between Korean nations. His testimony is widely repeated in international newspapers and interviews. He retells it so often that he “occasionally felt [he] was trading [his] experience for a story that was no longer entirely [his] own” (224). With so many complicated identities, the testimonies of North Korean defectors become more powerful than they have believed. Their testimonies are almost like a.

(37) Liao 30. double-edged sword that can be easily manipulated by the both side. For instance, in 2012, a North Korean young couple who have “double-defected” returns to Pyongyang after living six years in the South. Upon their arriving, Pyongyang regime calls a press conference to accuse South Korean government of luring them away by dint of gimmicks and manipulation; and the re-defected couple give their testimony about leading a miserable life in the South, emphasizing how North Koreans are “snubbed and disdained everywhere they went” (Herman, “Why Do People Keep ‘Re-Defecting’ To North Korea?”). Nevertheless, when a North Korean defector’s identity is underscored as a refugee, the society will sympathetically see him as a victim persecuted by the world’s most abusive dictatorship and is in urgent need of physical and mental health care. The identity of being a North Korean refugee further embodies the impassable chasm between the two Korean nations: the divergences in cultures and medical conditions. Every North Korean defector who safely enters the South will be sent to the House of Unity, commonly known as Hanawon; it is a government-run resettlement center solely designed for North Korean defectors, teaching them how to survive in the South’s ultracompetitive capitalist culture since the education in North Korea is utterly useless for life in the South. Hanawon appears to be “a well-funded, security-obsessed mental hospital”, encircled by a high fence and always watched by video cameras and armed guards (Harden 162). In the facility, defectors’ physical and mental health will be closely monitored and evaluated in order to ensure that when the refugees are released into the South Korean society, they will successfully adapt and will not cause extra troubles. In addition to mental trauma, confusion, paranoid, and technophobia, North Korean defectors also suffer from some preventable diseases that are all but nonexistent in South Korea, such as hepatitis B, tuberculosis, chronic gynecological infections and cysts (Harden 165)..

(38) Liao 31. Notably, Hanawon epitomizes the fear from both North Korean defectors and South Korean citizens. North Korean defectors are so much in fear of being rejected by the South and losing their hard-fought freedom, while South Koreans also fear their social order and capital value are tumbled by the defectors. The purpose of Hanawon is to accommodate and assimilate the untrained defectors like a detention for immigrants; it is a special facility that includes the unwanted outsiders by excluding them, limiting them to a remote hillside that is miles away from Seoul. Hanawon converts North Korean defectors’ identity from helpless refugees to potential immigrants during their three-month stay. When a defector is officially released to be an immigrant, he is expected to stand on his own two feet and lead a sustainable life by receiving “a free apartment, and eight-hundred-dollar-a-month settlement stipend for two years, and as much as eighteen thousand dollars if he stuck with job training or higher education” from the South Korean government (Harden 163). But the training from Hanawon hardly pays up for both North Korean defectors and South Korean government. To South Korea government, these special immigrants cannot create enough financial profits to compensate the spending of Hanawon and other humanitarian rescue programs, since these immigrants “often depend on the South Korean government to solve their problems, and fail to take personal responsibility for poor work habits or for showing up late on the job” (Harden 167). To find employers who will accept these North Korean newcomers, the Ministry of Unification even pays up to 1,800 USD per year if the employers risk hiring a defector (Harden 167). Sadly, to some defectors, leaving Hanawon is the beginning of another nightmare. Although they officially obtain the identity as a newly converted South Korean citizen, they will never truly fit in the South Korean society due to constant discrimination and misunderstanding. Bearing the incurable homesick and inability to adapt, the.

(39) Liao 32. unemployment rate of North Korean defectors in the South is four times the national average; their suicide rate is more than two and a half times for South Koreans (Harden 174). To the neighboring countries of North Korea like China and Thailand, North Korean defectors are nothing more than illegal immigrants who cause serious domestic financial problems. In China, hiring North Korean defectors equal to provide low wages since they hardly have any rights to make a bargain with the employers. Chinese officials are afraid that these North Korean illegal immigrants will reduce the working opportunities of local laborers. Consequently, whenever a North Korean defector is caught in China, he will be treated as an illegal immigrant and immediately repatriated. In spite of the accusation from international humanitarian rescue groups, China firmly states that the repatriation does not violate the U.N. Convention on the Status of Refugees because they label the identity of North Korean defectors as illegal immigrants, not refugees (Demick 282). The multiple identities featured by North Korean defectors foreshadow the complexity of reconstructing North Korean defection testimony. The reconstruction must be carried out in an international context due to both the high mobility of North Korean defectors and the wide broadcasting and circulation of their testimonies across the world. After introducing the common elements of North Korean collective memories which include the country’s heavy historical revisionism, Kim’s cult of personality, and the famine of the 1990s, this chapter facilitates the upcoming discussion on the representation of North Korean defectors’ traumatic memories by providing an insight into the defectors’ cultural and cognitive background..

(40) Liao 33. Chapter Two The Analysis of North Korean Defectors’ Traumatic Memories Representation. “I am evolving from being an animal,” he said. “But it is going very, very slowly. Sometimes I try to cry and laugh like other people, just to see if it feels like anything. Yet tears don’t come. Laughter doesn’t come.” -. Shin Dong-Hyuk, Escape from Camp 14 (181). In 2005, Shin Dong-Hyuk narrowly escapes from Kaechon prison camp, the most notorious North Korean Total Control Zone commonly known as Camp 14. Though the site of Camp 14 can be clearly recognized from the satellite photos internationally, North Korean government fully denies its existence. Little is known about the inhumane conditions inside the camp until Shin reveals his life stories to the world with Blaine Harden’s help in 2012. Their collaboration leads to the publication of Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West, a worldwide hit that endeavors to break the monopoly of North Korean official history. This book not only turns Shin’s traumatic life stories into a powerful testimony, but also makes Shin one of the strongest voices in the effort to raise awareness of the human rights abuse in North Korea. Even though being a free man now, Shin is still plagued by various PTSD symptoms, such as unpleasant flashbacks, nightmares, and emotional numbness. His ongoing struggle to face and rebuild the haunting past can be viewed as a slow process of recovering and attempts of breaking free from his ultimate confinement caused by traumas. By baring his North Korean gulag experiences to the world, Shin’s act of retelling his memories as a testimony links his private life to the political and judicial dimension to mobilize the human rights infrastructures, and thus renders his.