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Ms. Lee on Mr. Shin

Recently I wrote about the troubling case of North Korean defector Shin Dong-hyuk, who admitted to giving inaccurate accounts of his life in North Korea.

Now defector and advocate Hyeonseo Lee has written about Shin in the New York Times. With eloquence and far more personal, direct insight than I could ever provide, she’s made some of the same points I wanted to get across. Here’s the heart of it:

This unfolding saga is troubling to me and to other defectors who tell the truth about the horrors of life in the North. The furor over Mr. Shin’s confession is really a sideshow, a distraction from the larger issue: Pyongyang’s continuous abuse of human rights.

Mr. Shin has been examined by doctors who believe he was subjected to torture and child labor, given the evidence of his scars and unnaturally bowed arms. We shouldn’t lose sight of that when discussing his lies.

It’s easy to see how Mr. Shin was tempted to obscure the truth. For defectors, sometimes doing so is the only way to survive.

Beyond that, she talks about the hardships and challenges North Koreans face when they arrive in South Korea, and the need to give them with greater support, which organizations like Liberty in North Korea work to provide.

There are many reasons North Korean defectors lie, as Lee notes. But at its heart, the issue remains the North Korean regime and its human rights abuses, not the personal foibles and mistakes of some of its victims.

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The price of a chat

When Obama came to power, he made clear that he was willing to sit down and talk with the leadership of pretty much any country, including several that we have long considered enemies and threats. It’s a good principle. Conflict is expensive and talk is cheap. What harm could there be in at least keeping the lines of discussion open?

Except that talk is not always cheap. When South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun met with Kim Jong-il in 2000, the price South Korea paid for the privilege was $500 million. Further meetings have come with escalating costs. North Korea tried to get $10 billion in cash plus aid from President Lee Myung-bak in exchange for a meeting.

There’s a tendency on the South Korean left to see the conflict with North Korea as perpetuated by the South Korean right and the United States. If only the United States and South Korea would talk to North Korean leaders directly, instead of threatening them with isolation and sanctions and military might, the thinking goes, we could achieve peace on the Korean Peninsula.

This line of thinking made a certain amount of sense in the 1990s, during the Sunshine Policy era. The world’s communist regimes were either collapsing or transforming. The cold war was over. South Korea too was undergoing a profound political shift, from right-wing military dictatorship to left-wing democracy. President Kim Dae-jung was right to try a new approach to an old and serious problem.

It didn’t work.

The North Korean regime, it turned out, was pocketing the money it got from summits while continuing with unacceptable behavior, particularly its nuclear program. The regime has kept itself alive however it can, playing regional powers against each other, dealing in meth and missile parts, oppressing its citizens.

So when North Korea begins to talk about talking, we should look carefully to see whether they’re arriving hat in hand. Are they looking for a dialogue, or are they just looking for a handout? Considering how little has been gained from past talks with North Korea, neither South Korea nor the United States should buy what Pyongyang is selling. Let Pyongyang deliver some sample goods first — a constructive conversation of any sort at all, really — before South Korea spends more money on empty words.

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North Korean defectors and the truth

North Korean defector and human rights activist Shin Dong-hyuk has recanted some of his testimony. He has admitted that aspects of the story he has told and retold about his experiences of torture and imprisonment in North Korea were wrong. Much of the testimony of defector Yeonmi Park has also been called into question.

It’s easy to see telling the truth in black and white terms: you say what’s so, or else you’re lying. But memory and truth-telling are not so simple. Before you judge Shin and Park — and certainly before you decide that all North Korean defector testimony is suspect — it’s worth looking a little more deeply into how we tell our own stories and what it means to tell the truth.

Learning to tell the truth

We assume that our concept of the truth is universal and inborn. It’s not. As Americans, we learn from a young age the importance of telling the truth, even if it’s a truth no one wants to hear or that might have negative consequences for us. That’s what the story of George Washington and the cherry tree is about. We also spend decades in school learning critical thinking skills, embedding us in a particular theory of truth where things are considered more true when we footnote our sources, read closely, show our work in math class.

North Koreans have none of that. Suki Kim has written about the difficulty of assigning her North Korean students to write essays: “Writing inevitably consisted of an endless repetition of [Kim Jong Il’s] achievements, none of which was ever verified, since they lacked the concept of backing up a claim with evidence.” She is speaking here of the intellectual elite among North Koreans. Someone like Shin Dong-hyuk, raised in North Korean prison camps, would have even less capacity for critical thinking, for sorting fact from fiction.

We also tend to imagine as universal our ideas that the truth is something independent and separate from us, and that there is moral value in knowing and admitting that independent truth, regardless of the consequences. North Koreans are raised in a culture where speaking or even knowing certain truths is dangerous.

But no one ever tells North Koreans, “Do not speak the following truths or facts.” Instead, the very concept of what is true is altered: what is true is what can be spoken, and what can be spoken is what is true. North Koreans are not trained to consider sources, whether their own empirical experience or otherwise. What’s true is what everyone says is true. That doesn’t mean truth is static or that new truths can’t ever emerge — even truths that go against the government line — but rather that truth value is increased by perceived consensus and undermined by the sense that no one else is saying the same thing.

Memory and politics

Now imagine North Koreans arriving in South Korea. They spend an initial period in isolation, being debriefed by intelligence officers (incidentally, in what one defector described as the most luxurious accommodations she’d ever experienced). They are being asked by officials in their new homeland to recall details from years or decades earlier, from their childhoods. They have no access to maps, to Wikipedia, to family photos. They can’t ask their parents what really happened. They are being asked to reconstruct everything, but memory is notoriously slippery. Events move out of order, they shift and change. (This happens to Westerners too: in my research on Korean shamanism, my main informant has had to modify her story several times, and there are certain incidents that other informants remember differently.)

Then these defectors enter South Korean society, where the political spectrum offers two main ways of thinking about North Korea. The left — still traumatized by the old right-wing dictatorship’s habit of calling every democracy protestor a North Korean spy — sees North Korea as unfairly maligned and threatened. They believe that South Korean and American militarism and provocation perpetuate the status quo on the peninsula, keeping the right in power and keeping North Korea defensive and isolated. They imagine that unilateral moves by South Korea, and especially the removal of US troops, would bring about a substantive shift in North Korea. The right sees North Korea as an unreliable negotiating partner and an ongoing military threat. They see North Korea as exacerbating tensions to manipulate the surrounding powers and perpetuate their regime, and they see the left as hopelessly naive. They also see North Korean defectors as suspect, potentially spies sent by the North Koreans to cause problems in the south.

Most North Korean defectors choose to live quietly, without engaging in political action. But for those who feel compelled to do something about the homeland and people they left behind, they must find their way within these competing narratives. The right is far more receptive to defectors than the left, and the right rewards stories that show how bad the North Korean regime is. Internationally too, stories of suffering and deprivation are good capital. They’re what we want to hear about North Korea.

But there’s more to it than that. North Korean defectors are trying to piece together coherent narratives from fragments of memory. When they arrive in the free world, they are bombarded with information they could never have accessed: satellite images of places they had mapped differently in their minds, Wikipedia entries that clarify the dates of events they remember in different order, competing accounts from other defectors that call into question particular memories. Defectors’ stories change because they are struggling to understand what is actually true and how to express it. Yeonmi Park, for example, has responded to criticisms of her changing accounts:

Much of the time, there was miscommunication because of a language barrier. I have only learned English in the last year or so, and I’m trying hard to improve every day to be a better advocate for my people. I apologize for any misunderstandings. For example, I never said that I saw executions in Hyesan. My friends’ mother was executed in a small city in central North Korea where my mother still has relatives (which is why I don’t want to name it) … Also, I apologize that there have been times when my childhood memories were not perfect, like how long my father was sentenced to prison. Now I am checking with my mom and others to correct everything.

What’s told and what’s true

So does all this mean that we can’t believe North Korean defectors?

No. What it means is that we should be careful not to take any one personal narrative as the solid, documented, verified truth. Each defector is a human being. Some human beings are more honest than others, some have better memories. Some, like Shin Dong-hyuk, keep secrets.

We should also be careful not to trust critiques too quickly. The Diplomat got a number of its facts wrong in trying to show that Yeonmi Park got her facts wrong. Nor are defectors the only ones with political agendas. Soft-pedaling North Korea’s human rights record — saying it’s not as bad as has been reported, holding up the human rights shortcomings of other nations in comparison — serves particular agendas.

What we can trust is the weight of testimony from hundreds or thousands of defectors. For example, the UN report on North Korean human rights violations relied on the testimony of 80 witnesses. When defector after defector describes the harrowing conditions of detention and torture in similar terms, it becomes less important whether this one was tortured at age 13 or age 20, whether that one saw an execution in one town or another.

What matters is that defector after defector talks about fear, imprisonment, starvation, beatings, executions. These are not fantasies, and they’re not a grand plot by South Korea’s intelligence services, and they’re not a trick of the American military-industrial complex to keep Northeast Asia in a state of war. We can see satellite images of prison camps. We can see the scars on Shin Dong-hyuk’s body.

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Where are the ones who condemn?

This is a question that one hears after atrocities: where are the people of the same group — Muslims or blacks, usually — who condemn the ugly acts of violence perpetrated in their name? I hear this complaint often from supporters of Israel. They are making the case that terrorists who fire rockets into Israel or stab people in synagogues are representatives of the true will of the great mass of Muslims and Arabs. If that’s not true, then where are the Arab and Muslim condemnations of such violence?

The answer is that they are in the places you would expect them to be: the Arab and Muslim press, in the languages spoken by the communities involved. Or they’re easily accessible in the English-language Arab press, where an Arab Muslim cartoonist had this to say about the Charlie Hebdo attack:

I condemn the attacks on the cartoonists even though I don’t agree with the publication’s editorial slant, which I have often found to be hurtful and racist. Nevertheless, I would continue to stand for their freedom of speech.

Which is pretty much what I think too.

This time, the condemnations are easy to see because they’re in cartoon form. Here’s a whole set of Arabic cartoons condemning the attacks. Take a look and remember that there are Arabs and Muslims who are as disgusted and disappointed by murder in the name of Islam as you are, or maybe more so.

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Learning enough to understand sorrow

When I first went to Korea, in 2001, I knew next to nothing about it, and I didn’t speak the language at all. I’d given myself a crash course in the hangeul alphabet and knew a few basic phrases, and that was it. I was in those days too intimidated by the language to give it serious study, but I couldn’t help picking up words and phrases as I went along.

One word I heard constantly was 어떻게 (eotteoke). One day I asked one of the Korean teachers what it meant. Literally, she explained, it means “how,” but it’s much more than that. Koreans use the word kind of the way American English uses “what,” as an exclamation, a complaint, a rebuke, an expression of bafflement.

Early the next morning, I stepped out onto my little street of Pambat-gil (which I did not know until after I left Korea meant “Chestnut Grove Street”). Off in the distance was an ajumma. She stood in the middle of the street, arms spread wide. I could see that she was gripping a cell phone in one of her uplifted hands. And she was crying out, in the most mournful tone, with the final vowel long drawn out, “Eotteoke! Eotteoke!”

I felt a giddy sense of elation: I understood! Something was happening in Korea, and I got it. What I got, though, was that this poor woman was howling out her shock and sorrow in the middle of the street at 8 am. Whatever news had come through that cell phone, it wasn’t good.

I was reminded of that dissonance — of the thrill of understanding tempered by the sorrow of what’s understood — as I read a long Facebook post in Korean today. Usually I let those pass by unread. They’re still difficult. But I’d just yesterday finished reading the classic Korean short story 사랑방 손님과 어머니 (Mother and Her Guest), and I thought maybe I could manage the five paragraphs my friend had written.

I’m glad I did. I learned that my friend’s grandmother had passed away, an important event that I otherwise would have missed. She wrote beautifully about the way her grandmother had been a teacher to her, how at a difficult time in her life her grandmother had taken her in and taught her how to make dolls’ clothes, how the family sat together sharing memories and how each person’s memories were different, but they were all warm memories.

I’m sorry that my friend has lost a dear family member, but I’m also thrilled that — with much help from an online dictionary — I could share in my friend’s memories of her beloved grandmother, her sense of loss and sorrow. I’m pleased that words I learned from reading Mother and Her Guest helped me to understand what my friend had written. I am also grateful that I know enough Korean now to find out about my friend’s loss and express my condolences.

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The pleasures of transit

I’ve been meditating for the past month, using Headspace (I get it discounted as a Google employee benefit). It’s a series of guided mindfulness meditations hosted by Andy Puddicombe, who sounds like the GEICO Gecko. Each day, the GEICO Gecko tells me to take some deep breaths, leads me through a body scan, reminds me to let thoughts come and go. There are times when I want to do it and times when I very much don’t. But has it been having any effect?

There are few better tests of mindfulness and patience than transit. Yesterday I flew from JFK in New York to Phoenix, on an oversold flight the Saturday before Christmas. I thought of Radiohead:

Transport
Motorways and tramlines
Starting and then stopping
Taking off and landing
The emptiest of feelings

As they announced a last-minute gate change, sending the mass of passengers scurrying across the terminal, I felt the pull of that kind of numb irritation. But I made a choice to approach the experience differently. At that second gate, as an entire planeload of people mobbed the counter, I went to look out the window at the ground crew attaching the terminal ramp to the plane, balancing on a high platform to open the plane door and roll in the food carts, putting down and taking up chocks. I noticed the hashes on the ground for where different models of planes should pull in: 747, 777, Airbus 380, 767, 757. Inside the terminal, a sparrow was darting from window to window. A mother brought her toddler to the window and tried to point out the bird to him, but he was mesmerized by the big metal birds outside.

Getting on the plane, I stood beside the woman who was furious about being in Zone 3 and kept telling the counter staff, with tight-lipped determination, that “overhead space is my biggest concern right now,” as if no one else had luggage and the airline had never had to deal with a situation like hers before. Two different families on the ramp were dealing with crowds of children whose seats were somehow not adjacent to their parents’. On board, the young man next to me was coughing up a lung, and his father in the aisle had an argument with the flight attendant over his already-tagged bag that was supposed to be checked. The cabin was so cold that I kept on my hat and gloves. The pilot announced that our JFK ground time was estimated at 50 minutes.

There was every reason to be sour and annoyed, but somehow I wasn’t. I looked out the window. You could see Manhattan in the distance, the new World Trade Center tower, and the planes taking off in front of us were silhouetted against it. It was beautiful. In the air, I ate my overpriced terminal sandwich, put a travel mix on my headphones and took a nap. I woke up, meditated with Headspace. I tried watching Frozen, but it was terrible, so I turned it off. I looked out the window. By then we were over western Nebraska. There was a stripe of snow, maybe 50 miles wide and hundreds of miles long, across an otherwise undifferentiated flatness of squares and circles, as if a line of clouds had gotten exactly that far and said, “I think I’m gonna go right here.” I thought about how strange it is that I know Seoul and Beijing and Kathmandu better than I’m likely ever to know that farmland, that the chances of finding me in Omaha are far less than the chances of finding me in Phnom Penh or Vientiane. Then the farmland gave way to the layer cake buttes and canyons and the snowy mountains of New Mexico, and after a while that landscape changed into badlands where the icy rivers splayed out like white fractals, and then the land stepped down into the Arizona desert. It was beautiful. I took out my laptop and wrote about it, and I noticed that when I’ve meditated and been sober — the one other time I kept it up was when I lived in Korea — I’ve written more and more freely. I almost didn’t want the flight to end. Almost.

*

There are two related thoughts that transit evokes: that nowhere is anywhere, and that everywhere is everywhere else.

The first thought is the numbness that comes over us, the feeling that we’re in non-space, non-time. It’s easy to feel like a dead thing when you’re in the TSA line. (As Talking Heads put it, “I’m tired of looking out the windows of the airplane / I’m tired of traveling, I want to be somewhere.”)

The second thought is the unnerving feeling that planes and technology are shrinking the world, that there is no escape, that wherever you go will be the same as wherever you left. This illusion is brought on by the weird sameness of airports, airplanes, transit lounges, duty free shops, chain hotels. But these places need to be legible and at least minimally palatable to travelers from everywhere, and they need to be interoperable with planes coming in from wherever. Airports aren’t the world. The world is still out there in all its everyday strangeness. Omaha retains its mystery, if you’re open to that.

But contra Talking Heads, nowhere is nowhere, and everywhere is somewhere — even airplane cabins and duty free shops. We’re always in transit: through time, through space. We’re always between things. Something is always ending, something has always not yet begun. But we are always somewhere. And I’m finding, for myself, that the simple practice of noticing where I am makes being there less frustrating, more interesting, more worthwhile. It’s counterintuitive, but when I stop resisting the irritations, stop forcing them away, they lose much of their power. Even at the airport.

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7 thoughts about The Interview

People know I’m into Korean things, so they’re asking me what I think about The Interview, the hacking of Sony Pictures Entertainment, and the subsequent pulling of the film from theaters.

1. The quality of the film is irrelevant

This point seems to confuse a lot of people, who are busy debating whether the film is The Great Dictator. As part of that debate, some are pointing out that The Interview is “a bad film.” This is kind of unfair considering that no one has seen it. But more importantly, it’s utterly irrelevant. So what if it’s terrible? Sony didn’t get hacked because the movie was good or bad, and the movie didn’t get pulled from theaters based on its quality. In geopolitical and ethical terms, the quality of the movie is a non-issue.

2. It’s OK to make a movie about assassinating a sitting head of state

It might or might not be in poor taste, depending on your taste. But it’s not wrong. Hollywood produces and distributes movies on every conceivable topic, glorifying all kinds of horrific violence, depicting the destruction of the United States, and on and on. One of the great classics of American cinema is about our own government plotting to bring about global nuclear armageddon. The Interview might be a lot of things, but incitement it is not, and it falls easily into the realm of speech that’s protected.

3. It’s OK to make fun of North Korea

Again, you might or might not find it to be in poor taste. But it’s OK to make a movie that makes fun of Hitler (cf. The Great Dictator, The Producers) or a comedy set in the Holocaust (Life Is Beautiful), or even a film that makes fun of a Kim who rules North Korea (Team America). The Atlantic gets it completely wrong in saying that North Korea isn’t funny. North Korea is hilarious, as dictatorships usually are, and one of the best weapons against them is humor.

North Korea’s leaders have been the butt of jokes on SNL, 30 Rock, in Team America, and elsewhere because they’re self-important buffoons. They should be lampooned. Dictators everywhere should be lampooned. Democratic leaders should also be lampooned. Making fun of the people in charge is important work.

4. Seth Rogen and James Franco are acting courageously

And as for that Atlantic article insisting that the film is “not an act of courage” like The Great Dictator because Hitler was at the height of his powers and North Korea is weak? Declaring that “it takes no valor and costs precious little to joke about these things safely oceans away from North Korea’s reach”? Well, it appears that North Korea has been able to hit Seth Rogen and his backers harder than Hitler ever hit Charlie Chaplin and his backers. North Korea has been known to assassinate people it doesn’t like, and quite famously kidnapped and enslaved a couple of South Korean movie people when they were in Hong Kong.

No, North Korea appears not to have gone after Trey Parker or Margaret Cho. But they might have. And they have gone after Rogen and Franco.

5. Sony and the film distributors aren’t cowards

Sony Pictures got hit really hard. Nobody died, so this isn’t the sort of thing where we ought to respond with missile strikes. But their business was paralyzed. And Sony Pictures is a business. And businesses are not moral human beings who take a stand. There is no Martin Luther King, Jr., Inc. Businesses are risk-averse organizations with a profit motive. None of these companies want to risk their holiday-season profits, and none of them want to risk being involved in the actual violence that’s been threatened.

Nor does Sony Pictures have the sense that the US government has their back. This form of cyberterrorism is new, and the US doesn’t know what to do about it exactly. We can’t call in the National Guard and ground all the planes. Sony Pictures is kind of on its own right now, and that’s not a comfortable place to be. I don’t blame them for not wanting to go to war with North Korea over Christmas.

6. We still don’t know whether it really was North Korea

Don’t forget that. These sort of attacks are hard to pin down. It might be a disgruntled former employee. We just don’t know.

7. Isolating North Korea’s economy is not the answer

The other bit of important news this week — way more important than this whole Interview situation — is America’s at-long-last opening with Cuba. We’ve been maintaining a policy of isolation for decades, and it has failed to topple the government of Cuba, resolve human rights issues there, or really serve our interests in any useful way.

So what do we want to do in response to North Korea’s hack attack? Cut off their dollars.

Corporations, as I said, are risk-averse. They don’t like wars or conflicts because they’re hard to predict in quarterly estimates. North Korea is free to be belligerent because it doesn’t have influential corporations. But there is business in North Korea, much of it controlled by the military. Rather than further isolating and limiting that business, it might make more sense to engage with it, embedding it in the global system that makes war unthinkable between any two major economic powers. If North Korean leadership had something significant to lose beyond their own borders, they might be more hesitant to threaten and attack. The way that happens most effectively in today’s world is through international trade.

North Korea doesn’t make that easy, but it may be the best bet for creating a class of influencers in North Korea who have an ownership stake in something significant and who will press within the system for a more moderate approach to the outside world.

Update: President Obama has now confirmed that North Korea is behind the hacking and said that he thinks Sony Pictures made a mistake in pulling the release of The Interview, though he is sympathetic. Sony Pictures responded, putting the blame on the theater distributors and claiming that they are still looking into ways to release the movie.