A River in Darkness

Asia is not usually high on my list of interests.  I have always wanted to visit Japan (likely linked to my dad’s serving as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints there) and I’ve always wanted to visit the famous sights in China.  I once had the opportunity to visit Bangkok, and while I enjoyed it, it was very different from anything I had ever experienced before.  I don’t know a lot about the region in general, but have never been a big fan of North Korea.  Once European Communism fell in the late ’80s and early ’90s, places like Cuba and North Korea have seemed like time warps, holding out unnecessarily while continuing to oppress people.  When people make the decision to try to leave those places, I always find it to be one I can sympathize with.

A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea by Masaji Ishikawa (ISBN: 978-1-5420-4719-7) is just such a tale, although it does have an interesting twist.  The author was not born in North Korea; in fact, he was born in Japan and was ethnically half Japanese.  His dad, who was not native to Japan, moved his family to North Korea under pressure from ethnic compatriots and the pressure of being an ethnic minority in re-building, post-war Japan, where such minorities weren’t always welcome.  The promises of the Communist utopia were very quickly discovered to be a total sham by the author and his family.  However, there was no real opportunity to get out.  The author's family had nothing to offer the Communist Party, so they lived as peasants, eventually finding that living under the radar of the authorities was easier than trying to conform to the system in North Korea.  Eventually, Ishikawa tires of the poverty, starvation, racism, hypocritical inequality, and lack of freedom.  He heads toward the border with China, fearful, but determined to make a break for it since, although that would mean an uncertain future, it was better than the future he could easily predict inside North Korea.  He made it to China, eventually linking up with the Japanese embassy there, which, with great difficulty, helped exfiltrate him to Japan.  Once back, Japan had jumped forward forty or so years, while North Korea had steadily gone backward.  Ishikawa struggled to adjust and felt abandoned by Japan.

The book was interesting, but disheartening.  Ishikawa's childhood is not an easy one, with alcohol abuse and physical abuse having large roles.  The move to North Korea is understandable only from his father's point of view.  Once there, even his father grows disillusioned with their new country, but like so many people in totalitarian, socialist regimes, he never felt empowered or free enough to do anything about his situation.  North Korea is bleak from the family's arrival to the very last page of the book.  The descriptions of life there are simple, yet vivid and powerful.  Readers are drawn in to the dark, gloomy, depressing lives of the underclass in North Korea.  In a way, it like reading Dostoevsky, but it was real.  The story of the escape was a breath of fresh air and involved some risks, risk-takers, and genuinely good people.  Movement between Japanese diplomatic facilities and the flight to Japan have a spy story quality to them.  Ishikawa's return to Japan and struggle to fit in again returns the reader to the more depressing side of the book.  What is clear by the end of the book is that North Korea is an anachronism and deserved its place on George Bush's “axis of evil.”  The book, like other, similar memoirs, serves as a warning against the lack of freedoms engendered by socialist governments everywhere and the positive, although imperfect, results of the free market and capitalism.

This work, including all text, photographs, and other original work, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 License and is copyrighted © MMXIV John Pruess.

Putin Country

As a missionary, I spent a good chunk of time, about five months, if I remember correctly, in a suburb of St. Petersburg, Russia, called Kolpino.  When originally transferred there, I wasn’t sure what to think.  I came to enjoy my time there, especially as I got to know some of the people who lived there.  Kolpino was and remains a factory town, though.  The vast majority of the people we ran into on the streets were so-called “real Russians,” just like lower middle-class Americans who have to work hard to provide for their families are often referred to as the “real America.”  It was often a struggle to understand the slang-filled language of the common man, but I enjoyed the challenge and I enjoyed running into such a wide variety of people, from pensioners to basketball-mad teenagers and from Muslims of Central Asian descent to Orthodox priests.  St. Petersburg and Moscow are highly westernized and with their slick, polished images, are often far removed from the Russia that surrounds them, often less than an hour’s drive away.

Putin Country: A Journey into the Real Russia by Anne Garrels (ISBN: 978-1-250-11811-0) provides a glimpse into Russia outside Moscow’s Ring Road and away from St. Petersburg’s glittering canals.  Garrels, who was a journalist in the Soviet Union, returned to Russia and decided to spend time in Chelyabinsk, also an industrial city, but one famous for being part of the Soviet military-industrial complex.  Like a lot of Russia, life here was extremely turbulent during the 1990s, right after the fall of Communism, and many people were happy to see some stability come to their lives and their country when Vladimir Putin came to power.  Since then, life has gone on, and, as tends to happen, different people’s lives have taken them different places.  The author delivers a number of short sketches of these different lives.  There are taxi drivers, working moms, doctors, activists, journalists, people fighting for the rights of disabled people, environmentalists, farmers, and entrepreneurs.  Not many sections of society are left untouched.  With all of her friends and contacts, Garrels eventually gets to the political questions Westerners wonder about.  In many cases, the Russians she talks to are either on board with Putin or at least accepting of the way things are going.  In the rarer cases when the people she talks to don’t like the way things are trending in Russia, the option isn’t to fight the good fight at home and change things through activism and electing the right people; the alternative to satisfaction with the status quo is to emigrate.  Garrels chronicles the hopelessness that many people feel, regardless of their political opinions, because they feel that Putin’s reign is a machine that cannot be altered.

I thought the literary portraits presented were great reading and reminded me a lot of Kolpino.  While anecdotal in nature, and not strictly scientific (in as much as social science can be called scientific), they seemed accurate and presented a faithful outline of the present general mentality in Russia.  I was not at all surprised to read about patriotic Russians who want the best for their country.  How to get there is what’s up for debate.  As long as the current system is in place, independent of personalities, things will probably only progress at an incredibly slow rate.  Corruption and cronyism, problems that are increasingly present in the West, make it hard for democracy, freedom, and economic prosperity to thrive.  Still, there was a lesson that is applicable to everyone and something worth taking into consideration when one weighs the policies one wants to support.  The lesson, I thought, was that, a lot of times, life is simply what we make of it.  The chapter that dealt with people fighting for a better life for their children with disabilities was poignant, but was also heavily marked by a fighting spirit of individualism.  One couple had worked hard, putting in the blood, sweat, and tears necessary to build a center for disabled kids and that provided various resources for parents dealing with the same things they dealt with.  They had built a successful operation, often in the face of formal and informal opposition.  Other parents involved in getting the project off the ground had similarly sacrificed.  The second and third generation of parents coming to the center had to be educated as to the commitments necessary both to improve their own situations and to continue the communal benefits.  It was slow work, but progress was evident.  Even in the face of great trials and an oppressive government, individuals find the best way to solve their problems.

This work, including all text, photographs, and other original work, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 License and is copyrighted © MMXIV John Pruess.