This Is Paradise!

If we were given a chance to pick paradise on Earth, which country would you choose? The US? UK? Switzerland? Belgium? Canada? Or would you choose North Korea? Yeah, the paradise that this book refers to is North Korea. Paradise being living in a country where you dig up food from rat holes and paradise being that your school life consists of memorizing verses in praise of the country's self-styled demon leaders.

Home to the world's most brutally closed regime, North Korea is a country teetering on the brink of disaster. I didn't know much of North Korea till I read the book. And what I came to know shocked me. Horrified me. Nauseated me. Sickened me to the core.

This Is Paradise! is written by Hyok Kang - a kid at best who has lived more lifetimes than you or I. Born in a small village called Onsong, he fled along with his family to China in 1998. He tells in stark clear language about the famine that struck North Korea in 1997 and continues to ravage large parts of the country even now, about the ruthlessly restricted life he and his family had to live in North Korea and a insightful glimpse into the workings of the secretive North Korean government led by Kim Jong-Il, son of the late Kim-il Sung.

Not everyone may have the stomach to read this book. One of the more disturbing accounts is about a man who kills his eight-year-old daughter when she begs for food and then driven by hunger slices her flesh for a gruesome feast. As book reviewer Jim Murphy says on Bookbag:

This Is Paradise! is an important book on so many levels. It is an insight into a world about which we have precious little information. It is the testimony of a boy living under a totalitarian regime. The very fact that he is testifying leaves us with a duty to read, to know, to pass on. And the closing pages in which Hyok Kang talks about the difficulties facing refugees, particularly those who have escaped conflict and abuse, are reminders to us all about the way in which human beings can suffer and continue to suffer...

Excerpt from the book:

In 1994, shortly before the death of Kim Il-sung, the Great Leader, the state food distribution system began to break down. Eventually, there was no more rice, no more potatoes. We moved on to vile food substitutes. Weeds, of whatever kind, were boiled up and swallowed in the form of soup. We picked these inedible leaves on the edges of the fields or the banks of the river. The soup was so bitter that we could barely keep it down. Our neighbours collected grass and tree bark — usually pine, or various shrubs. They grated the bark and boiled it up before eating it. And much good it did them: their faces swelled from day to day until they finally perished.

You can read more here on FrontPage. But you really should do better than that - read the entire 176 pages, and read what Hyok Kang has to say here on a Human Rights website.