Thinking about North Korea

Months ago, I saw an interview with Mike Kim on The Daily Show. A Korean American, Kim left a financial planning business to move to the Chinese-Korean border and assist in the undercover work of helping North Koreans flee their homeland. Since that time he founded the organization Crossing Borders to provide them with further assistance.

Kim has written a book, Escaping North Korea: Defiance and Hope in the World's Most Repressive Country. Based primarily on his conversations with the refugees and those who work to help them, Kim paints a picture of what life is like inside North Korea today. He shares stories of what refugees must risk and undergo in order to attempt an escape, as well as some of his own harrowing experiences trying to help them.

As a Christian, Kim additionally describes the dangerous work of the house churches in China trying to provide an "underground railroad" system for North Koreans who successfully cross the border.

While it's not the best edited book of all time, and not a scholarly treatment of the subject matter (which might not interest you anyway), if you think of the book as a compilation of his own experiences and those of the many others he encountered in his work, it's fascinating.

The first half of this book is pretty bleak--a picture of poverty, starvation, oppression, exploitation of women and children, among other things. But in the second half, Kim focuses on reasons for hope--those working to help the refugees, reasons to think the North Korean regime's stranglehold on its people might be slipping. It was at times a difficult book to consider, but worth knowing as a Christian what some of our brothers and sisters are facing on the other side of the world.