A Firefly in the Dark of North Korea
The words children sing at school don’t normally make headlines, but flashes of the mundane in North Korea can be newsworthy. I found this out a few years ago when I came across a news story about a well-known tune that had been given an irreverent twist in North Korea.
The Daily NK, an online media outlet with sources in North Korea, reported that at a rural school a subversive take on the children’s song “Three Bears” had been found. The normal lyrics to the giddy tune tell the story of a happy family, with short verses dedicated to dad, mom and baby, describing each bear with an adjective. Dad is portly, mom is slender and their baby is oh so cute.
In the altered version reportedly found at the school, the family members are switched out with the names of the three members of North Korea’s hereditary succession, founding leader Kim Il Sung, his son Kim Jong Il, then grandson and current leader Kim Jong Un, calling them greedy or dimwitted. Daily NK translated the lyrics as, ““Three bears in a house, pocketing everything; grandpa bear, papa bear and baby bear. Grandpa Bear is fat, Papa Bear is fat, too, and Baby Bear is a doofus.”
The song was to me a heartening reminder that the North Korean regime hasn’t managed to eradicate its subjects’ senses of humor and irony. North Koreans are brought up to view their leaders as gods, constantly fed with myths about the Kim family’s majesty. Without access to internet, print or broadcast media, North Koreans have little opportunity to check the veracity of these claims for themselves. Nevertheless, not everyone is convinced by the state narrative. It sounds like harmless fun, but in North Korea lambasting the country’s ruling dynasty is treated as something between crime and blasphemy and can get one banished to a prison camp.
I thought of that case when I learned recently about a set of short stories smuggled out of North Korea. The Guardian reported that a collection of stories by a pseudonymous author known as Bandi (meaning “firefly”) had been smuggled out of North Korea. The stories were published in South Korea in 2014 and are now drawing interest in the west.
For all the ink that gets spilled analyzing the North Korean government’s every move, we still know little about what life there is actually like, and what regular North Koreans think of their rulers. Bandi is therefore notable for being a writer that still lives in North Korea and can conjure the aroma of the place, as well as some indication of how the overbearing state sits in its subjects’ psyches.
The Guardian reported that publishers all over the world are seeking the rights to translations. There is therefore hope that Bandi could be to North Korea was Solzhenitsyn was to the USSR, a writer who draws global attention with unadorned accounts of everyday life under dictatorship.
Most accounts of North Korea come from escapees who have long since left the country. Most of them are similar. Adapted or written specifically for Western audiences, they are memoirs of triumph over hardship, of dogged, risky efforts to escape dictatorship and find freedom. Since Bandi’s work is fiction, it won’t face the questions over factual accuracy that some defector memoirs have been subject to.
Bandi’s stories, which have already been published in South Korea, are set during the 1990s that ravaged North Korea, killing thousands. That is somewhat disappointing, as more recent stories about the turn to small-scale free markets North Korean society has taken since the famine-era collapse of the state distribution system would contribute more to the outside world’s understanding.
Some in literary circles have happily described Bandi as a reminder of the inextinguishable human spirit, as the sarcastic three bears lyrics were for me years ago. Kim Jong Un’s dictatorial control hasn’t crushed the creative impulse in North Korea, that even without free access to literature, there are writers carrying out true explorations of their society on the page.
Thought I haven’t yet read Bandi’s work, I feel comfortable calling it a triumph, even if his book doesn’t sell or isn’t much fun to read. Bandi may shine fragments of light on all those North Korean lives suffering under dictatorship, but no single firefly is enough to illuminate the darkness that shrouds North Korea.
*Steven Borowiec covers North and South Korea for the Los Angeles Times.