What comes to mind when you think of "North Korea"? Kim Jong-un, nuclear weapons, dictatorship, poverty... We hear these things often on the news, but they feel vague and distant.
This book is not an abstraction of North Korea, but a landscape painting that delicately depicts the scenery within it.

This book is a memoir, but at the same time, it is a letter containing the journey and sorrows of a Pyongyang citizen.
It's more brutal because it's plain.
The fierce life of a woman as a wife and mother serves as a small mirror that reflects the blind spots of the vast North Korean society that extends from Kim Il-sung to Kim Jong-un.

As a survivor, as someone who escaped, the author says it is his duty to inform the world so that a country like North Korea will never be established anywhere else on Earth, so that our children will never again have to live in such a hell.

Countless children have disappeared without a sound.
When I was in my second year of high school, Kim Young-sook, the youngest daughter of Kim Dong-gyu, a former anti-Japanese guerrilla fighter who was serving as vice president, suddenly disappeared one day.
She was a chubby, cheerful girl who loved to eat and always carried a snack in her hand.
Kim Young-sun, Kim Yu-ri, and Kim Seo-gyeong, the daughters of the deputy director of the Central Party's United Front Department who returned from Japan, were also good-natured and studious siblings who enjoyed secret power, but they disappeared overnight with their entire family.
Bang Hee-soon, 30), whose father was a naval commander and later served as Minister of Army and Maritime Affairs, also disappeared with his entire family one day during the August vacation before entering college.
Even though we were young students, we knew very well that we shouldn't try to find out why our friends had disappeared, and we shouldn't ask them.

---From "The World of Power"

My doubts about him were later resolved while living abroad with my husband.
Foreigners worked hard for a month and paid a certain amount of their monthly income to the government as taxes, and the government used those taxes to run the government and implement welfare policies for the people.
But the salary I received in North Korea was so paltry that I couldn't even buy a pound of meat.
If we've never paid our citizens a fair wage, isn't it only natural that we can't collect taxes? It's absurd to boast about being a tax-free country.
I would rather have taxes collected and a system created where the people can live properly, not a free medical treatment system or free education system that is ineffective, but a system where people can receive proper treatment and education by paying money, and a system where people can receive basic living rights in return for working hard.
I wanted to live in a system where I could receive support.

---From "Capitalist Welfare System"

The husband asked again as if to confirm.

"Are you really sure you won't regret it? Are you sure you won't say you miss your mother and want to go back?
I'm fine.
“Your parents are already gone, and your siblings have lived their entire lives at the end of their rope, so they can endure hardships, but your siblings are different.”
At that moment, the faces of my mother and brothers passed by one after another.
The thought of my entire family being kicked out to the countryside overnight because of me was suffocating.
I stood at the threshold where a moment's choice could send my loved ones to heaven or hell.
---From "Selection"

When I decided to defect, I spent all day reading about South Korea's laws related to the protection of North Korean defectors.
I looked into the enforcement decrees aimed at protecting and supporting North Korean defectors and envisioned my future situation in Korea.
Living in London, I had always seen the hardships of immigrants' lives, so I didn't have high expectations for life in Korea.
My husband and I promised to overcome the sorrows of being first-generation immigrants.
I was confident that I could overcome any hardship if I could just give my children the milk.
But the world was on our family's side in their search for freedom.
The very existence of the Republic of Korea on the Korean Peninsula was a great fortune for our family.

---From "Thankful Republic of Korea"