One of the reasons I started writing when I did, in this post-truth age of misinformation and fake news, was because I wanted to be able to tell stories that reveal uncomfortable truths, a determination that led me to Bandi. Bandi, (Korean for Firefly), is a North Korean samizdat writer still living under the Kim regime who in the 1990s wrote smuggled-out, anonymous short stories that reveal the horrors of living there. In honestly presenting everyday life and values, these stories show the culture’s madness and levels of control that western minds like mine might otherwise find hard to understand. 

City of Specters is set in Pyongyang in the run up to the National Day of Celebrations – a day when everything must go perfectly, down to smiling the right smile and walking the right walk. When we meet Han Gyeong-hee, she is the well-fed and well-respected daughter of a martyr from the glorious revolution, with an inherited prestigious job and a flat in the capital’s main square. But she also has a two-year old son who is afraid of the huge pictures of Karl Marks and Kim Yong Il that hang opposite where they live. When the square is being prepared for the big celebration, she draws an unsanctioned curtain each night to stop the baby from crying. This sets off a chain of events that lead to her and her husband being accused of passing down negative thoughts to their son, a crime punishable by immediate exile to the starving countryside. The almost casual calm with which these events are told, punctuated by flashes of humour, normalises the unconscionable so seamlessly it’s terrifying.

First published in The Accusation – Forbidden Stories from inside North Korea, Serpents Tail, 2014. Available to read online on Lit Hub