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| Chai Seh-lynn, center, is co-author with North Korean refugee Park Ji-hyun of the book, "The Hard Road Out: One Woman's Escape From North Korea." Chai is pictured here at the Freedom Speakers International office with Casey Lartigue Jr., co-author with North Korean refugee Han Song-mi of the book "Greenlight to Freedom," and FSI co-founder Lee Eun-koo. Courtesy of Casey Lartigue |
By Chai Seh-lynn
If you want to write a book and it is the two of you writing it, you have to work together a lot, share a lot. It is challenging, especially when one is from North Korea, the other from South Korea.
I met Park Ji-hyun, a North Korean refugee for the first time in 2014 in the United Kingdom when Amnesty International hired me to interview her for a documentary. I spent an entire day asking her questions and listening to her answers. As I was processing all the information, I could tell it was creating confusions in my head, picturing the sufferings in North Korea, feeling the empathy for this woman, and at the same time sensing my anti-communism education instinctively kicking in, projecting Ji-hyun growing red horns on her head.
This discomfort I experienced exists, in my opinion, suppressed and deeply rooted, in every single South Korean. If it was not for writing this book, I would have never addressed it myself. I would have just kept ignoring North Korea, as if it was a different country. Like all humans, I too like the comfort of repetition, accumulation of similar actions, as it gives me a sense of security. The encounter with Ji-hyun, however, shook it all up and that state of being out of balance made me realize it was time for me to write. Time to write about her, the human being, with all her emotions and memories. That is what people do, when they write in French. "An event is not complete unless written," said the 2022 Nobel Prize winner Annie Arnaud.
The three things that we had in common ― a Korean heritage, the fact that we were women and the fact that we were missing home ― allowed to me engage her in conversation. The writer in me wanted to give Ji-hyun the home that she had buried in the deepest part of herself, by talking about her childhood. For her, remembering was painful, difficult, almost impossible, but I knew that exercise would bring her back to life.
As for me, growing up, we never talked about North Korea at home. My friends tell me they never talk about it either. An eclipse in our life. I wrote this book as a duty of unfolding that eclipse, as if I had to redeem myself from the guilt of living with a forgotten past. Don't we exist as individuals because a country exists?
The encounter of two perspectives, two cultures, two subjectivities, two interpretations…As we know, there are always two sides to every story, and the reality is extremely more complex than it looks. Unless you meet and talk, you cannot resolve differences. You have to deconstruct yourself first, then soak yourself in the other person's skin, and only then will you be able to reconstruct yourself with a different mindset. By writing this book together, Ji-hyun and I did not achieve the big reunification, but we certainly made a "micro-reunification." A truly cathartic experience for both of us.
Chai Seh-lynn is co-author with Park Ji-hyun of the book, "The Hard Road Out: One Woman's Escape From North Korea."
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| Chai Seh-lynn is co-author with North Korean refugee Park Ji-hyun of the book, "The Hard Road Out: One Woman's Escape From North Korea." Courtesy of Casey Lartigue Jr. |
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