NEW YORK — Joseph Kim is facing a momentous decision that might be familiar to some fortunate young Americans. Should he accept Bard College’s offer of a full ride? Or a lesser scholarship from American University that would require him to come up with $40,000 a year? Maybe Columbia will still come back to him with an offer?
But Kim, a political science major preparing to transfer from a community college in Brooklyn, is not your typical American college applicant. He’s a refugee from North Korea, and, having survived a devastating famine and a perilous escape, he’s trying to make his way in a country of people who, he was once taught to believe, love nothing more than massacring Koreans.
“I am a much happier person than I was when I first came to this country,” Kim, 25, writes in his newly released memoir, “Under the Same Sky.” “But my journey to the West and my journey within the West was far stranger than I could have imagined.”
He had navigated his way through hunger, poverty and repression in the world’s last bastion of communism. Now, he is making his life in the epicenter of capitalism — New York City.
“Someone told me that if you can survive in New York City, you can survive anywhere,” he said.
Kim’s book recounts his transformation during the 1990s famine that killed at least 1 million of his compatriots, including a 5-year-old who loved rice cakes and cartoons, and a homeless teenager in a gang of “wandering swallows,” raggedy kids who stole handfuls of corn and even sewer grates to survive.
He was rounded up and held at a youth detention center. Then, facing one hardship after another upon his release, he escaped to China in 2006.
Written with author Stephan Talty, “Under the Same Sky” is one of a string of memoirs by North Korean escapees being published this summer. Hyeonseo Lee recounts her escape in “The Girl With Seven Names,” while Eunsun Kim details her journey to South Korea in “A Thousand Miles to Freedom.” Yeonmi Park, one of the most high-profile recent escapees, also has a memoir coming out in September.
Together, the books add to the drumbeat of calls for more action on human rights in North Korea, whose brutal practices were outlined in a major U.N. report last year.
They also represent an unusual contribution to outsiders’ understanding of North Korea, the most impenetrable country on the planet. While almost 28,000 escapees live in South Korea and about 175 in the United States, reliable information remains hard to come by.
