Suja, hearing the news of his miraculous breakout at her father’s newspaper office, determines to find him. On a school break, Jin steals cornmeal for his starving family-a treasonable offense-and is condemned to a prison camp, from which he escapes. Suja, a young North Korean girl whose father works for the government newspaper and gets her a photography internship there, has become enamored of Jin, a country boy from the impoverished town of Yangdook whom she met at Kim Il-sung University. Shin’s suspenseful debut sets an adventurous love story against the backdrop of North Korea’s authoritarian government during the last years of Kim Jong-il’s reign. As a result, ignorance of not just the world, but of their own society is the rule for the North Korean people. For to anger the Dear Leader is basically to sign one’s death warrant. Television, newspapers, films all have to toe the Party’s line and spread only positive news, heavily larded with extravagant praise for their Dear Leader, lest they incur his wrath.
News from the outside is nonexistent, and domestic bad news is stifled. There are no independent media in North Korea.
Occasionally news will leak about the famines and the sorry state of the North Korean economy, but mostly we hear only about Kim Jong-Un and his sabre-rattling, despotism, and murderous treatment of any who challenge him. The outside world knows little about these people. Ann Shin’s affecting debut novel, The Last Exiles, is an attempt to pull back the curtain on the lives of ordinary North Koreans and reveal their constant struggle to create an existence that is somewhere close to human.
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