Somewhere Inside

I thought my obsession with North Korea was over, but on her last day there, after touring the DMZ, my daughter Jenna recommended this book. The book’s subtitle is “One Sister’s Captivity in North Korea and the Other’s Fight to Bring Her Home.” The girls are of Chinese heritage, but are Americans. This is a totally nonfiction work about an event that occurred only two years ago, from March to August in 2010. Laura Ling, the younger of the two sisters, a journalist and correspondent, was trying to do a documentary on people who were escaping from North Vietnam into China. Essentially, this is a timely follow-up to “Nothing to Envy,” which was the best book I read in 2011, also a nonfiction work about people who escaped from the most isolated country on our planet. Laura and another woman, Euna Lee, her coproducer and translator, as well as a cameraman and a guide, we all on the China side of the Tumen River, the border between North Korea and China. Surprisingly, the border is relatively unguarded. The crew hoped to get pictures of and an interview with someone who was newly escaping across the river. Of course, in March, it is bitterly cold in that part of the world, so the river was mostly frozen over. Laura made the fateful decision to follow her guide across the river, just for a moment, just so they could set foot in the country and then hurry back. But, their presence was immediately detected by the North Koreans who chased them back across the river into China, beat them, and hauled them back into their country. That began 140 days of captivity, and the Ling women (Lisa continues to have a distinguished career as a news correspondent) wrote their story just as the subtitle suggests. Can you imagine? They had to call on none other than Bill Clinton to fly to Korea to get them out since Kim Sung Il would accept no other envoy. This is a very well, can’t-put-it-down book which I read in less than a 24-hour period. There was real life terror, real life-threatening events, all cast in the light of trying to figure out what “Dearest Leader” wanted in order to release the women. This book is, to use an intentional pun, captivating.