In Secret, a North Korean Writer Protests the Regime

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 9 March 2018

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Bandi is the pen name of a North Korean writer. He is believed to be a propaganda writer for the government who began to write, secretly, fiction and poems critical of the regime. (Details of his biography cannot be verified, because identifying him publically would put his life in jeopardy.) His work was smuggled out of the country in circumstances that resemble a spy novel, and has recently been published in the West. The New Yorker Radio Hour’s Mythili Rao has written about Bandi’s fiction and poetry. She spoke with the translator of the poems, a scholar of Korean culture named Heinz Insu Fenkl. Fenkl says the poems reflect a sophisticated approach that turns literary devices familiar to North Korean readers to subversive purposes. Plus, Curtis Sittenfeld talks with Joshua Rothman on why men should read romance novels.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm excited to be having a conversation with someone when they have that revelation
0:11.3	like it's making sure that maybe looking at this case it could be an interesting process
0:17.6	process. Okay.
0:19.4	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production
0:24.6	of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:27.6	Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour.
0:30.6	I'm David Remnick.
0:32.6	Recently on New Yorker.com, we published a poem from North Korea, our first.
0:36.6	It's called Blizzard by a writer identified as Bandy.
0:41.3	Bandi is the only dissident we know of writing from inside the DPRK.
0:45.3	It's an extraordinarily isolated nation, and we know almost nothing about its culture.
0:50.3	The New Yorker Radio Hours Meithily Rao has been writing about the strange circumstances behind Bandy's work.
0:57.0	So here's what we think we know about Bandy. He's believed to be a North Korean writer working as a propagandist for the state.
1:07.0	And the story goes that sometime in the 80s or 90s, he started secretly writing fiction that was critical of the state. And the story goes that sometime in the 80s or 90s, he started secretly writing
1:12.8	fiction that was critical of the regime. There was no way he was going to be able to publish that,
1:17.4	so these papers quietly accumulated hidden away somewhere. Several years ago, a relative of Bandies
1:25.4	told him she was going to defect. She was going to leave North Korea.
1:29.3	And at that point, he told her about this manuscript and asked her if she could take it with her.
1:34.3	She said that would be far too dangerous in case she was caught, but if she made it across safely, she would try to send back for it.
1:41.3	When this relative got to South Korea, she got in touch with a human rights activist
1:45.4	who had a lot of contacts along the border, and he was able to find someone who could sneak in
1:51.4	and contact Bandy, and the story goes that the manuscript was smuggled out of the country
	...

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