More stories from Best Korea

Want to know more about North Best Korea?
Here's some recommendations to some real world events and memoirs by the people who lived there.

What's this?

Nope, not a guide on how to get each of the 4 endings for the VN.
Not one of those joke guides on Steam, either.

Just something for you to read if you have spare time and interest.

Overview map

General

Its easier if you read this Wikipedia link on defectors first.[en.wikipedia.org]

Most of the guide below pertains to some non-fiction works.

A Kim Jong-Il Production

Amazon link if you want to find the book[www.amazon.com]

The kidnapped movie directors mentioned in this VN is a reference to this.

Synopsis on Amazon

The Extraordinary True Story of Kim Jong-Il’s kidnapping of the golden couple of South Korean Cinema, The Movies They Were Forced to Make, and Their Daring Escape.

Before becoming the world’s most notorious dictator, Kim Jong-Il ran North Korea’s Ministry for Propaganda and all its film studios. Underwhelmed by the pool of talent available to him he took drastic steps, ordering the kidnap of Choi Eun-Hee (Madame Choi) – South Korea’s most famous actress – and her ex-husband Shin Sang-Ok, the country’s most famous filmmaker. But as Madame Choi and Shin Shang-Ok begin to make North Korea’s greatest films, they hatch a plan of escape worthy of a blockbuster Hollywood ending. A Kim Jong-Il Production is that rarest of books: a wildly entertaining, cunningly told story that offers a rare glimpse into a nation still wrapped in mystery.

One of the reviews on Amazon

Captivating and well-researched, this book informs and entertains.

Paul Fischer's A Kim Jong Il Production presents the rudimentary story of tragic life in the DPRK, however this volume's subjects are two clever kidnapping victims who go on to be creative survivors of the cruel fates orchestrated by Kim Jong-Il. The manner in which Fischer incorporates strategic interviews, facts, historical research, and a touching creative nonfiction narrative creates a vibrant and dynamic voice that makes this book an effective combination of multiple genres encapsulated into one book.

The book is a nonfiction narrative that covers both Kim Jong-Il's rise to power and the kidnapping and employment of Choi Eun-Hee and Shin Sang-Ok from South Korea to kickstart the DPRK's new film industry. Through a variety of cloak and dagger operations, the two were able to undermine the authority of Kim and use their influence over the Dear Leader, the country, and various diplomatic and professional connections to their advantage in escaping the brutal kingdom. But the manner in which Fischer combines testimony, narrative, and facts is masterfully woven throughout each paragraph of the book.

In A Kim Jong-Il Production, Fisher tells a captivating story using a variety of methods that combine research, testimony, and creative nonfiction storytelling. The manner in which his inline references to interviews, historical data, and his own trips to North Korea are interwoven with a creative narrative create a voice that is both authoritative and engaging to the audience. This innovative approach to storytelling melds a traditional narrative methodology with fact in an engaging manner, and that in turn bridges the popular with the academic and widens the potential market for the text as well as the awareness of the readers who pick it up.


Wikipedia link[en.wikipedia.org], as a summary.

The Girl With Seven Names

Amazon link if you want to find the book[www.amazon.com]

Synopsis on Amazon

An extraordinary insight into life under one of the world’s most ruthless and secretive dictatorships – and the story of one woman’s terrifying struggle to avoid capture/repatriation and guide her family to freedom.

As a child growing up in North Korea, Hyeonseo Lee was one of millions trapped by a secretive and brutal communist regime. Her home on the border with China gave her some exposure to the world beyond the confines of the Hermit Kingdom and, as the famine of the 1990s struck, she began to wonder, question and to realise that she had been brainwashed her entire life. Given the repression, poverty and starvation she witnessed surely her country could not be, as she had been told “the best on the planet”?

Aged seventeen, she decided to escape North Korea. She could not have imagined that it would be twelve years before she was reunited with her family.

She could not return, since rumours of her escape were spreading, and she and her family could incur the punishments of the government authorities – involving imprisonment, torture, and possible public execution. Hyeonseo instead remained in China and rapidly learned Chinese in an effort to adapt and survive. Twelve years and two lifetimes later, she would return to the North Korean border in a daring mission to spirit her mother and brother to South Korea, on one of the most arduous, costly and dangerous journeys imaginable.

This is the unique story not only of Hyeonseo’s escape from the darkness into the light, but also of her coming of age, education and the resolve she found to rebuild her life – not once, but twice – first in China, then in South Korea. Strong, brave and eloquent, this memoir is a triumph of her remarkable spirit.

Top review of the book on Amazon

Very interesting story. It keeps moving and is an easy read.

I've read several accounts of escaping from North korea. This is a good one because it covers several subjects that are not covered in other books. For example hyeonseo grew up right on the border next to the Yalu river. There is extensive discussion of cross border smuggling in the book as her mother and other relatives were participants in this trade. Being so close to the border they could also get Chinese cell phone service and calls could be made to North Korea using Chinese cells. The other thing that is quite different about her story is that she spend more than a decade in China and was continually hiding from being discovered as an illegal therr. In one period she mentioned to others that she was from North Korea and its clear somebody reported her. She withstood an interrogation by the Chinese police and was able to convince them she was Chinese due to her ability to speak Mandarin and her mastery of Chinese Characters, which she attributes to her father pushing her to study while she was in school.

She has dangerous interactions with gangs, which she survives, was assaulted badly by an unknown assailant with a 1 liter beer bottle, an incident that did put her in the hospital and other adventures. One learns a bit about China and North Korea in this book. She has relatives which span several classes of North Korean society and one can get a feeling for what those strata are like. She also talks about the great amount of indoctrination she received during her education, of course this is common among the accounts of DPRK defectors.

Different that most of the defectors books she does describe the challenges facing defectors in South Korea. Their education is worthless and hence most of them severely struggle to obtain a college degree, which is important in South Korea. she also describes the process by which they vet defectors as well as the interrogation techniques of the Chinese police.

Once she has made it to South Korea she brings her mother and brother out of North Korea. This activity has several difficult twists which meant that the plan had to change in major ways on the fly and the challenges of getting through China to another country to defect to a South Korean embassy are shown. They chose Laos, a backwater whose insufferable bureaucracy and corrupt civil service made things hard. A very helpful Australian saves the day.
The story is interesting and one learns a fair bit about North Korea and China.

Wikipedia link[en.wikipedia.org], as a summary.

Youtube video of her talk is below.

https://youtu.be/PdxPCeWw75k

In Order To Live

Amazon link[www.amazon.com]

Synopsis on Amazon

Yeonmi Park has told the harrowing story of her escape from North Korea as a child many times, but never before has she revealed the most intimate and devastating details of the repressive society she was raised in and the enormous price she paid to escape.

Park’s family was loving and close-knit, but life in North Korea was brutal, practically medieval. Park would regularly go without food and was made to believe that, Kim Jong Il, the country’s dictator, could read her mind. After her father was imprisoned and tortured by the regime for trading on the black-market, a risk he took in order to provide for his wife and two young daughters, Yeonmi and her family were branded as criminals and forced to the cruel margins of North Korean society. With thirteen-year-old Park suffering from a botched appendectomy and weighing a mere sixty pounds, she and her mother were smuggled across the border into China.

I wasn’t dreaming of freedom when I escaped from North Korea. I didn’t even know what it meant to be free. All I knew was that if my family stayed behind, we would probably die—from starvation, from disease, from the inhuman conditions of a prison labor camp. The hunger had become unbearable; I was willing to risk my life for the promise of a bowl of rice. But there was more to our journey than our own survival. My mother and I were searching for my older sister, Eunmi, who had left for China a few days earlier and had not been heard from since.

Park knew the journey would be difficult, but could not have imagined the extent of the hardship to come. Those years in China cost Park her childhood, and nearly her life. By the time she and her mother made their way to South Korea two years later, her father was dead and her sister was still missing. Before now, only her mother knew what really happened between the time they crossed the Yalu river into China and when they followed the stars through the frigid Gobi Desert to freedom. As she writes, “I convinced myself that a lot of what I had experienced never happened. I taught myself to forget the rest.”

In In Order to Live, Park shines a light not just into the darkest corners of life in North Korea, describing the deprivation and deception she endured and which millions of North Korean people continue to endure to this day, but also onto her own most painful and difficult memories. She tells with bravery and dignity for the first time the story of how she and her mother were betrayed and sold into sexual slavery in China and forced to suffer terrible psychological and physical hardship before they finally made their way to Seoul, South Korea—and to freedom.

Still in her early twenties, Yeonmi Park has lived through experiences that few people of any age will ever know—and most people would never recover from. Park confronts her past with a startling resilience, refusing to be defeated or defined by the circumstances of her former life in North Korea and China. In spite of everything, she has never stopped being proud of where she is from, and never stopped striving for a better life. Indeed, today she is a human rights activist working determinedly to bring attention to the oppression taking place in her home country.

Park’s testimony is rare, edifying, and terribly important, and the story she tells in In Order to Live is heartbreaking and unimaginable, but never without hope. Her voice is riveting and dignified. This is the human spirit at its most indomitable.

Top review on Amazon

A heart-felt window into the strength of human spirit

At university when I was studying modern Chinese history, I always shunned history books with their bare, empty facts and their clinical indifference to what's written inside them. In my opinion. history is best told in stories of the people who live through it, so I did most of my research through autobiographies. I came to this book with the expectation of doing much the same - of reading someone's story and learning more about North Korea and what life is still like for the people living there. What I didn't expect was the level of depth and meaning in the story inside.

I watched Ms Park's One Young World speech (and cried along with her), and I was expecting the book to be emotional, and in particular I was looking forward to the parts when she was reunited with her family members. It wasn't emotional - but after I'd finished the book and realised it wasn't, it made perfect sense. We are taken step by step through someone's quest to survive. The lengths she's had to go through, and someone who has been starving for half her life, repeatedly raped, brutalised, lost people dear to her, and seen awful, awful things (hopefully she has managed to overcome her initial indifference to the idea of counselling!), there's too much to cope with to even know where to begin addressing any emotions.

It would be disingenuous for the writer to have made this an emotional book; Ms Park hardly had time or energy for emotions. Every moment she was either trying to survive herself or trying to help her family members. There was no excess energy to be used for anything except whatever she needed to do to make it through the obstacles she was facing. And, boy, did she have to do a lot of awful things in order to survive. It takes a special type of strength to be able to be honest about the awful things that have happened to you - in particular being trafficked and raped - and I know deciding to tell that story must have been a difficult one. I don't know if she's going to read her reviews, but if she does, I want to thank her for her courage.

I started reading this book at 8pm last night and I'm writing this review at 3:28am - I couldn't put it down. I watched the One Young World speech a few minutes ago again and cried (again). Ms Park talks about her desire to free North Koreans, or even to convince the Chinese government to stop persecuting North Korean Refugees who managed to escape. From the way her strength of spirit just bleeds out of the words on every page of this book, I have no doubt she will succeed.

Yeonmi's speech at One Young World below

https://youtu.be/ufhKWfPSQOw

A Thousand Miles To Freedom

Amazon link[www.amazon.com]

Synopsis on Amazon

Eunsun Kim was born in North Korea, one of the most secretive and oppressive countries in the modern world. As a child Eunsun loved her country...despite her school field trips to public executions, daily self-criticism sessions, and the increasing gnaw of hunger as the country-wide famine escalated.

By the time she was eleven years old, Eunsun's father and grandparents had died of starvation, and Eunsun was in danger of the same. Finally, her mother decided to escape North Korea with Eunsun and her sister, not knowing that they were embarking on a journey that would take them nine long years to complete. Before finally reaching South Korea and freedom, Eunsun and her family would live homeless, fall into the hands of Chinese human traffickers, survive a North Korean labor camp, and cross the deserts of Mongolia on foot.

Now, Eunsun is sharing her remarkable story to give voice to the tens of millions of North Koreans still suffering in silence. Told with grace and courage, her memoir is a riveting exposé of North Korea's totalitarian regime and, ultimately, a testament to the strength and resilience of the human spirit.

One of the reviews on Amazon

An inspiring, learning experience

This is a wonderful book that shows what life is like in North Korea and the extremes that people are willing to go through to escape from that country. The author and her family went through horrendous things in order to get to freedom in South Korea. It filled me with gratitude for many things in my life that I take for granted such as food, clothes, a warm house, peace and safety, and modern conveniences. It made me appreciate the country and community that I live in.

It amazed me that such living conditions exist in North Korea in the 21st Century. I kept reminding myself that these things were happening now and not sometime in the 1800’s. Also, it was an eye opener to how the people are brainwashed and controlled by the government to the point that they don’t know what is really happening in the outside world or even to think for themselves. They only hear and see what the government wants.

All in all it is a book that keeps you reading just to find out if the author survives. It is tragic, inspiring, suspenseful and enlightening. I would recommend it to all adults as well as high school and middle school students.

Escape From Camp 14

Amazon link[www.amazon.com]

Synopsis on Amazon

The heartwrenching New York Times bestseller about the only known person born inside a North Korean prison camp to have escaped. Blaine Harden's latest book, King of Spies, will be available from Viking in Fall 2017.
North Korea’s political prison camps have existed twice as long as Stalin’s Soviet gulags and twelve times as long as the Nazi concentration camps. No one born and raised in these camps is known to have escaped. No one, that is, except Shin Dong-hyuk.

In Escape From Camp 14, Blaine Harden unlocks the secrets of the world’s most repressive totalitarian state through the story of Shin’s shocking imprisonment and his astounding getaway. Shin knew nothing of civilized existence—he saw his mother as a competitor for food, guards raised him to be a snitch, and he witnessed the execution of his mother and brother.

The late “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il was recognized throughout the world, but his country remains sealed as his third son and chosen heir, Kim Jong Eun, consolidates power. Few foreigners are allowed in, and few North Koreans are able to leave. North Korea is hungry, bankrupt, and armed with nuclear weapons. It is also a human rights catastrophe. Between 150,000 and 200,000 people work as slaves in its political prison camps. These camps are clearly visible in satellite photographs, yet North Korea’s government denies they exist.

Harden’s harrowing narrative exposes this hidden dystopia, focusing on an extraordinary young man who came of age inside the highest security prison in the highest security state. Escape from Camp 14 offers an unequalled inside account of one of the world’s darkest nations. It is a tale of endurance and courage, survival and hope.

Top review on Amazon

Simply horrifying.

Once you've started this book, it's very difficult to put down.

How this man survived the brutality of a 'Total Control' North Korean prison camp is impossible to conceive. From watching classmates being beaten to death and his mother and brother being executed, to being tortured over hot coals at the age of 13 and suffering near starvation for the first 24 years of his life, to the soul-destroying work ethic and unparalleled cruelty of the prison guards, how Shin Dong-hyuk is still alive, let alone now living happily in America, is breathtaking. His story is heartbreaking from the very beginning, yet his ability to keep on going in the face of absolute punishment will inspire all who read about it. The worst day you've ever had, will likely pale in comparison to a normal day in the life of this guy.

Blaine Harden has done a great job of presenting the details, and obviously cultivated a strong relationship with Shin. The book is short but there's more than enough in there for you to appreciate the gravity of the situation in North Korea, and its relationship with both South Korea and China.

Worth every penny.

WIkipedia link[en.wikipedia.org]

The Great Leader & The Fighter Pilot

Amazon link[www.amazon.com]

Synopsis on Amazon

In The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot, New York Times bestselling author Blaine Harden tells the riveting story of how Kim Il Sung grabbed power and plunged his country into war against the United States while the youngest fighter pilot in his air force was playing a high-risk game of deception—and escape.

As Kim ascended from Soviet puppet to godlike ruler, No Kum Sok noisily pretended to love his Great Leader. That is, until he swiped a Soviet MiG-15 and delivered it to the Americans, not knowing they were offering a $100,000 bounty for the warplane (the equivalent of nearly one million dollars today). The theft—just weeks after the Korean War ended in July 1953—electrified the world and incited Kim’s bloody vengeance.

During the Korean War the United States brutally carpet bombed the North, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and giving the Kim dynasty, as Harden reveals, the fact-based narrative it would use to this day to sell paranoia and hatred of Americans.

Drawing on documents from Chinese and Russian archives about the role of Mao and Stalin in Kim’s shadowy rise, as well as from never-before-released U.S. intelligence and interrogation files, Harden gives us a heart-pounding escape adventure and an entirely new way to understand the world’s longest-lasting totalitarian state.

One of the reviews

A lot of ink has been spilled writing about North Korea lately, and for good reason: the Hermit Kingdom is inscrutable, ominous, and just plain strange. In fact, this is author Blaine Harden's second visit to deliriously Orwellian country in three years, following his remarkable 2012 book, Escape from Camp 14. This second effort is also well worth the trip. Relying on declassified documents and interviews, Harden applies his journalistic acumen to the task of tracking two pivotal players at the dawn of the Kim regime. On one side is Kim Il Sung, rising from his origins as a scrappy guerrilla insurgent to become the self-appointed "Great Leader" who brazenly, sometimes incompetently, pitted a triumvirate of superpowers against each other on the Korean peninsula. Harden exposes Kim's shadowy, contentious relationships with Stalin and Mao, both of whom underestimated the budding tyrant's recklessness--while overestimating his martial talent--in their game of global chess. On the other side is No Kum Sok, a young fighter pilot who silently labors as a secret traitor, patiently biding his time reciting state pabulum and waiting for the main chance to make a high-stakes flight for the south. The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot expertly melds geopolitics with personal struggle, creating an exciting and illuminating account of a chapter of world history that still resonates today. --Jon Foro

Wikipedia summary[en.wikipedia.org]

Random Youtube videos

Prepare to spend some time if you intend to watch all of these.

My Daily Life In NORTH KOREA (MYSTERIOUS 7 DAY TRIP)
https://youtu.be/uMoSyk0rK9s

The North Korea I wasnt meant to see
https://youtu.be/QXwVX6I9D04

Never before seen real life footage inside of North Korea (Documentary)
https://youtu.be/YgHh6f1GYx0

Why Korea Split Into North and South Korea
https://youtu.be/l0E9Kel8BtE

What North Korean Defectors Think Of North Korea | ASIAN BOSS
https://youtu.be/DyqUw0WYwoc

Pyongyang Street Food - North Korea
https://youtu.be/ZdhSuJ47Zqw

'The Privileged' Store in North Korea - Part 1
https://youtu.be/aRYJ9u0sEE4

Adelyna Arittaptta in Pyongyang Rainbow Ship, North Korea
https://youtu.be/aS5AZRYWVPU

New Year 2016 in Pyongyang North Korea - Mansudae Hill's Grand Monument
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqPR4umI6LY

No! No! Nippon!

If you didn't already know, this VN is a parody of another VN by MangaGamer.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/251870/Go_Go_Nippon_My_First_Trip_to_Japan/

If you haven't read it and are willing to try, I'd recommend you get the whole bundle.

• Base game only gets you few locations and static character sprites.
  
• The 2015 expansion gives more locations, widescreen format, and the E-mote system. E-mote system is like those moving animations for the catgirls in Nekopara, but there's no boob jiggling in GGN.
  
• The 2016 expansion gives even more locations, extra endings, and Steam achievements.

Off topic

We don't get that many parody VNs on Steam, but I'm aware of at least one more that should be coming to Steam. Eventually. There's at least anime girl versions of Hitler, Churchill and Stalin.



Its called My Little Dictator and is still a Work In Progress.

Their website[war-girl.com]

[Astolfo]

[Cobren]

Coming back here 4 years later having met a North Korean defector and having read In Order to Live, I can still say this game is a funny romp. But god am I glad the guide is just this instead.

[Africandave™]

Nice

[Alaratt]

very interesting stuff. Scary as hell too.

[SND]

if it is the best why do people run away i want to read books on the real experinces but thank you i will read these too ig ues

[DizzieDawgie]

Thank you for this guide.