Inside the Hermit Kingdom: A Memoir

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

In 1994, Korean-Canadian Sun-Kyung Yi, a 27-year-old journalist and
award-winning filmmaker, became the first Western reporter ever
permitted into the virtually unknown country of North Korea for an
extended visit. Her trip resulted in a fascinating three-part
“Ideas” program on CBC Radio in early 1995, and now this book.

Unfortunately, the journey takes up less than half of this slim volume.
We learn perhaps more than we want to know about the author, whose
writing veers occasionally toward the self-indulgent. She offers
interesting insights about being one of the few Asians growing up in
Regina, but is excessively harsh about members of her chosen profession.
During a stint as a Globe and Mail reporter, she found that
“journalists, by and large, were not a very bright bunch of people.”
Yi, who won’t date Korean men “because of their Neanderthal
attitudes” and “their unhealthy attachment to their mothers,” is
particularly critical of a Korean-language paper for which she worked.

The book is of considerable interest, however, when the author
describes the political intrigue in the Korean-Canadian community that
led to her extraordinary trip, and her three-week stay in North Korea.
It is a chilling picture she gives us, “like a dream in which
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland meets Orwell’s Nineteen
Eighty-Four.” Like Orwell’s automatons, the North Koreans all love
Big Brother, the Great Leader. “We all think the same,” she is told
when she asks her horrified minder if nobody has any criticism at all.
The book also includes an account of the author’s visit a year later
to her birthplace, South Korea, where she is received with great
suspicion and watched almost as closely as she had been in the Stalinist
north.

Inside the Hermit Kingdom provides an informative picture of one of
Canada’s lesser-known minority communities, a rare glimpse into a
closed nation, and a sharp look at the not yet completely democratic
society of one of our Pacific allies.