Escape From North Korea: The Untold Story of Asia’s Underground
Railroad, by Melanie Kirkpatrick, Encounter Books, 376 pages,
$25.99

“What’s a church?” the beggar asks. He has just clawed his way
out of Kim Jong-il’s nightmare state, across the freezing Tumen
River to China, in a new book by former Wall Street
Journal editor Melanie Kirkpatrick. “Look for a building with
a cross on it,” he is told. The guy doesn’t even realize he should
be looking for a cross on top of the building. Nor does he
know that he has escaped from North Korea only to show up in a
Gods Must Be Crazy–type incident in a book by a
neoconservative journalist who delights in these touching but
occasionally underdeveloped conversion narratives.

The book is Escape From North Korea: The Untold Story of
Asia’s Underground Railroad, an account of the brave Christian
activists who smuggle families out of the madness of North Korea
and into China. Here China is depicted as a kind of Arizona of the
East, a place where the escaped must evade the enforcers of what
Mark Lagon, a Bush State Department official, describes as “an
insensitive and arguably cruel immigration policy.” (But families
“who are sent back to Mexico from the United States,” Kirkpatrick
takes pains to write, “are not jailed, starved, tortured or
executed.”)

Kirkpatrick, who interviewed hundreds of defectors, rescuers,
and Republicans, expands the existing literature on North Korea’s
ongoing human rights catastrophe and the cruel hypocrisies of its
dictator. Kim Jong-il, who reigned from 1994 to 2011, treated
himself to NBA games, Friday the 13th, and a multi-tiered
squad of Pleasure Girls while restricting his people to two meals a
day, imposing the death penalty for “immorality,” and prohibiting a
wide spectrum of music. The Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff,
for example, had fled to the U.S. following a Communist revolution,
and party officials feared that their subjects might get ideas. So
they banned his work and instead limited North Koreans’ listening
to the likes of “The Song of the Coast Artillery Women.”

Kirkpatrick writes affectingly of how music floating from
another room reached suspicious ears when Kim Cheol-Woong, a piano
player from the Pyongyang Philharmonic, made the mistake of
practicing the pretty French standard “Les Feulles Mortes” for his
girlfriend. He was subsequently forced to pen a 10-page letter to
the party confessing his disloyalty. The incident prompted the
pianist to pay a broker $2,000 to help him escape to China,
suffering for two years as a migrant logger before he regained
access to a piano and was hailed in the South Korean media as a
jazz hero.

Readers hoping to spend more
time in the company of such well-drawn North Koreans may be
bewildered when the text forces us instead to listen to the likes
of the neoconservative Iraq War architect Paul Wolfowitz. Wolfowitz
was—would you believe?—an Asia expert at the State Department in
the early ’80s. But the neocon stuff here, including rather
repetitive get-tough-on-China polemics, takes up valuable page
space that could have been put to better use humanizing the people
of Pyongyang or giving us a better sense of Christianity in
Korea.

There’s also the sense here that Kirkpatrick, who after 9/11
searched in her work for evidence of a religious awakening at work
in New York City, is sometimes fitting her escaped subjects into a
divine scheme first and asking questions second. There’s a heavy
emphasis on souls being led to salvation in secret church basements
but not always on people as people. (The chapter epigrams are
quotes from participants in the original Underground Railroad. You
know you have a problem when your epigrams are more evocative than
your interview subjects.)

And in a book where Asians are twice presented to the reader in
terms of their accents (“the little kids running over, saying
‘hello,’ the Ls sounding like Rs”), you may cringe and wish for an
approach that dives further into the hearts of the North Korean
characters as individual human beings. Such depth can be found in
more nuanced books on the subject, such as the detail-rich

Nothing To Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, by the
L.A. Times scribe Barbara Demick, and
Escaping North Korea, by the gutsy American evangelical
Mike Kim. Kim’s gripping book tells how he gave up the good life as
a hotshot Georgetown MBA to save North Koreans while posing as a
Taekwondo black belt. He appears in Kirkpatrick’s tome too, but
here his exciting story is breezed over in a surprisingly
non-action-packed overview of his group, Crossing Borders.

The most enigmatic presence in Escape From North Korea
is that of the American humanitarian Tim Peters, who has worked
extensively to ship food to North Koreans during the ongoing famine
and to shelter refugees from trouble in China. (They each receive a
Bible.) Here his faith journey is generically described, belying a
more controversial and interesting tale that could have been told.
You would not know from his vague presence here that
Peters—according to coverage in
Stars and Stripes and elsewhere—found religion not in a
typical evangelical setting but in something called the Children of
God, a controversial Huntington Beach sect that also calls itself
The Family (not to be confused with the Washington schemers
chronicled in Jeff Sharlet’s
The Family). Peters’ relationship to this church is
cloudy. He long maintained an active missionary status in it, and
he now refuses to speak ill of it. He has insisted that Helping
Hands Korea is separate from The Family, though former members of
the Children of God insist that Peters’s secretive new group is
working in tandem with his old one.

The man at the center of this bizarre church was David Berg, a
bearded presence whose personality cult may not have reached Kim
Jong-il-esque dimensions, but not for want of trying. Among other
notorious activities, Berg prostituted female members on the
beaches to lure in male recruits. One of the unstated ironies here
is that there was a time when The Family was seen as such a threat
to young people in speed-freak-era L.A. that its self-proclaimed
enemies—”deprogrammers”—modeled themselves after the
Underground Railroad, too. Berg’s most famous enemy, the kidnapper
Ted Patrick, even titled his 1976 life story
Let Our Children Go!

Belief is not always simple. Actor River Phoenix, who was
sexually abused in The Family and likely driven by this toward his
drug death, said what Berg did was “destroying people’s lives.” But
here on the North Korean border we meet a minister who emerged from
the same church and is saving an untold number of lives. These are
the moral contradictions that elevate great journalism, and it’s
disappointing when the political book industry smoothes out these
wrinkles for easy consumption by interest groups. Still,
sociological and literary complaints aside, the sheer scale of
human suffering that Kirkpatrick illuminates makes any book like
this a worthy endeavor—even with Paul Wolfowitz in it.