"My book was being dismissed for the very element that typically wins acclaim for narrative accounts of investigative journalism. When Ted Conover, author of the award-winning Newjack, posed as a corrections officer to investigate the prison system, he was lauded by TheNew York Times for going “deeper than surface” and reporting “for real.” Barbara Ehrenreich, author of the best-selling Nickel and Dimed, was widely celebrated for working undercover as a waitress, hotel maid, and sales clerk toexpose the conditions of the working poor. Among journalists, undercover work is generally viewed as a badge of honor, not a mark of shame. (Miscategorizing my book as a memoir, as it happens, also had the effect of disqualifying it from any journalism awards.)
The backlash extended well beyond the media. At my book events, I began to notice that there was always someone in the audience—often white, often male, inevitably hostile—who raised his hand to challenge my work. The gist was always the same: He had been to North Korea himself, or knew someone who had, and it wasn’t as bad or dangerous as I claimed, so why was I lying, and putting people in danger, to sell a book?
The invariable pattern of such attacks gave me pause. Why did people with no real experience of North Korea feel such a passionate need to dismiss my firsthand reporting and defend one of the world’s most murderous dictatorships? My book had clearly wounded these men in some way. Perhaps it had undercut their male pride, their sense of being an expert on world affairs, even when they weren’t. Perhaps they felt accused of being complicit in North Korea’s horrors, and converted that guilt into denial, a basic survival instinct. Whatever their motives, they felt a need to assert themselves over me. Some even denounced me, a South Korean woman, as someone who had merely returned “home” to North Korea; to them, I hadn’t gone undercover at all. Which is another way of saying that what I had written was personal, and therefore by definition not authoritative...
As I grappled with these feelings, I saw that my anger, the inner bits of it, reaches back to the reason why I write: to soothe that stirring within me, each moment I face the blank page, that beckons a heart so fearful of the wider world. When I sleep, I rarely dream; I am alone inside a darkness, and at the edge of my consciousness lurk the howling, stifled cries of what lies outside. In my own way, I write to make sense of these jarring worlds, from internal to external, and to save lives, both mine and others’. This is why I risked going into North Korea undercover: because I could not be consoled while the injustice of 25 million voiceless people trapped in a modern-day gulag remains part of our society. To have my reporting on this brutal truth so systematically undermined is symptomatic of what scares me about America."
There is so much here - the way that some people are experts and their personal experiences are universal truths, and some people are storytellers who can never truly understand themselves or tell a truth that isn't biased by their context.
FB: "There are only two kinds of books on North Korea: those by white journalists who visited the country under the regime’s supervision, and “as told to” memoirs by defectors. The intellectual hierarchy is clear—authority belongs to the white gaze. Orientalism reigns."
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