The Reluctant Communist

I just finished reading The Reluctant Communist: My Desertion, Court-Martial, and Forty-year Imprisonment in North Korea by Charles Robert Jenkins (with the help of Jim Frederick), and I have *very* mixed feelings about it. I read this book from beginning to end rather quickly, and I found it absolutely fascinating… if at times rather grating.

This book, as you might be able to glean from the title, is about a former US Army soldier Sergeant Charles Robert Jenkins who, while stationed at the DMZ in 1965 decided to go AWOL and cross the border into North Korea. He didn’t choose to do this out of some ideological affinity for North Korea; he did it because he had some damn fool idea that the North Koreans would send him via Russia to the US – and he would thereby manage to get sent home and, as such, avoid dangerous assignments along the DMZ and a possible transfer to Vietnam. And, oh yeah – he was drunk at the time, so no doubt this seemed like a logical decision.

Jenkins writes about his “forty-year imprisonment” as though he suffered in the gulags alongside average North Koreans… whereas in truth, while his existence was far from Western upper-class comfort, it was princely by North Korean standards. All that being said, I still found the book fascinating. There are so few stories out there about day-to-day life in North Korea – and none such by any other Americans – that this book provides a wealth of insights unavailable anywhere else. I won’t go into the details; if this is something that interests you, read the book.

I will, however, point out a couple of rather mundane things that caught my eye:

The product-purchasing system that existed in the Former Soviet Union – and which still can be found in many stores (although decreasing in number) across the FSU – was apparently common in North Korea as well. This is how the “system” works: You tell Storekeeper A what you want to buy. S/he gives you a ticket, which you take to Storekeeper B. You pay Storekeeper B and are given a receipt. You take this receipt back to Storekeeper A, and are only then given the item. I hadn’t realized that this “system” was found in any countries other than the FSU, although it makes an odd kind of sense for it to exist in a Communist country. After all, everyone *must* be employed, so the more jobs available (even if they are needless), the better.

One thing which Jenkins mentioned as being “typically North Korean,” but which jumped out at me as being “typically Korean” came from an instance in which one of his friends (another American defector, Jerry Wayne Parrish) was dying of kidney failure. Parrish had been hospitalized numerous times for minor kidney troubles, and simply assumed this was another such minor event – the hospital released him, allowing him to continue believing this, but told his friends and family the truth: he was dying, and they thought it was best for him to remain unaware of this fact. I have heard numerous times here in South Korea that doctors will never (or rarely, depending on who you ask about this) tell a patient that s/he is terminal so as not to worry him/her. I find it rather reassuring that there are still cultural oddities which span the peninsula.