The Aquariums of Pyongyang

Kang Chol-hwan 2001

Devastation Rating

Existential Dread
North Korea camps memoir survival

Our Take

Kang spent ten years in the Yodok concentration camp in North Korea from age nine. His account of life inside the camp is the most complete testimony from the North Korean gulag system. The bureaucratic specificity — the categories of prisoner, the rules, the punishments — is the most devastating element.

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