North Korea demands women serve solely as dutiful wives and mothers with no personal identity. A new book, “Women Are Not Dead,” chronicles Seol Song-a’s fight against this oppression and her life after escaping.
Two themes permeate the book: marketization and women’s rights. Through market activities and repeated questioning of the system, the author maintained her dignity despite state control, eventually defecting to South Korea where she now works as a journalist and researcher while still processing her trauma.
Like many North Korean women, the author was expected to earn money through market activities to pay taxes to the state, serve her husband, and raise her children as loyal revolutionaries. However, she continuously questioned the system and fought desperately to maintain her dignity as a human being and as a woman.
The author vividly describes the reality of female life in North Korea, conveying a powerful message about the country’s absurdities through her experiences of oppression, discrimination, and the process of overcoming them.
Two themes permeate the book: “North Korean marketization” and “women’s rights advancement.” The author leaves readers contemplating how these factors influenced each other. One particularly notable moment comes when a part-timer she hired calls her “our owner,” making her realize that markets have given birth to a new social class.
Through her life in North Korea’s emerging market economy, the author emphasizes the importance of women’s independence and self-realization, essentially declaring that “female subordination is not destiny.”
Her harrowing survival story includes watching her carefully built “penicillin business” collapse due to an entrapment investigation by North Korean authorities. This offers insight into the desperate circumstances facing women in North Korea today, as market restrictions and COVID-19 lockdowns have diminished both markets and women’s social status.
The author demonstrates her determination to change her own fate through multiple trips to China to request money from relatives and her passionate pursuit of market-related education. These passages reveal the expansion of her self-identity that had been suppressed simply because she was a woman.
By portraying her eventual decision to defect despite numerous obstacles and her subsequent challenges in a new society, the author allows readers to witness how North Korean women push beyond mere survival and strive for meaningful lives.
Now working in South Korea as a journalist reporting on North Korean women’s lives, as well as a researcher, writer, and lecturer, the author emphasizes that “North Korean women are those who have challenged rather than conformed to their environment.”
She candidly admits she’s still overcoming deep internal trauma. In doing so, she sends a message of hope to oppressed North Korean women: “women are not dead.”
This book serves as a valuable testimony that exposes the ongoing structural problems created by the North Korean regime through the author’s personal narrative.
