Unperson

Book excerpt: In George Orwell?s 1984, an 'unperson' is someone who has been vaporized, whose record has been erased. Similarly, the North Korean defectors that Tim Franco chose to portray have decided to disappear, fleeing sometimes for ideological reasons and often out of despair. The road to South Korea is dangerous and can take years, across the many different borders with Mongolia, Laos, Thailand and China. The travels of the ones that do are filled with the fear of being arrested and sent back to labour camps. Having arrived in South Korea, they often struggle to find a new identity, lost between their North Korean past and South Korean future. 00Here, Tim Franco presents the stories of fifteen such 'unpersons'. Each portrait goes side by side with the story of how and why the subjects came to their radical decision to flee. In order to retrace their steps, Franco travelled to their crossing points, capturing the diversity of landscape that is the background of North Korean defection.