Somewhere Inside: One Sister's Captivity in North Korea and the Other's Fight to Bring Her Home by Laura Ling and Lisa Ling. Wow. That's a cumbersome title. This is my first library borrowed e-book, and I wound up staying up until 2 this morning, finishing it in one day. So I guess it was kind of riveting. I don't envy the Ling sisters the task of writing this book. Searching for the right tone must have been as difficult as trying to figure out what to say when interrogated by North Koreans. Laura Ling, of course, is one of the two journalists who was captured and held prisoner by North Korea for several months in 2009 after crossing the border from China illegally. Difficult to find the tone because what Ling did was, inarguably, both foolish and illegal. While filming a documentary about the situation of North Korean defectors living in China, she and her two crew members, along with their guide, crossed the frozen river that forms the border between China and North Korea, stepped onto North Korean soil for, they say, less than a minute, then turned to head back. Midway back, they were spotted and chased by North Korean soldiers, who arrested Ling and Euna Lee (the third crew member and their guide escaped) after they were back in China. They don't deny they crossed the border, and they don't even have any good reason for having done it; it seems to have just been a whim of their guide, and they followed him without questioning--it wasn't to conduct an interview or get some powerful footage. I.e. it wasn't an act of journalistic courage so much as just...dumb. And they weren't even breaking some special, oppressive law specific to North Korea; it's illegal to cross borders without permission everywhere. We certainly arrest people in America for it, too.
Ling and Lee are then held in North Korea for 5 months, during which time they manage to cause enormous headaches for pretty much anyone who's ever had anything to do with governing the US. While their personal crisis is going on, President Obama has just started his presidency and North Korea is busy launching satellites and testing nuclear weapons and generally pissing off everyone in the international community. Meanwhile, back home, Lisa Ling is pestering Al Gore, Bill Richardson, Jimmy Carter, Bill and Hillary Clinton, various state department officials, Brad and Angelina, and President Obama himself (she gets his sister Maya to pass an e-mail to him for her) to drop everything and help get her sister home. And, of course, you can't really fault her for this; it's what family does. But, nonetheless, the end result is that the Obama administration was put into a very difficult and awkward position because Laura Ling did something stupid.
So, then, how about this book? Well, as I said, it's a page turner (even though I knew how it was going to turn out from the beginning). It's always fascinating to hear they do things in North Korea. In this case, it was striking how much better Ling and Lee were treated than ordinary North Korean citizens would have been. Indeed, how much better off they were during their captivity than North Koreans who haven't been arrested for anything. Ling was beaten and suffered from a head injury while actually being arrested, but, after that, she is treated very well physically. She's mostly confined to a room (not a cell) with a private bath and two female guards, with whom she develops a tenuous friendship. She has regular meals, is eventually allowed letters and packages from home, and takes walks outside every day with her interrogator and translator. The interrogator asks her lots of questions, but seems to genuinely want to help her (i.e. to help her tell the North Koreans what they want to hear so she can go home). Though she deliberately withholds names of defectors that he asks for, claiming not to remember them, the "interrogation" never gets more intense than just hours of questioning. The worst thing that seems to happen is that sometimes the people she encounters give her mean looks. Of course, it's the uncertainty about when and if she'll get to go home that's the real hardship.
And the tone? I think Ling does as well as she can, given the basic situation. Particularly in the epilogue, she's careful to note the guilt she feels for her actions and their consequences; it's a tricky balancing act--acknowledging what's wrong about what she did without justifying North Korea, acknowledging the kindness she was shown by individual North Koreans while still criticizing, albeit fairly subtly, the government. And telling her own story without pushing to the background the ultimately much more difficult struggles of North Koreans themselves.
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