North Korea News Podcast by NK News - How North Korean literature celebrates the ‘hidden heroes’ of everyday life

Episode Date: May 15, 2025

In this episode, scholars Immanuel Kim and Benoit Berthelier discuss their new book, “Hidden Heroes: An Anthology of North Korean Fiction,” which brings together 10 DPRK short stories from the last 30 years that focus on ordinary citizens who quietly contribute to society. Kim and Berthelier discuss their motivations for curating this anthology, their translation […]

You're listening to an exclusive episode of the NK News podcast available only to subscribers. You can listen to this and other episodes from your preferred podcast player by accessing the Private Podcast feed. For more detailed instructions, please see the step-by-step guide on the NK News podcast. I'm your host, Jaco's Wedslut, and this episode was recorded on the morning of Saturday, the 12th of April, 2025 via StreamYard. And I'm joined on StreamYard by two people who have put together an anthology of North Korean literature, North Korean fiction, and let me introduce them. We have first of all a

returning guest, Professor Emmanuel Kim, who is the Korea Foundation and Kim Renaud Associate Professor of Korean Literature and Culture Studies at George Washington University. His research specializes in North Korean literature and cinema, including comedy films, some of which we discussed right here on this very podcast back in July 2021 on episode 190, when he was last on the show. So welcome back, Emmanuel. Thanks for having me.

And we're also joined by Benoit Berthelier, who is senior lecturer in Korean studies at the University of Sydney. His research interests also include North Korean literature, culture, and society, as well as digital humanities and discourse analysis. Welcome on the show, Benoit. Hello. Thanks for having me. So this book that's just come out, it's called Hidden Heroes, anthology of North Korean fiction. Let's talk about that. The idea of an anthology of North Korean fiction, it might seem surprising to many listeners. North Korea is often portrayed as a place of rigid state control where literature is little more than propaganda. Why does the world need an anthology of North Korean short stories and what do you hope readers will take away from it? Benoit,

why don't you kick off? Benoit Leclerc, Ph.D. Yeah, I think one of the ideas that we had when we started this is that we wanted to show readers unfamiliar with North Korea, I guess just a different picture of the country. And one that's not necessarily, we didn't go for pieces that are not representative or not propaganda. We tried to go with pieces that were popular in North Korea that North Korean readers enjoyed or that we knew we had information that those stories had made their mark on literary history or the literary landscape. And so that gave us sort of a bit of quality. And we wanted to do something that

wouldn't be seen as just like a curiosity, just something that people would pick up for fun and then kind of look through it and just, you know, like find it ridiculous and so over the top. I mean, there are bits and pieces that will definitely seem unfamiliar or propagandistic, but I think we would be satisfied if people read through the story and could really relate to them. And I think a lot of the situations, stories, emotions that are depicted in the stories are things that doesn't matter if you're in the US, in Asia, anywhere in the world, doesn't really matter what your political beliefs are. There's something that anybody I think could relate to in every one of those stories. Emmanuel, do you want to add anything to that?

Yeah, for me, this project dated back when I picked up another anthology called Literature from the Countries of Axis of Evil, and they had a collection of three, four North Korean short stories. So this is way back when, early 2000s, and there were very few English translated North Korean short stories. So I had to pick it up and I read through these stories and I thought, well, number one, it was a very eclectic collection. None of these stories had anything to do with each other. But then there was a resounding layer of propaganda, the typical propaganda that one would expect to see from North Korea. And the introduction of that anthology really caught my eye. And it said that if you do not praise the great leader in North Korea, that short story

will not be published. And I thought, okay, well, this is just an irresponsible statement. And I had to find stories that would counter this Western notion and perception of North Korean literature. And lo and behold, there are so many out there. I mean, Benoit and I, we could go on and on about stories that not necessarily praise the great leader. So where do we begin? Do we begin from the 50s? Do we begin 60s? We have to choose a decade or a certain stories that had patterns to it so that our readers could understand the trajectory of our collection. It's not just

eclectic random stories that we put together. They have a certain theme that cuts across it. And that was the end product of this Hidden Heroes anthology. Okay. Okay. So in selecting the stories, you've got 10 short stories from the last 30 years from Chosun Munhak and Munhak Shinmun, the major literary journals of North Korea. Tell us a bit about the process of choosing those stories and how that golden thread that runs through all of them that Emmanuel mentioned, Hidden Heroes, how that works, Benoit? Yeah, well, I think a little bit like it's a long story as Emmanuel mentioned, like we started this project, how long is it now? Like 15 years ago?

Yeah, probably about 15 years. Yeah. And so I think the anthology, and that's really important to mention, sort of like the backstory of it, is that we pitched this to, I lost track of the number, but to a number of publisher publishing houses, and we've got as many rejections. But sometimes we'd work with the editors. And so sort of like the fate of the anthology is really tied to that sort of challenge of trying to get North Korean literature

published in the West. Like it's not something that people would like people would get interested, but then there's all of the challenges that are sometimes commercial, like can we sell this? Are people going to be interested? And if they were going to be interested what people are there? And so I think those type of worries, which, you know, in a way, you could say are also ways of controlling, maybe not necessarily censoring, but at least affecting the final output of the anthology,

all of those forces definitely shaped the end product of the anthology. And I think when we started, we had an outlook that was a little less coherent. And so the sort of trying to get it published helped us refine what we wanted to do with anthology. We went with something that I think our first criteria was, is this interesting? Like, would we like maybe, you know, we're both teaching about North Korea. And so if there's a short story that will display like an unexpected or something that's very interesting to teach about,

about like gender in North Korea, like those are the things that we thought might be useful for a class. But then as we kept working on it, it was really clear that this was lacking sort of homogeneity, like we needed a better thread to go through it. And so as we reviewed it, we kind of realized that what we were really interested about was the sort of everyday, like depiction of the everyday. And as luck would have it, this was also a literary trend that really started in the 1980s, which was the Hidden Hero movement. So that's how we decided to sort of focus on stories that, you know, we're trying to implement this directive for the arts to

We're trying to implement this directive for the arts to look at the lives of everyday people and their dedication to their work or their craft and try to depict it in a way that would be non-sensational, non-propagandistic. Okay, so Emmanuel, tell us a bit about this movement, this hidden hero movement or turn in North Korean fiction. Yeah, so what we discovered was we have the 1960s or late 1950s, the Cheollima movement, and a lot of the short stories had to deal with the reconstruction of the country. And you get your typical revolutionary, they're hard-working, tireless revolutionary that we're quite used to seeing from like the Soviet socialist realist novels. Then around the 1970s, you have the three revolutions, revolutionary heroes who again work tirelessly.

But at this point, there's a lot of praising the leader, the praising the party, the typical propaganda that you might want that you might see. But you also see a new trend, this kind of intellectual who comes into the story. And it's this entire effort to build the country with this intellectuals, which is quite different from China and the Soviet Union. And then come the 1980s with the Hidden Heroes, they sort of went back to the everyday, you know, nobody

knows who this person is, but this person is doing all that he or she can for the country. And they called these heroes the Hidden Heroes. And it was the whole slogan was, hey, we need to identify who the Hidden Heroes are. So if you read through our stories, you'll see and identify who the hidden hero is. It's the least unexpected person. It's the it's the person that you don't consider to be a popular person or someone of any kind of political stature, it's just maybe a janitor. It might be just a low employee.

And these people, they do great things for either the agriculture cooperation or the factory or whatever, their job or the country. So, yeah, that's how we selected it. And it did require some filtering. It required some, you know, should we do this one or that one? You know, Benoit and I, we had a large collection already to begin with, and we went through and selected the ones that we thought were good for the hidden hero theme. Yeah, in the introduction, you talk about the dilemma of avoiding both works that reinforce the stereotypes of North Korea and those that are too rarefied to reflect

the country's literary landscape. And how did you navigate that challenge. podcast player by accessing the Private Podcast Feed. For more detailed instructions, please see the step-by-step guide on the NK News website at nknews.org slash private dash feed.