The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf
The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf |
| Posted: 11 Sep 2012 03:09 AM PDT New author Roshni Menon talks about writing her first book and realising a dream of her own. THE-REE, Ge-reen, De-reams," says Roshni Menon, enunciating carefully. "For the longest time as a child, I couldn't say those three words properly. I would say those words as two syllables instead of one." She laughingly recalls how a friend would tease her endlessly about it. So when she wanted to write a children's book, the three words popped into her head and became the title: Three Green Dreams. Roshni, 35, is an ENT surgeon by day, and now she adds author to her credentials. She has three children, aged two and a half, five, and seven, and Ria, the heroine of the story, is based on her daughter, also called Ria. "I know most people write the story first and think of the title. For me, everything starts with the title," Roshni says. She set about fleshing out a story around these three words and came up with a lyrical tale about the adventures of Ria, who travels into the dreams of children from around the world. Indeed, the number three represents first, the dream of Ria, second, the collective dreams of the children she meets as she goes round the world and third, the dreams of the reader. Roshni explains that the use of the colour green is not about the environment, although there are elements of that in some of the pages. For example, when Ria visits Soren in Sweden, they talk about saving the earth, but only because Sweden is a country that is all about green energy and recycling. "I wanted to evoke the different memories conjured up by the colour green for different people. For Malaysians, green is synonymous with Milo, Kickapoo, durian and our trees. In India, green represents young mangoes, pistachios, mint chutney and chillies, and cricket pitches. In Japan, it represents green tea, nori (seaweed) and tennis balls. And so forth. "When I finished writing the book, I had very definite ideas of how I wanted it to look like. I have always admired Yusof Majid's work, and thought he'd be the perfect person to illustrate my work. I actually asked him via sms whether he'd do it or not!" says Roshni. She won him over with the story she wrote, and he agreed to produce all the landscapes in the book. Roshni now needed a character. She looked around for an artist or illustrator who could bring Ria to life. When artist Seeling Tan sent in her proposal for the character, Roshni knew she was the one she wanted to work with. "Seeling brought to life the character of Ria, and she was everything I pictured in my head," says Roshni. So both artists set to work, individually, based on Roshni's brief and many subsequent discussions. The end result of that collaboration is 11 landscapes by Yusof, and 18 character drawings by Tan, which were merged digitally for the book. For editing, Roshni approached Daphne Lee, Star2 On Sunday's Tots To Teens columnist who is known for her work in children's literature. "Working with all these good people was great. I learnt a great deal," she says. Instead of going the route of seeking a publisher for her book, Roshni decided to self-publish, albeit through a publishing company she formed with two other like-minded friends. She named it Smallprint. "We noticed there is a gap in the market for quality local children's books. We could do a lot with a publishing company, instead of this being a one-off project. We set up Smallprint with the intention of publishing more books. We want to put out really great books written by Malaysians, but with a global appeal. Right now, there are two projects in progress, and we hope to increase that figure to five next year," she says. While planning for the future, Roshni also had to be practical about the funding of her current project, Three Green Dreams. She had the brilliant idea of selling off the paintings that Yusof and Tan did for the book during the book launch. And what a success the launch plus exhibition was. She sold off all but two of the paintings, which she kept for herself. Would she ever ditch her day job and do writing and publishing full time? "I love my job too much!" she laughs. "Writing allows me to escape from the rigidity of the medical profession. I have always loved words, and you could say this is the realisation of my dream. Writing allows the creative side of me to emerge. I hope I am lucky enough to be able to do both." She says her scientific side makes an appearance in the book as well, when she talks about green colour-blindness when Ria visits Sebastian and Sean in Hong Kong. Also, she explains the words and phrases used throughout the book in a glossary at the end of the book, much like medical glossaries. "That's the scientist in me, I suppose," she laughs. As the book is about the colour green, Roshni admits she has been asked whether she planned for it to be a series of books, each about a different colour. "I never thought of that. I just wanted to write a book with the title Three Green Dreams. It is something to think about. But no, there are no red, orange or yellow books in the works yet. My next book, which I have started, is about something else. You will have to wait and see," she smiles. Three Green Dreams is available at Kinokuniya Bookstores at Suria KLCC; Silverfish Books (03-2284 4837 / silverfishbooks.com) and Cziplee Bangsar (03-2287 7699 / cziplee.com) in Kuala Lumpur; and Borders outlets nationwide. |
| Posted: 11 Sep 2012 03:08 AM PDT Brutal, horrific pain continues to blight a man who crawled his way out of a prison camp and now devotes his life to human rights. Escape From Camp 14 THE image of North Korea we have all seen is the aerial shot taken at night. Whilst the lights of South Korea and China burn brightly all around it, North Korea itself is in almost total darkness. A dark hole in a well-lit world. Go to Google Maps and enter North Korea and another surprise awaits you. This time it is white. In stark contrast to the borderlands of China and South Korea there is simply a white space with a single name: the capital, Pyongyang. Zoom in and an unmarked whiteness fills the screen. No towns, no roads, no physical features, just white space. Above all, no prison camps. For these you have to go to Google Earth. There are various estimates of how many people are incarcerated in North Korea's camps, but it is pretty safe to say there are at least 100,000 and possibly as many as 300,000. The camps, of course, do not exist according to the official line. In all that unmapped, unmarked white space there are not really tens of thousands of slaves living just above starvation level. How could there be? Nonetheless, type Camp 14 into Google Earth and you will find lines of grey buildings that have a definite concentration camp air about them. "There is no 'human rights issue' in this country as everyone leads the most dignified and happy life," said the North Korean News Agency on March 6, 2009. The body of Shin Dong-hyuk tells a different story. One of his fingers is missing a top joint – cut off by camp guards as punishment for dropping a sewing machine. He has terrible burn scars on his back from being suspended by a rope over a cauldron of fire. His lower abdomen is scarred from the hook that was gaffed through his skin to raise and lower him over the hot coals. That was when he was 13. The most telling scars are those on his lower legs. They come from the high voltage fence that he crawled through to escape from Camp 14. If the physical scars are brutal, the mental ones will take longer to heal. Shin was born in the camp, one of two children resulting from a union arranged by guards as a reward for his father's skill on a lathe. His father and "wife" were allowed to see each other only a handful of times in a year. His mother treated him brutally. Any idea that being prisoners together caused inmates to bond against a common enemy are rapidly dispelled. "Outsiders have a wrong understanding of the camp. It is not just the soldiers who beat us. It is the prisoners themselves who are not kind to each other. There is no sense of community." Instead there is betrayal and distrust. Prisoners are encouraged to snitch on each other. Their reward? Food. In conditions that constantly threaten starvation and where malnutrition is normal, prisoners will do almost anything for extra food. One night, Shin hears his mother and brother plotting an escape. Angry at them and brainwashed into a culture of snitching, he informs on them. His mother is hanged; his brother is executed by firing squad. Shin is forced to watch. And what does he feel? Nothing. He feels nothing because they have broken the camp rules and therefore they deserve to die. It is many years before he is able to admit that he had betrayed them and a great deal longer before he is able to forgive himself. Shin is the only known survivor of the camps to tell his story. There are thousands of defectors from North Korea to the South but only three people ever are known to have escaped from the camps. Escape From Camp 14 is a brutal and horrific story. There are plenty of war stories that glorify escapes from high security prisons but this is not one of them. Even Shin's escape is hedged with pain. Told by the guards to stay close to a new prisoner and report everything he says to them, he takes the first step to independent thought by befriending the man and keeping his secrets. Through him he learns something of the outside world. In particular, he learns that in China you can go into a restaurant and order meat, as much grilled meat as you like. That is incentive enough to escape. So the pair plot and plan, take advantage of a work detail near the perimeter fence and run for it. His colleague dies on the high voltage fence; Shin crawls over his body and with seering electrical burns to his legs makes his way by random chance to China and eventually, South Korea. And there, over a long period of time, his story is finally told. A happy ending? Not really. Shin is damaged in every sense of the word. He is taken to Los Angeles to join the South Korean community there, but he refuses psychiatric help and returns to South Korea. Adjustment to a materialistic and highly competitive world is virtually impossible. The scars of the camp will take a lifetime to heal although he has found a human rights cause, the camps, to which he has devoted himself. Escape From Camp 14 is an important book as all survivor testimonies are important. It spells out, as nothing has done before, the sheer duplicity, brutality, horror and inhumanity of the Kim dynasty. Coupled with Barbara Demick's Nothing To Envy, the white space on the map is slowly being coloured in. We can no longer claim ignorance. |
| Posted: 10 Sep 2012 04:00 PM PDT AMERICAN journalist Blaine Harden has been in machine-gun bloodbaths in Eastern Europe and covered corruption in the Congo, but says the most powerful story he has ever reported is in his new book, Escape From Camp 14. Published earlier this month by Viking, the book is a biography of Shin Dong-hyuk who was born in 1982 in a no-exit prison camp in North Korea, where thousands are detained for so-called political crimes. Shin was raised under conditions of starvation and incredible brutality, taught to consider his mother a competitor for food rather than a loved family member, and escaped the camp only at age 23 – by climbing through an electric fence, insulated against the deadly current by the body of his best friend. The book details how he walked for a month until he reached China and then South Korea, via its embassy in Shanghai. Later, he moved to California, sponsored by Americans who read a 2008 report Harden wrote about him in the Washington Post. Now 30, he is in Seoul, posting weekly web videos featuring other defectors from the North. "I can say without reservation that Shin's story is the most interesting and complex that I've covered," Harden, 60, declares over the phone from Seattle, Washington, the United States. He resides there with his wife Jessie, who works for Boeing, and their nine-year-old daughter Lucinda and seven-year-old son Arno. He recently took Lucinda to see the fantasy movie, The Hunger Games, which is set in a dystopian world where children kill one another for food, and found horrific parallels to the savagery Shin lived with for most of his life. "He did not know basic value structures and what it meant to be a human being until he was 23," says the journalist who, like Shin, hopes Escape From Camp 14 can raise enough international awareness to effect change for the better in the North Korean gulags. The book is certainly making waves: It has been on the New York Times bestseller list for three weeks and received rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic. London's Guardian newspaper calls it "harrowing but important", while the Wall Street Journal describes it as "searing". The Economist and the Washington Post, Harden's former employer, have called for investigations into the prison camps. A career journalist now with TV channel PBS Frontline, Harden started out at age 25 on the Post, where his first assignment was to write about a horse that had been saved from drowning. He went on to become its foreign correspondent in Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia, and in the noughties, was national news correspondent for The New York Times. He was with the Post again, covering North and South Korea, when he first met Shin via a human rights group in Seoul in December 2008. Given Pyongyang's iron grip on media and reporting in the country, one of the best ways for journalists like him to fill in the blanks is to talk to defectors in South Korea, Harden says. Shin was then 26 and had recently published his life story in Korean, Escape To The Outside World, which had sold barely 500 of the 3,000 print run. Over lunch and through a translator, he shared stories of the savagery he encountered daily in the camp, from his schoolteacher beating a girl to death because she was hoarding food – five "unauthorised" grains of wheat – to his cousin being raped by the prison guards. Shin and his older brother themselves were products of a forced "marriage" between his parents, who met only a handful of times to breed. He has no idea whether he has other relatives still in the camp. His account could not be verified independently, though human rights activists in Seoul agreed that it rang true. Shin is after all unique, the only North Korean born in a prison camp to have escaped alive. An estimated 200,000 people are confined to these camps, easily captured in satellite images but denied vigorously by the government in Pyongyang. Harden says the existence of these camps explains how the North Korean system has been able to outlast other totalitarian regimes. "The reason is they have lost none of their capacity for cruelty," he says. His 2008 report on Shin for the Washington Post elicited "a remarkable reaction from readers", so over the next nine months, he convinced the younger man to allow him to write a book that would raise awareness of these camps. They met in southern California in the summer of 2010. Shin was then living under the wing of an American couple but spoke little English. Translation was provided by a friend his own age, Yale graduate David Kim. "It was an experience like no other, to pry so hard, to get close, to get as much information as possible. He didn't like it, but he understood the need for it," Harden recalls of their sessions, which went on intermittently until February of last year. Midway through their interaction, Shin revealed a terrible truth: that he was responsible for the death of his mother and brother. He had earlier reported how she and his older brother were hanged to death for attempting to escape when he was 14, and had also spoken of the torture he faced as punishment for their so-called crime. He had hidden the fact that he was the person who betrayed them to the guards in the first place, but felt he could no longer lie to his friends. Harden quoted Shin's words at a human rights conference in Washington, DC, earlier this month: "I wanted people to know this is the kind of children they are raising right now in these camps. People whose loyalty is to the guards and who will do anything to get more food." The effects clearly linger, as the book shows. Shin has difficulty maintaining relationships and has also shied away from learning English. Even now, when he and Harden appear together to promote the book – they split the proceeds evenly – he needs a translator. "He has said he's not the kind of person who should get an education," the journalist says. "It's a part of his guilt surviving these camps. "He has also said he's in the process of learning how to be a human being. Those are his words." – The Straits Times, Singapore/Asia News Network |
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