num_pages: 246
description: Yongju is an accomplished student from one of North Korea's most prominent families. Jangmi on the other hand has had to fend for herself since childhood most recently by smuggling goods across the border. Then there is Danny a Chinese-American teenager of North Korean descent whose quirks and precocious intelligence have long marked him as an outcast in his California high school. These three disparate lives converge when each of them escapes to the region where China borders North KoreaDanny to visit his mother who is working as a missionary there after a humiliating incident keeps him out of school; Yongju to escape persecution after his father is killed at the hands of the Dear Leader himself; and Jangmi to protect her unborn child. As they struggle to survive in a place where danger seems to close in on all sides in the form of government informants husbands thieves abductors and even missionaries they come to form a kind of adoptive family. But will Yongju Jangmi and Danny find their way to the better lives they risked everything for? Transporting the reader to one of the most little-known and threatening environments in the world and exploring how humanity persists even in the most desperate circumstances How I Became a North Korean is a brilliant and essential first novel by one of our most promising writers.
language: English
title: How I Became a North Korean
publisher: Viking