Essay Questions

What is the purpose of school at the camps?

There are two main purposes of the schools attended by children at the camp. The first is literacy; the North Korean regime wants a population able to understand the basic propaganda that they are being force fed; they need propaganda writers, and other skilled positions, and so do not want to create an illiterate population that is not as useful to them as a literate population would be.

The second purpose - and probably the most important in the eyes of the regime - is to indoctrinate and brainwash children from the earliest age. The regime wants children to grow up with a blind devotion to them, which it begins to teach from the moment that a child has the capacity to understand and process information. It also means that children brainwashed like this will have a devotion to the regime that over-rides any attachment to family, friends or to the notion of what is right and wrong. Schools begin the process of creating a nation of people willing to inform on others, especially on their elders, for whom the regime is still something new because they can remember when life was not always this brutal or harsh. School is another propaganda tool rather than an educational establishment, and exists only for the purpose of creating brainwashed and obedient servants of the regime.

Because Shin is an unreliable narrator is is difficult to like him?

It is very hard to like Shin because it is very difficult to identify with him, but that does not necessarily make it hard to believe him or to feel enormous pity for him and the circumstances of his life. He is a cold character who lacks empathy; in fact his personality could be said to be somewhat sociopathic in that he has no idea how to make bonds with people, and seems to have very little inclination to learn this skill.

Shin does not have an emotional bond with his mother and blames this on the way in which children in the camp are taught to feel nothing for their family, but later he shows that it was possible to overcome this when the need arose; he is able to feel a certain affinity for Park that approximates friendship, which also enables him to plan an escape for himself. Shin is a person who views others not according to their personality but according to their usefulness to him, which is not a very nice trait at all, and makes him hard to like, but it is also an understandable trait in someone who has been brainwashed from a very early age into believing the propaganda fed to him by an evil regime.