Jia: A Novel of North Korea

By Hyejin Kim

The first novel about present-day North Korea to be published in the West.

A moving and true-to-life tale of courage in the face of oppression and exile.

Hyejin Kim’s Jia follows the adventures of an orphaned young woman, Jia, who has the grace of a dancer but the misfortune of coming from a politically suspect family. In the isolated mining village of her childhood, Jia’s father, a science teacher, questions government intrusion into his classroom and is taken away by police, never to be heard from again. Now Jia must leave the village where her family has been sent as punishment to carve a path for herself. Her journey takes her first to Pyongyang, and finally to Shenyang in northeast China. Along the way, she falls in love with a soldier, befriends beggars, is kidnapped, beaten, and sold, negotiates Chinese culture, and learns to balance cruel necessity with the possibilities of kindness and love. Above all, Jia must remain wary, always ready to adapt to the “capricious political winds” of modern North Korea and China.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cleis Press
• Release date: Jul 1, 2007
• ISBN: 9781573444842

Reviews for Jia

[katong_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A compassionate storyteller, a compelling story and situation. The author sometimes struggles to keep sentimentality in check, because its wrenching material. The author is a globally-oriented South Korean (US Phd, living in Singapore, studied in China), writing about North Korean refugees in China. I found her approach compelling, and different than how a Western writer might have handled this, though I'm still trying to figure out why exactly.PS: Loved the cover photo by Kubota-sensei... been a long time since I've seen him also...

[meggyweg · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The beginning of this was good, reminded me a bit of Memoirs of a Geisha. And certainly it was a novelty reading a book set in North Korea. I mean, nobody knows anything about North Korea. I've heard that this is the only book in English that's set in modern-day North Korea.However, as one professional review I read pointed out, the book reads like a first draft. It was like the author was trying to cram as many North Korea issues into the story as possible and she couldn't keep track of them all. So many plotlines were simply abandoned and there was basically no ending. Also, the business at the end with that nice guy suddenly deciding to rescue Jia from the brothel and pay for her to learn Chinese and everything for ABSOLUTELY NO REASON pretty much defines the term "deus ex machina." C-minus.