The Reluctant Memoirist (2024)

It was in Miami, last December, while sitting on apanel at an international book fair, that I tried to piece together the chainof events that had brought me to a place I knew I did not belong.

I considered the writers sitting next to me, threewomen who had written memoirs from places close to their hearts—stories ofloss, family, selfhood. The questions from the audience, also mostly women,focused on each author’s emotional awakening and growth. How did we feel aboutthe spiritual journeys we had undertaken? What lessons had we learned along theway?

I had no idea how I was supposed to answer, for asimple reason: My book wasn’t a memoir. As an investigative journalist, I hadbeen researching and visiting North Korea for over a decade. In 2011, armedwith a book contract, I went undercover to work as an ESL teacher at anevangelical university in Pyongyang. My 270 students—the elite of North Korea,the sons of high-level officials—were being groomed as the face of regimechange to come under Kim Jong-un.

As a virtual prison state, North Korea is a placewhere the act of journalism is nearly impossible. Talking to citizens will getyou nothing more than the party line, and most information about North Korea isrelated by Western journalists, who either visit the country on brief pressjunkets or record and repackage the unverifiable accounts of defectors. Havingbeen born and raised in South Korea, I am fluent in the country’s language andculture, which enabled me to glean the subtleties beneath the surface, withoutthe censoring presence of an official translator.

As I taught, I lived in a locked compound undercomplete surveillance: Every room was bugged, every class recorded. I scribbleddown conversations as they happened and buried my notes in a lesson plan. Iwrote at night, erasing the copy from my laptop each time I signed off, savingit to USB sticks that I carried on my body at all times. I backed up myresearch on an SD card, which I hid in the room in different spots, always withthe light off, in case there were cameras. After six months, I returned homewith 400 pages of notes and began writing.

In reexamining a terrible tangle of a situation, onecan sometimes pinpoint that single moment when everything went wrong. During mydecade-long research, I had always feared that this would happen in NorthKorea, where I would have no control over my fate. As it turned out, the momenttook place in New York City, after I had finally finished my draft. Six monthsbefore publication, my editor sent over the design for the book cover.Something caught my eye: Below the title—Without You, There Is No Us: MyTime With the Sons of North Korea’s Elite—were the words, “A Memoir.”

The Reluctant Memoirist (1)

I immediately emailed my editor. “I really do notfeel comfortable with my book being called a memoir,” I told her. “I thinkcalling it a memoir trivializes my reporting.” Memoir, after all, suggestsmemories—the unresolved issues of the past, examined through the author’s ownexperiences. My work, though literary and at times personal, was a narrativeaccount of investigative reporting. I wasn’t simply trying to convey how I sawthe world; I was reporting how it was seen and lived by others.

My editor would not budge. She noted that my bookwas written in the first person—a device I had employed, like many journalists,to provide a narrative framework for my reporting. To call it journalism, sheargued, would limit its potential readership. I did not quite understand thenthat this was a sales decision. I later learned that memoirs in general sellbetter than investigative journalism.

I tried to push back. “This is no Eat, Pray,Love,” I argued during a phone call with my editor and agent.

“You only wish,” my agent laughed.

But that was the whole point. I did not wish that mybook were Eat, Pray, Love. As the only journalist to live undercover inNorth Korea, I had risked imprisonment to tell a story of internationalimportance by the only means possible. By casting my book as personal ratherthan professional—by marketing me as a woman on a journey of self-discovery,rather than a reporter on a groundbreaking assignment—I was effectively beingstripped of my expertise on the subject I knew best. It was a subtle shift, butone familiar to professional women from all walks of life. I was being movedfrom a position of authority—What do you know?—to the realm of emotion: Howdid you feel?

It soon became clear that this was a battle I couldnot win, and I relented. The content of my work was what really mattered, Itold myself. However it was labeled and marketed, my reporting would speak foritself.

Leading up to publication, I was nervous. Theevangelical university in North Korea had sent me threatening emails, demandingthat I send them my draft and cease publication. This was not unexpected:Investigative journalists who go undercover to gain access to institutionsconsidered off-limits to the public—from private prisons to mental hospitals—don’texpect a warm reception from the institutions they infiltrate. The evangelicalorganization wanted to protect its close ties to the North Korean regime andthe country’s future leaders. But I had entered the country under my own name,and gained the unpaid teaching job based on my qualifications.

The code of ethics of the Society of ProfessionalJournalists states that reporters should “avoid undercover or othersurreptitious methods of gathering information unless traditional, open methodswill not yield information vital to the public.” It is hard to imagine anysubject more vital to the public, or more impervious to open methods, than thesecretive, nuclear North Korea; its violations against humanity, the UnitedNations has declared, “reveal a State that does not have any parallel in thecontemporary world.” My greatest concern had been for my students, and I hadfollowed well-established journalistic practices to ensure that they would notbe harmed.


But when my book was finally published in the fallof 2014, the backlash came not from North Korea, but from a source I had notexpected: other reporters. As my publisher began to promote my book, severaljournalists took to the internet to denounce me. They called me “deeplydishonest” for going undercover. They slammed me as a “selfish person” forusing my access at the university to write a “kiss-and-tell memoir.” Theyaccused me, without any evidence, of “putting sources at risk.” In their eyes,it seemed, I was a memoirist treading on journalistic turf, a Koreanschoolteacher who sold out her students for a quick buck.

For the most part, the attacks ignored the substanceof what I had written—my investigative findings—and focused instead on mymethods. “What she wrote is nothing too shocking or new,” went a typical tweet.“She lied and risked people’s lives for financial gain.” When I was interviewedby the BBC, the radio hosts read aloud a damning letter they received from theuniversity in North Korea, and accosted me for betraying my employer. Indiscussion threads on Facebook, people accused me of going to North Korea for“the sole purpose of using the experience to make money by producing a book,”which might or might not have to do with the fact that my book made the NewYork Times best-seller list. My inbox began to be bombarded with messagesfrom strangers: “Shame on you for putting good people in harm’s way for yourgain.” One morning, I woke up to a Twitter message that read, simply: “Go fuckyourself.”

When the first review was published by Kirkus,I was shocked to see the words “deceive” and “deception” three times in thefirst paragraph. The Chicago Tribune questioned my ethics: “Her bookraises difficult questions about whether this insight is worth the considerablerisk to these innocents, none of whom knew her real reasons for being there.”The Los Angeles Review of Books went even further: “Herdishonesty has left her open to criticism, and rightfully so. The ethics of herchoice cast doubt on her reliability (another de facto peril of memoir), andher fear of discovery appears to have colored her impressions and descriptionswith paranoia and distrust.”

My book was being dismissed for the very elementthat typically wins acclaim for narrative accounts of investigative journalism.When Ted Conover, author of the award-winning Newjack, posed as acorrections officer to investigate the prison system, he was lauded by TheNew York Times for going “deeper than surface” and reporting “forreal.” Barbara Ehrenreich, author of the best-selling Nickel and Dimed,was widely celebrated for working undercover as a waitress, hotel maid, andsales clerk to expose the conditions of the working poor. Among journalists,undercover work is generally viewed as a badge of honor, not a mark of shame.(Miscategorizing my book as a memoir, as it happens, also had the effect ofdisqualifying it from any journalism awards.)

The backlash extended well beyond the media. At mybook events, I began to notice that there was always someone in theaudience—often white, often male, inevitably hostile—who raised his hand tochallenge my work. The gist was always the same: He had been to North Koreahimself, or knew someone who had, and it wasn’t as bad or dangerous as Iclaimed, so why was I lying, and putting people in danger, to sell a book?

The invariable pattern of such attacks gave mepause. Why did people with no real experience of North Korea feel such apassionate need to dismiss my firsthand reporting and defend one of the world’smost murderous dictatorships? My book had clearly wounded these men in someway. Perhaps it had undercut their male pride, their sense of being an experton world affairs, even when they weren’t. Perhaps they felt accused of beingcomplicit in North Korea’s horrors, and converted that guilt into denial, abasic survival instinct. Whatever their motives, they felt a need to assertthemselves over me. Some even denounced me, a South Korean woman, as someonewho had merely returned “home” to North Korea; to them, I hadn’t gone undercoverat all. Which is another way of saying that what I had written was personal,and therefore by definition not authoritative.

There are only two kinds of books on North Korea:those by white journalists who visited the country under the regime’s supervision,and “as told to” memoirs by defectors. The intellectual hierarchy isclear—authority belongs to the white gaze. Orientalism reigns.

For me, the systematic undermining of my expertisewas further escalated by the review in The New York Times. What struckme was not whether the review was positive, but the selection of the reviewer,a former TV columnist of Korean origin, whose only past book-length nonfictionwas on South Korean popular culture. Other than her ethnicity, it was hard tosee why the editors felt that a pop culture expert was qualified to review aserious investigative book on a dictatorship. I wasn’t surprised, however,since any time in my career that I am asked to review a book by a leadingnewspaper, which is not often, the book is almost always by an Asian,regardless of its content.

As an Asian female, I find that people rarely assumeI’m an investigative journalist; even after I tell them, they often forget.Having spent my formative years in America not speaking English, I know how tobe mute; my accent sometimes makes people assume I am naïve. I am good atdisappearing. I am aware that such apparent weaknesses can in fact beadvantages. The less threatening your subjects perceive you to be, the morecareless they are in revealing information, which makes it easier for thewriter to infiltrate a world without being conspicuous. Joan Didion, in SlouchingTowards Bethlehem, notes a similar quandary: “My only advantage as areporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, andso neurotically inarticulate, that people tend to forget that my presence runscounter to their best interests.”

Such gender discrimination can manifest eitherpositively or negatively. Most people I interact with as a reporter tend to bemen, and generally, men like to explain things to women. So I let them. Ilisten attentively; I never talk about myself because I am discreet by nature,but also because I am sincerely fascinated by every detail they reveal aboutthemselves. They are, after all, my work.

I recently spoke with Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, authorof Random Family, who chronicled the lives of a single family in theSouth Bronx for a decade. When her book came out, she told me, it was heremotional bond with her subjects that received much of the praise, more thanher meticulous reporting. “If I had written a highly detailed book about beingembedded with a troop,” she said, “the magnitude of the actual legwork wouldhave been recognized.” Yet she also believes that great literary journalismcombines the heart and the brain. “I cannot imagine doing the reporting I didif I weren’t a woman,” she said. “You are who you are, and that includes whenyou go to report.”

I would like to report that I took the reaction tomy book in stride, that I weathered all the accusations and dismissals withpatience, that I understood their causes and effects. But I did not.

The rage I felt was deeper than any other emotion Ihad ever known, as if I had been holding it in for a very long time—not justsince the end of my yearlong book tour, much of which I spent in bleak hotelrooms sipping bad wine from the mini-bar, but since I first arrived in Americaas a foreigner at age 13, mute and powerless. In immigrant ghettos, I learnedthat in my adoptive home, my skin was considered yellow, the color of theforsythia that had bloomed around my childhood home back in South Korea. Allthese years later, despite everything I had achieved, it was as though none ofit mattered: I was still that girl. And this time the girl was not mute, butmuted.

As I grappled with these feelings, I saw that myanger, the inner bits of it, reaches back to the reason why I write: to soothethat stirring within me, each moment I face the blank page, that beckons aheart so fearful of the wider world. When I sleep, I rarely dream; I am aloneinside a darkness, and at the edge of my consciousness lurk the howling,stifled cries of what lies outside. In my own way, I write to make sense ofthese jarring worlds, from internal to external, and to save lives, both mineand others’. This is why I risked going into North Korea undercover: because Icould not be consoled while the injustice of 25 million voiceless peopletrapped in a modern-day gulag remains part of our society. To have my reportingon this brutal truth so systematically undermined is symptomatic of what scaresme about America.

I recognize the irony here: Sifting through mymemories, recalling again and again what happened has turned me, in this essay,into a memoirist. My book is about North Korea, but this essay is about me, andfor me, there is something deeply humiliating about being so self-obsessed.Here I am telling my story to you, the reader, essentially to beg foracknowledgment: I am an investigative journalist, please take me seriously.I had been excluded from the insular world of journalism; perhaps, in the end,my anger is a reaction to that exclusion. As a woman of color entrenched in aprofession still dominated by white men, I have been forced to use my writing notto explore topics of my own choosing, or to investigate the world’scomplexities, but as a means to legitimize myself.

The Reluctant Memoirist (2024)
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