Black Girl from Pyongyang: In Search of My Identity

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A cursory Google will tell you that Francisco Macias developed a cult of personality, a one party system and appointed himself President for life. I do recommend reading this book if you are reading other literature on EG. It gives a different perspective and is worth considering when researching the country. I am glad to tell you that you have the privilege of studying at the Mangyŏngdae Revolutionary Boarding School,’ he said. The life story of Monica is a very unique and is certainly worth reading. However, I feel like a lot of information of her research towards her father is left out, not mentioning one negative aspect of his leadership.

Are they aware that, wherever there are asymmetric power dynamics, the victor's version of events is accepted as the truth, creating a warped narrative of historical events? I like to remind readers that the author is not trying to show the world the truth and the only truth, but she is giving the reader an opportunity to soak in how other people might see the world. Not everything anyone of us have learned in school and during our upbringing is the ultimate truth. We all need to try to understand other people better, and not simply let everyone know we have the only right knowledge, and everyone else is wrong. Isn't that one of the reasons the world is what it is today? You won't find a recounting of atrocities or a political discussion on the merits or demerits of such complicated places as North Korea or a country immersed in post colonial dynamics like Equatorial Guinea, but her story is full of daily life experiences, with highs and lows, with lovely friendships and bittersweet memories, of real people living in real places even if that place is Pyongyang. This may sound harsh, but whenever she does try and expose her value system, her prose is reminiscent of an undergraduate-level politics essay. Grand statements that mean very little, waffly overarching generalisations, 'love don't hate'-style statements... such a missed opportunity, so many glaring omissions, and yet a lot of time is devoted to her time as a Leroy Merlin employee - only Spanish readers and/or anyone sufficiently acquainted with the Spanish home furniture market will realise how bonkers that sentence is.The Clapham Grand announces partnership with Terrence Higgins Trust, supporting World AIDS Day 2023 How often did Monica see Kim? “At the beginning, quite often. He was charismatic. He would nag me to study hard, like a typical Korean grandfather. He’d say, ‘The best weapon you have is education.’ ” Although his nephew monitored Monica day to day, Kim observed her progress, encouraging her to drop one dream of becoming a pianist and instead to study textile engineering to help her country’s fledgling economy. Feeling abandoned by her family, the young Monica struggled to fit into Korean society. At first she rebelled against its military discipline but eventually chose Korean culture over her own. Her Great Leader had promised her father that he would educate her and send her home to serve her own country. So he employed a Spanish teacher to ensure she kept up with her native language, but she refused to learn it and cleaved ever closer to Kim’s dictatorial regime, until the incident with the Syrian student and the newspaper. Being open to all sides of a narrative, as she often mentions she is, does also mean looking into the narratives that do not favour your family. The hypocrisy is striking and hence I did not like her analysis of her father's history and take on the world. This is not to say she is wrong in all respects but she should have included more nuance in her analysis to consider more sides of her fathers reign.

In Spain, for the first time, she heard people badmouth her two father figures. She heard Macias described as “the dictator of dictators, a despicable human being”. “It was the most difficult thing to think my father was a killer. I never said my full name to people.” One man followed her on the street. He said he knew who she was and would kill her.My connection to the society I grew up in is partly emotional, but I do have the capacity for dispassionate legal analysis. The moment that emotion interferes with analysis, the analysis can become sloppy.”

I originally requested this book because I am fascinated by North Korea and thought that I would learn more this mysterious country.I enjoyed this for its honesty, for her remarkable and truly fascinating story, for the insight she provides into life in North Korea, for the spotlight, however flawed, on Equatoguinean life, and for her perspective on life as an eternal migrant in Spain, the US, the UK, South Korea, and other places. There are many highlights, and I loved that she included so many photographs. Her account of her first visit to China from North Korea is hilarious, and sad. In all, Macias is a brave and complex woman, and I’d love to invite her to that hypothetical dinner party. I wanted desperately to blend in with my classmates, but their unspoken message seemed to be: ‘You are not Korean, you are not like us.'”

Not just your run of the mill memoir, it's the life story of a Guinean girl who grows up in North Korea, even more, the youngest daughter of the 1st President of independent Equatorial Guinea raised in North Korea under the protection of Kim Il-Sung... who keeps trying to find out who she is with her mixed identity while also trying to reconcile the two men so crucial in her life, who the world sees as horrific, with the direct experience of them she had.Her “unusual” life story certainly gives her a unique vantage point from which to comment on global divisions. For Macias (who currently lives in London and works in a clothes shop) was born in 1971, the fourth child of the first legitimate president of independent Equatorial Guinea, Francois Macias. Fearing for her safety and seeking to strengthen his country’s ties with the communist bloc, he sent her to be raised in North Korea by the man she calls her “adoptive father”: Kim Il-sung. Shortly after she arrived in Pyongyang, aged eight, her father was accused of perpetrating atrocities and executed by firing squad – although nobody told her he was dead. So Monica enrolled in North Korea’s University of Light Industry, where she shared a hall with other foreign students. She began to have inklings of how limited her environment was and that not all the world might be like North Korea. She was shaken when a man she realised must be a surveillance agent – a concept she’d heard of but previously dismissed as a fantasy – harshly told her as a Korean she could not spend time with a Syrian friend. “I started wondering.” In Beijing, singing karaoke with South Koreans, people she’d been taught to view as US puppets. Such meetings made her question the society in which she’d been raised. She has been very closely involved at the highest levels of two countries that are generally regarded, in the west, as being despotic. Her central thesis is that's it's important to understand every country's viewpoint from its own perspective. I am more than happy to accept that. I have no doubt that the west has done terrible things in the past; that may influence the way in which it reports on other countries; and it may cause the west to continue to behave in ways which are not always just or fair. However, despite Macias saying several times that she wanted to investigate and understand Equatorial Guinea and North Korea, she failed to make it clear that this is what she did.