Stars Between the Sun and Moon

June 29, 2015
The most effective element in Jang’s often tragic, thought-provoking memoir documenting her life in 1970s North Korea is the conversational, anecdotal mode in which it is told, akin to an oral history. Jang, recounting her story to Amnesty International Media Award–winning journalist McClelland, spares no detail of her harrowing upbringing in North Korea during a decade of famine, when she was often starving and was locked inside the house by her grandmother during the day. Jang attempts to better her circumstances by crossing over to China illegally, which results in her arrest, and marries an abusive man who, with Jang’s mother’s aid, sells her son, Sungmin, to a couple who live on a naval base. Subsequently, Jang is bedridden, “receiving no rations... after a week I had to return to work.” Lamenting the loss of her son and rejecting offers from other suitors—“I didn’t want another man. I wanted Sungmin”—she sets out to find him on the naval base, but the search proves fruitless. Her escape is suspenseful as she becomes a refugee in Mongolia and, ultimately, Toronto.