Black Girl from Pyongyang: In Search of My Identity

Product Information

She mentions that some North Korean defectors in Seoul, South Korea, talk about returning. I have heard this. This is because they come to South Korea totally unequipped to deal with the high pressure, capitalist life there. Nevertheless, I'm not sure if this makes a compelling argument why North (a hereditary dictatorship) and South (a functioning democracy) should be regarded equally. 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. Hmm, this is essentially a lightweight and patronisingly naïve narrative in which Macias states well-known axioms such as that above as if they're discoveries that only she has made and which she wants to impart to us. And yes, we are aware that, to quote the cliché, history is written by the victors. It's really not news.

I originally requested this book because I am fascinated by North Korea and thought that I would learn more this mysterious country. The trip sowed more doubt, not least after she ended up singing karaoke with tourists from South Korea, people she’d been brought up to pity as American puppets. She returned to Pyongyang, but was questioning her hermetic society even further. “It was as if I had walked onto a movie set and was reciting my lines of dialogue from an approved script.” Yet, it is her story, her propaganda, so to speak, and her truth. One can't help but feel a little sorry for her and how she's felt the need to justify so much of her life. I always appreciate different perspectives and this certainly provides one. She's a sympathetic character and one wants to like her, but in the end it just reeks of privilege and bias. In 2013, Macías gained media attention following the publication of her memoir, I'm Monique from Pyongyang ( Korean: 나는 평양의 모니카입니다), which was written in Korean. In this book, she recounted her experiences in North and South Korea and how they shaped her perspectives on the issues of the two countries. [5]Most important to her is discovering the truth about her father's rule in Africa, and her growing awareness of the reality of post-colonialism and the legacy of racism. I was very open to hearing a fresh interpretation of the Macias period, because the available histories of Equatorial Guinea are very damning of him. Monica made some interesting points regarding the vacuum and chaos left by the Spanish colonizers, and the difficulty of governing a tribal country that hadn't been free for two centuries. But the argument is not fully developed, at least not enough for us to start perceiving her father in a wholly new light. At any rate, the book is her story, not her father's, and it's a fascinating one.

Today, Monica Macias lives in a south London suburb and works on the shop floor of a well-known clothes chain. No customer could even begin to guess her extraordinary childhood divided between two countries that were among the worst in terms of political rights and civil liberties, effectively parentless from the age of 7 and brought up in a military boarding school. Macias considers that she had two fathers, both reviled by the world. She is Brown (self-identifying, as she is from an Equatoguinean father and a Spanish-Equatoguinean mother), yet she is culturally Asian, and Korean to be specific. She is completely dislocated from her father’s culture, except as she encountered it as an adult (and she hates the food, except for plantains). The memories of those closest to her of Francisco Macias, and their accounts of his rule, do not align with the world’s image of him, which she attributes to propaganda created by Equatorial Guinea’s former colonisers, the Spanish, and her father’s Equatoguinean enemies. At the beginning of the book, she promises to outline evidence that her father was not as bad as he was portrayed to be, and was rather the victim of circumstances, but she does not do this. Instead, she talks briefly about how people around him were killing innocent people in his name, without presenting evidence. Comments about structural racism feel tired and clichéd - whereas Monica could have had a fascinating perspective as someone with very mixed-race antecedents who has moved from Africa to Asia to Europe, and who speaks a variety of languages. For all her claims about the importance of education, there's not much evidence in here of critical thinking above a most basic level. Many have tried to make Monica denounce both Macias and Kim Il-sung, but she refuses. To her, she insists, Kim Il-sung was her saviour, of whose abuses of human rights she was obviously oblivious. More broadly, she contends no country is intrinsically “good” or “evil”. “I have long wondered whether any nation has earned the moral authority to lecture others.” She reminisces about the food and community she misses but I find it bizarre that she chose to skip over the negative parts altogether. Maybe in an effort to balance with what we otherwise would read about NK. I would have liked to read about her full experience though. I would have liked to know whether or not she was aware of executions, disappearings etc while she lived there.

The Sydney Morning Herald

The author is the daughter of Francisco Macias, the president of Equatorial New Guinea, another country that I know nothing about, and had sent his daughter Monica to be brought up and educated in North Korea under the guidance of Kim II Sung at the age of 8. She moved to New York. US president George W. Bush had named Iran, Iraq and North Korea the “axis of evil” and many Americans were horrified to learn of her origins. She was distressed by friends’ comments about the country’s famine from 1994 and 1999, estimated to have killed between 2.5 million and 3.5 million people. “They were talking about it as if North Koreans deserved it because they had a different system,” she says. The subject material of this book is fascinating. The young daughter of the President of Equatorial Guinea goes to North Korea in the 1970s for her education and possibly safety. She remains there for some 15 years before setting out to explore the world and revisit her heritage.