Read "City of Specters" by Bandi: HERE
“City of Specters” is a short story published in 1993 by a North Korean writer who uses the pseudonym Bandi. Bandi’s parents moved to China to flee from the Korean War, and he was born and raised there. A lot of Bandi’s works are intended to criticize the North Korean government and they have been smuggled out of North Korea. “City of Specters” is one of them. In this short story, North Korean mom Han Gyeong-Hee receives a punishment for putting on curtains that is not accepted by the government. The story shows the horrific reality in a society where everyone is pressured to conform and the risk of rebelling against it.
In the story, the protagonist Han Gyeong-Hee is described as someone who does not take the government’s rules seriously. She refuses to take down the curtain of her choice despite being warned twice by the government officials. Gyeong-Hee has her own reason: her son fears the photo of Karl Marx and the country’s leader, Kim Il-Sung. The curtain she chooses does not match other buildings’ curtain and the government officials state that it will ruin the image of the city of Pyongyang especially when it is one day before the National Day celebrations. Not only that, Gyeong-Hee also refuses to participate in the celebration for she is taking care of her sick child. Although Gyeong-Hee maintained this courageous behaviour, she and her family end up banished from the capital city to the countryside because the government claims that what she does is “unacceptable.”
Even though the story is fiction, it is hard to not see how realistic the story might have been, especially upon acknowledging the setting of the story. It is no secret that North Korea is a place where communist dictatorship flourished and, at least based on what we hear from the media, a place where freedom is almost non-existent. North Koreans live with strict regulations and rules, especially when it comes to what their government says. There are many stories on how breaking the rules will result in horrible punishment, even as far as death execution, for both locals and tourists. This is what happen to Gyeong-Hee’s family where something as small as a curtain eventually lead them to be relocated.
The writer uses Gyeong-Hee to emphasizes the theme of conformity. Gyeong-Hee was born in the countryside where she did not need to be uniformized when the National Day celebrations come. Her husband has said that that is not the way it is in Pyongyang, but she does not care. She seems to not take the communist ideology very seriously, even justifying her son’s fear to the father of communist. When the government official accuses her of being a spy for her different curtains, she laughs and tell the truth, she does not show any fear. She is the opposite of conformity; she is a rebel, she is fearless, she is “possessed by the spirit of some general” (14) like what her grandmother said.
This attitude is also what makes Gyeong-Hee realizes the dystopian situation that she currently lives in. When the celebration of National Day happens, Gyeong-Hee, who stays at her apartment instead, witnesses how the Pyongyang citizens quickly gather in the Kim Il-Sung square in forty-five minutes after a public warning is sounded throughout the city, the government claims this is a miracle as a just the rain has just stopped a second before that. Looking at this, Gyeong-Hee feels eerie, claiming that she is seeing an “awe of terror rather than the wonder felt in witnessing a miracle.” She wonders what kind of force can make people act like “puppets on a string”. She later realizes that fear is the reason. After the day of the celebration, government officials start to investigate everyone, looking for “anything deemed to have marred the celebrations” (13). People fear this, people fear going against order as it cost them to be banished from the city, which is unfortunately what happen to Gyeong-Hee.
At the end, it is shown that Gyeong-Hee herself regrets her action, realizing that she “truly had lived in ignorance of what it was to fear” (14). Upon realizing this, she seems to understand that she has no choice but to conform to the society she lives in. She cannot go against the government anymore, she now has to believe in the ideology that the country believes in.
In conclusion, “City of Specters” is a story about the consequence of going against conformity in a society where the people do not have freedom. Bandi shows a terrifying portrayal of how the North Korean’s government use fear to make people obey and how the people in the country hold onto this fear to survive. Although the consequence of Bandi’s action could have been worse, it still send the message that, unfortunately, freedom is not a choice in this part of the world.
REFERENCE
Bandi. (1993). City of Specters. CommonLit. Retrieved June 9, 2022, from https://www.commonlit.org/en/texts/city-of-specters
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