The Reluctant Communist

The Reluctant Communist
Author: Charles Robert Jenkins with Jim Frederick 2008 225 pp
My rating: 3*
Started April 29 2008, Finished April 30 2008

An interesting sidelong view into what life is like inside North Korea. Jenkins was a US soldier stationed in South Korea in 1964 who, more or less to avoid being sent to Vietnam, abandoned a patrol along the DMZ and deserted to North Korea, believing he’d soon be returned to the US, spend a few months in the brig and then be discharged. Instead, the North kept as something of a prize which they didn’t know exactly what to do with, establishing a life for him in various enclaves with a few other American deserters and other random foreigners, such as some Japanese women, one of whom became Jenkins’ wife, who had been kidnapped by the NK government to train spies. While Jenkins’ unique and relatively privileged status as well as the distance his handlers tried to maintain between him and ordinary North Koreans preclude a true view of the desperation of life in that nuthouse of a country, one still gets a strong sense of what a bleak and drab existence life there is. A few observations of note: 1. During the 40 years covered, while the first and much of the 2nd world underwent a period of unprecedented growth and prosperity, the North Korean economy actually contracted to the point where existence was much more difficult at the end of Jenkins’ stay than at the beginning; by the end, even for Jenkins, food was very difficult to procure 2. Theft was a constant concern for everyone. School children were required to stand regular night watches at the school lest starving soldiers (though military spending was the government’s top priority) loot the school. 3. NK is so insular and lacking in foreign residents that Jenkins and his three fellow American deserters were often cast in propaganda movies, playing whatever Caucasian roles the scripts required 4. Though Jenkins’ relative simplicity is partially responsible for this, life in NK was so primitive and lacking in interesting events, that Jenkins is able to provide only 110 uncrowded pages of reminiscences about the 40 years of his life between his desertion and the diplomatic maneuvering that eventually resulted in his family being relocated to his wife’s native land.