Claire Kohda Hazelton

‘Buy pink baby clothes,’ Kim Jiyoung, the protagonist of this best-selling South Korean novel is told at the obstetrician’s office. Jiyoung’s mother responds: ‘It’s OK, the next one will be a boy.’ There are numerous births in this book. Births of girls are met with disappointment. The births of sons are celebrated. When Jiyoung is born in 1982, ‘abortion for medical problems had been legal for 10 years...aborting females was common practice as if “daughter” was a medical problem’. Her younger sister is ‘erased’.

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Michael Palin in North Korea was a two-part 2018 documentary on the Monty Python actor’s tightly choreographed tour of North Korea. Palin dances with cheerfully drunk North Koreans on International Workers’ Day and picnics with his guide, a woman called So Hyang. He plays catch with an inflatable globe with some North Korean children and learns some taekwondo.