Paek Nam-nyong - Friend - A Novel from North Korea

Friend is set during the Hidden Hero campaign of the 1980s, which sought to recognize the extraordinary achievements of otherwise ordinary citizens, and elements of this campaign can be found in the novel. It is also influenced by Three Revolutions campaign mentioned earlier. Protagonist Judge Jeong Jin Wu admonishes the other characters for not abiding by the Party’s directives of self-improvement through education. Manual labor was no longer seen as the pinnacle of achievement in North Korean fiction. By the 1980s, many stories portrayed characters with higher education and technical skills. The trend in fiction of this period was to delineate a new class of intellectual heroes who improved social conditions with their brainpower rather than their brute strength. Seok Chun is a lathe operator who refuses to pursue the education that could raise him to a managerial or executive position at his factory. Paek does not denigrate Seok Chun’s achievements, but he does question whether the younger man could offer society more than the use of his hands. Judge Jeong Jin Wu rebukes Seok Chun’s averse attitude toward change, which is a common literary and rhetorical style in North Korean literature, and encourages him to enroll in the Engineering College. Although Judge Jeong Jin Wu works to inspire the characters to change so that they can help develop a stronger nation, the conclusion of the narrative is more ambiguous than the prescribed formula used in many North Korean works of fiction. For Paek, even proper political indoctrinations cannot make individuals change overnight. Ultimately, Paek designs his narrative around individuals who navigate their agency through the thicket of political expectations and discover meaning in themselves, family, and the community.

In this sense, Friend is Paek’s finest work, an achievement that has made him a renowned novelist in North Korea. The motif of the story is the catastrophic consequences of divorce that derive from individuals placing their self-centered choices above family unity in importance. Paek abides by the Party’s ideology on family as a small unit that ought to preserve the moral fabric of society, but he also asserts that remaining happily married is a completely different story. No political ideology can force individuals to love and live happily ever after. He acknowledges that marriage is hard work and that maintaining the harmony of a family requires self-sacrifice. And through secondary plotlines, Paek is able to complicate even this assertion. Far from being a tidy morality play, Friend portrays a messy world of human emotions and relationships that is at once entirely alien and eerily familiar.

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