Three disparate characters’ lives converge when they flee their homes and find themselves in a small Chinese town just across from North Korea. As they fight to survive in a place where danger seems to close in on all sides, in the form of government informants, husbands, thieves, abductors, and even missionaries, they come to form a kind of adoptive family.
Transporting the reader to one of the least-known environments in the world, and exploring how humanity persists even in the most desparate circumstances, How I Became a North Korean is a brilliant and essential first novel by one of our most promising writers. (Jacket text)
Special thanks to Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
Isaac Stone Fish is a senior fellow at the Asia Society in New York City, on sabbatical from Foreign Policy Magazine. While at Foreign Policy, he was the publication’s Asia Editor: he managed coverage of the region, and wrote about the politics, economics, and international affairs of China, Japan, and North Korea. Formerly a Beijing correspondent for Newsweek, Stone Fish spent seven years living in China prior to joining Foreign Policy. While there, he traveled widely in the region and in the country, visiting every Chinese province except lonely Jiangxi.
His views on international affairs have been widely quoted, including in MSNBC, NPR, CBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Slate, The Guardian, PRI, the BBC, the Sydney Morning Herald, Talking Points Memo, and Al-Jazeera, among others; and in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, and Vietnamese media. An experienced public speaker, Stone Fish has given talks at Columbia, Cornell, Duke, the University of Pennsylvania, Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, the University of Washington in Seattle, University of Groningen in Holland, Fudan University (in Mandarin), among other universities; and at conferences, think tanks, and events around the world.
Besides publishing in Foreign Policy, where he has worked for the last four years, Stone Fish’s articles have also appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Slate, The Daily Beast, Time, and the Los Angeles Times. While in Beijing, he served on the board of the Foreign Correspondent’s Club of China, and, when the sky wasn’t the color of glue, was an avid runner.
A fluent Mandarin speaker, Stone Fish is a graduate of Columbia University, where he studied Chinese literature. He is also a Global Shaper at the World Economic Forum, and a non-resident senior fellow at the University of Nottingham’s China Policy Institute. In his spare time, he is writing a novel on North Korea.
http://www.isaacstonefish.com/#bio
Thomas Byrne (moderator) joined The Korea Society as its President in August of 2015. He comes to the Society from Moody’s Investor Services, where he was Senior Vice President, Regional Manager, Spokesperson, and Director of Analysis for the Sovereign Risk Group in the Asia-Pacific and Middle East regions. Before moving to Moody’s in 1996, he was the Senior Economist of the Asia Department at the Institute of International Finance in Washington DC. Tom has an MA degree in International Relations with an emphasis on economics from The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Before his graduate work, he served in South Korea for three years as a US Peace Corps volunteer. President Byrne teaches as an adjunct professor, at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs in New York City and at Georgetown University’s Graduate School of Foreign Service in Washington, D.C.
