Pages read: 3 - 62
The book Persepolis talks about how it felt as a little girl, living in Iran just as things started to get bad. Living at the time when students were segregated by gender lines, when women's rights receded rapidly, and when family members were put in prison or executed because they were suspected to be spies. On page 51, the book describes a scene where Siamek who had been released from prison, tells Marjane and her parents about how the soldiers brutally tortured the prisoners and even assassinated a person named Ahmadi after making him suffer the worst pains. This reminded me of, my neighbor country, North Korea. I have seen many articles, books, and exhibitions of how the North Korean citizens were mercilessly treated, just for trying to escape from the poverty and starvation. The picture below is from an exhibition consisted out of drawings drawn by prisoners who escaped from North Korea and came to live in South Korea. However, the picture represents how the man was stoned trying to flee to China. Texts said that once someone is caught doing the slightest thing considered betraying the dictator, soldiers would immediately send him or her to concentration camps and make them work for the rest of their lives. If they made the smallest mistake, they would cut their fingers of. When the prisoner was pregnant, they would hit her or use other methods to force abortion. I was utterly in shock when I realized that rape, burning the prisoners skin, assault, and public executions were just a normal act in those camps. In addition, there is so little to eat that the prisoners have to eat rats, frogs, insects, whatever they find to prevent them from starving to death. That scene of the book brought back those sad and painful realities the people in North Korea were facing right now.
Another connection I made was, on page 54, when Marjane thinks, “So my father was not a hero.”, “If only he had been in prison.” I thought that Marjane was really similar to me when I was young. In fourth grade, when a few of my friends told me about how their relatives escaped from North Korea, although I was happy for them, I also was kind of disappointed that none of my relatives had experienced such dramatic event. The picture below shows a boy telling an interesting story to his friends, but I had no story to tell, and Marjane probably thought the same thing.
In conclusion, from this book I think the stories of the prisons impacted me the most and made me think more deeply into it since North Korea is still performing those inhumanely actions.
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Photo Sources:
[북한 정치범 수용소 전시회(12)] 도망자 Runaway. Digital image. UTD. 그날까지, 12 Jan. 2012. Web. 14 Sept. 2014. <http://utdusa.tistory.com/839>.
A Fun Party Icebreaker Game for Tweens. Digital image. About Home. Donna Pilato, 5 June 2014. Web. 14 Sept. 2014. <http://entertaining.about.com/od/miscgames/a/tweenicebrkr.htm>.
Dear Silvia,
ReplyDeletegreat blog post! You had some very well thought and interesting connections. I really liked how you connections are of personal feelings toward North Korea, not of what other people think of the war. I also enjoyed how you added a bit of background knowledge of the torturing involved if someone tried to leave the country. Overall I think that it was really interesting how you connected a lot to the book and the author. Awesome post
Silvia,
ReplyDeleteReally good post about the Koreans. This stories are upsetting and I feel we all need to do something and protecting the people that are close to me. I don't know much about the Korean war ,but some Koreans from my BSS class told me that a bunch of Korean people are scared of another war. It's sad if the Iran war was similar to the Korean war because from reading Persepolis, I discovered that not just the adults ,but the kids died. Another thing that reminds me of war was when we saw a video about a kid that was exploded when he was playing soccer.