All the lessons you need to learn in life, he said, will be taught to you by your enemy.

In my experience, ghosts are made up only of the living, people you know are out there but are forever out of range

. . . nobody every taught you loyalty . . .

The urge to create a fictional narrative is a mysterious one, and when an idea comes, the writer's sense of what a story wants to be is only vaguely visible through the penumbra of inspiration.

But, in North Korea, it's just the opposite. There's one story. It's written by the Kim regime. And 23 million people are conscripted to be secondary characters. There, as a youth, your aptitude towards certain jobs is measured, and the rest of your life is dictated, whether you'll be a fisherman or a farmer or an opera singer.

The light, the sky, the water, they were all things you looked *through* during the day. At night, they were things you looked *into*. You looked *into* the stars, you looked *into* dark rollers and the surprising platinum flash of their caps.

I know it really sounds cheesy, but I did feel a duty to try to tell the stories of people who couldn't speak for themselves.