Sublime

We were taught that Kim Il-sung was “the king who liberated Korea from colonialism.” He’d waged a war against US imperialists and their South Korean lackeys—and had won. It was thoroughly drummed into us that Kim Il-sung was an invincible general made of steel. I could tell the teachers were proud of his role as the Great Leader of an emerging nati

Little girls, she argued, were worth nothing more than the medals they could win, so they were starved, abused, and used to keep their bodies and skills perfect—like “pretty boxes.”

“Because if it is true and it is this bad, then everyone knows. If they knew, they’d stop it, right? Surely no one really believes medals are worth more than little girls.”

Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.

Whenever we had a toe war, I always won.

The use of pesticides had seemed to Ye just a normal, proper—or, at least, neutral—act, but Carson’s book allowed Ye to see that, from Nature’s perspective, their use was indistinguishable from the Cultural Revolution, and equally destructive to our world. If this was so, then how many other acts of humankind that had seemed normal or even righteou

I was stealing people’s minds, misleading them into feeling indebted to me when they really weren’t, and that was wrong.