Kang Chol Hwan Selected as One of Time’s ‘Asian Heroes’

In person,  Kang is unimpressive.  Like  all of the North Koreans I’ve met, he’s strikingly  small, frail, reserved, and downcast.  One fears that some loud noise might frighten him off.  He makes a  deeper impression through the written word:

At 10, Kang and his family had already spent a year in Yodok, a North Korean labor camp, sent there because his grandfather, a manager at a state-owned agency, had been accused of disloyalty to the regime of the late dictator Kim Il Sung, father of current strongman Kim Jong Il. Kang’s task was to help bury those who died, usually of hunger or untreated ailments. The work was grim, but, he later recalled, it offered a “very practical advantage: the burial team could strip the corpse of its clothes and either reuse them or barter them.” Kang would not be released till he was 19.

Read the rest here.