Hello from New York, where I’m excited to bring KOREAN MESSIAH into the world. I’ll be doing a series of events this week, including at the Korea Society with Barbara Demick; at the Asia Society with Orville Schell and Julian Gewirtz; at Columbia University with Tony Namkung, who inspired me to write this book; and at Redeemer East Side with Michael Luo of The New Yorker. There are a few other gatherings that you can find on my book website, so if you’re in town, come out!
Writing a book can be a lonely process, but that wasn’t the case here. Over the past twelve years, as the book grew from a simple question to a sprawling, hydra-headed project, I’ve been fortunate to have friends, colleagues, and fellow book-writers to discuss the core contentions with.
There were times where the project grew unwieldy; at one point, it ballooned to an astounding (and commercially unviable) 1,000+ pages. As many a journalist has learned, cutting can be much more difficult than writing. That’s hard enough with a 1,000-word piece, never mind a 1,000-page piece.
Still, few were the moments when my fixation with this project flagged. I believed the subject matter was important, yes, but more than that, I simply found myself gripped with this tale of the church boy who made himself the object of the world’s greatest personality cult. At times I imagined him, sitting on his mother’s lap in a packed Pyongyang sanctuary, gazing around as a rapt congregation sat spellbound at the feet of the pastor up on the dais, and thinking: This is how it’s done.
Now that KOREAN MESSIAH is heading to bookstores, a lot of friends have asked me how I feel. Honestly, it’s bittersweet. The project has been a part of my life for more than a decade now, preoccupying my nights and weekends as I juggled frenetic news cycles in Korea (Park Geun-hye’s impeachment, Kim Jong Nam’s assassination, South Korean women’s curling at the 2018 Winter Olympics, Trump and Kim’s swing from “fire and fury” to “falling in love”) and then in China (Covid-19, the 2022 Winter Olympics, Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, military purges, and the country’s rise as a technological power).
Of course, I’m sad to say goodbye to the book project. But more than that, I’m thrilled for KOREAN MESSIAH to finally see the light, and to have readers engage with it. Not all will be satisfied, and I anticipate objections. But my hope in writing this book is that it will change the way people think about North Korea, about Christianity, about Korea and Christianity, and about faith, power, and cults of personality—why we believe the things we believe, and how those beliefs can be shaped by others.
One advance reader wrote to say how the book “really shook me in ways I’m still trying to process.” That is the sort of sensation I felt too when I first began digging into the life of Kim Il Sung.
I hope you’ll pick up a copy of the book, and—especially if it too shakes how you think about the world—I hope you’ll spread the word.