Every Falling Star: The True Story of How I Survived and Escaped North Korea

In August 2022, North Korea reported that the country had achieved “victory” over the COVID-19 pandemic. While for the rest of the world the pandemic began in 2020, North Korea’s first case was announced in May 2022. As reported by the BBC, North Korean officials do not refer to the sickness as “COVID-19,” only as “the fever.” CNN speculates what else Kim Jong-un, the current dictator of North Korea, might be hiding surrounding the country’s COVID-19 outbreak.

Every Falling Star was published in 2016, which is pre-COVID-19 outbreak, but many of its themes are still meaningful—perhaps even more so—in the wake of the pandemic. How is the way North Korean officials talk about COVID-19 a kind of manipulation of reality, much in the way they use Folk Stories and Propaganda to disguise a Traumatic Reality?

Teaching Suggestion: Help students understand that declaring “victory” over a virus, as Kim Jong-un did, is a kind of folk story about coronavirus. It makes North Korea seem like a “hero” and coronavirus a “villain”—and, essentially, it simplifies a much more complicated reality about the nature of COVID-19. Ask them for their thoughts on how the other themes in the novel—for example, Wealth Disparity and Hope and Disillusionment—might have changed in pandemic times.