Every Falling Star

Sungju Lee was born in March 1987 in Pyongyang, North Korea. His father Seong-il was a military officer, and his mother Jeongwha was a teacher. In January 1997, North Korea’s authoritarian government exiled Lee’s family to a famine-stricken northern city, Gyeong-seong, to punish Seong-il for political noncompliance. In March 1998, as the famine worsened, Seong-il crossed the border into China seeking food and disappeared; in June 1998, Jeongwha set out for North Korea’s eastern coast to ask her sister for food and likewise disappeared. Left alone, Sunju joined a gang of boys orphaned by the famine, with whom he train-hopped around North Korea stealing food until his grandfather located him four and a half years later. He eventually escaped to South Korea and reunited with his father. In South Korea, Sunju Lee resumed his education, earning a BA from Seoul’s prestigious Sogang University. After graduating, he earned an MA from the University of Warwick, UK, in international relations. While interning with the Parliament of Canada, he encountered Canadian journalist Susan McClelland, who helped Sungju Lee write his young-adult nonfiction memoir, Every Falling Star. He consults for a South Korea-based nonprofit, the Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights, which provides aid to North Korean defectors. Susan McClelland, born on November 8, 1967, graduated from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario with a Social Sciences degree in 1990. She went on to work for the Miami Herald and the New York Times in the U.S. before returning to Canada to work as a freelance journalist. After McClelland encountered Sierra Leonean civil war refugee Mariatu Kamara in Toronto, the two co-wrote Kamara’s memoir, The Bite of the Mango, which won the Norma Fleck Award for Canadian Children’s Non-Fiction in 2009. Afterward, McClelland helped other political refugees and survivors of violence publish memoirs, including Every Falling Star with Sungju Lee. McClelland has also collaborated on documentary adaptations of her journalism such as The Nanny Business, about the exploitation of Filipino childcare workers in Canada. With her daughter Charlotte Marron, McClelland has started a media business, Full Cup Productions.

Every Falling Star is primarily set in North Korea during the North Korean famine, euphemistically dubbed the “Arduous March” by North Korea’s government-controlled media, which lasted from 1995 to 2000. The famine had several causes. First, the Soviet Union, which had historically provided aid to North Korea, dissolved in 1991. The resulting end of Soviet aid to North Korea badly damaged North Korea’s economy, particularly its agricultural sector. Second, China, another communist regime that had been providing aid to North Korea, dramatically reduced said aid in 1993 due to China’s own economic problems. Third, in summer 1995, extreme floods rendered much of North Korea’s farmland unusable while simultaneously destroying much of the country’s stored grain. These floods were followed by droughts in 1996 and 1997, exacerbating the effects of prior natural disasters. In addition, North Korea’s ration system, though supposed to provide food to the entire country, reportedly favored political elites and loyalists, leaving ordinary people to go hungry. It is unknown exactly how many North Koreans died from the famine; estimates vary widely, from about half a million to more than two million dead.

Sungju Lee co-authored Every Falling Star with Canadian journalist Susan McClelland, who has helped several young survivors of war and dictatorship write memoirs. McClelland helped Mariatu Kamara, maimed as an adolescent by soldiers in the Sierra Leonean civil war, write the memoir The Bite of the Mango; she also helped Lucia Jang, a political refugee and human-trafficking survivor from North Korea, write the memoir Stars between the Sun and Moon: One Woman’s Life in North Korea and Escape to Freedom. In Every Falling Star, Sungju Lee calls North Korea a “true-to-life dystopian nation.” Elsewhere, he mentions that his favorite novel is George Orwell’s 1949 work Nineteen Eighty-Four, about a fictional 20th-century dystopia widely believed to have been partly based on the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, a regime that backed North Korea’s communist dictatorship until the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. Though Sungju Lee’s memoir is nonfiction, Nineteen Eighty-Four may have influenced which real events from his past in North Korea he chose to relate and emphasize. Meanwhile, contemporary works of fiction set in North Korea include American writer Adam Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Orphan Master’s Son and pseudonymous North Korean writer Bandi’s short-story collection The Accusation.