Globe reporter, Kim in Boulder
Jaipur Literature fest in third year
In January 2002, journalist Mike Rezendes and his colleagues at Spotlight, The Boston Globe’s crack investigative team, ripped the cover off the Catholic Church’s long cover-up of sexual abuse by priests with a report that would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize.
A month later, Suki Kim made her first visit to the gulag state of North Korea as an undercover journalist, an experience she later turned into a shocking cover story for the New York Review of Books.
Though separated by nearly 7,000 miles, an entire continent and the largest ocean in the world, Kim and Rezendes were engaged in precisely the same enterprise.
“Mike’s work on the Catholic Church, and my investigative work in North Korea for over a decade, both take on subjects that are nearly impossible to crack,” says Kim, author of “Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea’s Elite” and the novel “The Interpreter.” “We both had to figure out how to approach the subject within a facade where it is almost impossible to get at the truth.”
Rezendes and Kim first met at a conference of Investigative Reporters and Editors in Phoenix when she approached him after a talk.
“I asked, ‘Who are you?’ When she said, ‘Suki Kim,’ I said, ‘What are you asking me questions for? I should be asking you,’ ” says Rezendes, who continues to work for Spotlight and is co-author of two books on clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
The two journalists will meet again when they join some 70 other writers from around the
world for the Third Annual ZEE Jaipur Literary Festival in Boulder on Sept. 15-17. Organizers of the 10-year-old literary festival in Jaipur, India, which draws more than 300,000 people, chose Boulder in 2015 to launch its U.S. counterpart.
Other international writers on the bill include Vikas Swarup, author of “Q& A,” basis for the Academy Award-winning movie “Slumdog Millionaire”; activist Amber Cantorna, the lesbian daughter of a highranking official at Focus on the Family; and Canadian-Egyptian novelist and journalist Omar El Akaad.
The lineup also features numerous local authors, such as New York Times-bestselling mystery novelist Margaret Coel, KGNU New Director Maeve Conran, “The Shallows” author Nicholas Carr, and beat writer Anne Waldman.
The festival format includes both joint discussions on diverse topics — “The Russian Revolution: 100 Years Later,” “Marvelous Thieves: Authors of the Arabian Nights,” “All the World’s a Stage” — and interviews with individual writers.
Akaad will interview Kim on “Undercover in North Korea: Facts and Fictions.” Kim has visited North Korea under many guises, including as a member of an evangelical Christian team seeking to establish a university in the notoriously closed nation.
“To be honest, they don’t really care if you are Christian, Muslim or atheist, so long as you believe in the Dear Leader (dictator Kim Jong-un),” she says.
Kim has watched this summer as Kim and President Donald Trump have traded threats and North Korea has launched rockets with the potential of delivering nuclear weapons to American cities. She says the current dangerous, intractable situation began in the immediate aftermath of World War II, when the United States and Soviet Union divided the Korean peninsula as a dynamic of the Cold War.
“In North Korea the only motive is regime survival, nothing else,” while the forces arrayed in opposition clearly have regime change on their minds, she says. And that means, despite the brutality and human-rights abuses of the Kim dynasty, “there is literally no other option than cooperation.”
Trump’s comments, she says, “have served no purpose but to increase tension and panic everyone. It’s hard to see how that benefits anyone.”
Mukund Padmanabhan, editor of The Hindu, will interview Rezendes in a session titled “Spotlight.”
“It’s both a heyday right now and a dangerous time for investigative reporting,” Rezendes says. “When the president of the United States says members of the media are enemies of the people, that’s pretty serious business.”
Perhaps worse, he says, dictatorial regimes such as those of Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey and Hun Sen in Cambodia are emboldened by the president’s anti-media rhetoric. Erdogan’s forces have imprisoned more journalists than any other nation, and Hun Sen has threatened to shut down all independent media.
“President Trump’s rhetoric literally puts journalists in grave physical danger,” Rezendes says.
Kim and Rezendes also will be interviewed together on the subject of writing itself.
“I write stories that are 5,000 words long, sometimes longer,” Rezendes says. “So if I want people to read to the bottom, I have to employ narrative techniques, cliffhangers and evocative writing.”