Monica Macias was 7 when was sent by her father, the first president of Equatorial Guinea, to live in Pyongyang with her sisters in 1979 It's quite amazing that Monica works as a retail assistant in a shop, as a chambermaid in a London hotel, low-paid jobs, and yet somehow manages to fly around the world, live in expensive cities (she claims she gets a part-loan for her SOAS studies) and never makes mention of how any of this is funded. Indeed, against the claim that her father stole national money, her mother says if that were true, where is the money... Having had not one father figure viewers by the west as a dictator but two, the author's childhood is not what you'd call traditional.. Following her life from Equatorial Guinea, a childhood in North Korea and then as an adult, discovering her identity across the world, the story is intrinsically interesting. Monica Macias offers, and is intensely passionate about, an alternative to the western view of North Korea. In 1979, aged only seven, Monica Macias was transplanted from West Africa to the unfamiliar surroundings of North Korea. She was sent by her father Francisco, the first president of post-Independence Equatorial Guinea, to be educated under the guardianship of his ally, Kim Il Sung.

Macias allows her own experience, and her experience alone, to determine her thoughts and opinions on North Korean society (and on her father, widely considered to have been one of Africa’s most brutal dictators). The subject material of this book is fascinating. The young daughter of the President of Equatorial Guinea goes to North Korea in the 1970s for her education and possibly safety. She remains there for some 15 years before setting out to explore the world and revisit her heritage. Macias’ experiences living in the two Koreas helped her develop an insider’s view of inter-Korea issues. So Monica enrolled in North Korea’s University of Light Industry, where she shared a hall with other foreign students. She began to have inklings of how limited her environment was and that not all the world might be like North Korea. She was shaken when a man she realised must be a surveillance agent – a concept she’d heard of but previously dismissed as a fantasy – harshly told her as a Korean she could not spend time with a Syrian friend. “I started wondering.”As to North Korea, I feel very ambivalent about what she has to say. She liked it, misses it and I can understand that as it is home to her. I do wonder how being essentially pupil of the state has influenced her experience.. Monica spent a somewhat confused and happy childhood at a strict, military boarding school in Pyongyang, where she lived a relatively privileged existence as the daughter of a close comrade and friend of Kim Il Sung. Initially, this effectively orphaned child cried herself to sleep. At one point she went on a hunger strike and ended up in hospital for a month. “I just wanted my mother,” she says. My anguish drove me to refuse all food. For a month, nothing passed my lips but water. My weight plummeted, raising fears that I might die. I was taken to Ponghwa hospital, where I was put on a glucose drip that kept me alive. Even there, my nights were spent crying: ‘I want my mum.’

Are they aware that, wherever there are asymmetric power dynamics, the victor's version of events is accepted as the truth, creating a warped narrative of historical events? With his family’s life in danger from his putative enemies, and with Communist nations reaching out to offer Macias assistance, he sent his wife and children to North Korea to live and be educated under the stewardship of Kim Il Sung, who the author refers to as her adopted father, and of whom she speaks very fondly. This may sound harsh, but whenever she does try and expose her value system, her prose is reminiscent of an undergraduate-level politics essay. Grand statements that mean very little, waffly overarching generalisations, 'love don't hate'-style statements... such a missed opportunity, so many glaring omissions, and yet a lot of time is devoted to her time as a Leroy Merlin employee - only Spanish readers and/or anyone sufficiently acquainted with the Spanish home furniture market will realise how bonkers that sentence is. If there were any, she claimed, the differences might have come from a limited understanding of each other. Mónica Macías (born 1972) [ citation needed] is an Equatoguinean author. She is the daughter of the country's first president, Francisco Macías Nguema. [1] [2] She was raised in North Korea.Kim Il-sung, the grandfather of current North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, looked after Macias and her two other siblings throughout their stay there.

Macias considers that she had two fathers, both reviled by the world. She is Brown (self-identifying, as she is from an Equatoguinean father and a Spanish-Equatoguinean mother), yet she is culturally Asian, and Korean to be specific. She is completely dislocated from her father’s culture, except as she encountered it as an adult (and she hates the food, except for plantains). The memories of those closest to her of Francisco Macias, and their accounts of his rule, do not align with the world’s image of him, which she attributes to propaganda created by Equatorial Guinea’s former colonisers, the Spanish, and her father’s Equatoguinean enemies. At the beginning of the book, she promises to outline evidence that her father was not as bad as he was portrayed to be, and was rather the victim of circumstances, but she does not do this. Instead, she talks briefly about how people around him were killing innocent people in his name, without presenting evidence. I like how personal this book is. I felt like I got to know the author. She is not afraid of realizing she is wrong, or that there are things she does not know, and she is not afraid of letting other people know that the way they see the world is not the whole truth either. In Spain, for the first time, she heard people badmouth her two father figures. She heard Macias described as “the dictator of dictators, a despicable human being”. “It was the most difficult thing to think my father was a killer. I never said my full name to people.” One man followed her on the street. He said he knew who she was and would kill her. Instead, she concluded, Macias’s reputation was the result of a powerful campaign by his enemies. She maintains that if her father had stolen his country’s oil wealth, her mother would not have sold plantains on the streets to survive, and she, his daughter, would not have had to support herself through low-paid jobs. “I am able to say my full name now.”

Within months, her father was executed in a military coup; her mother became unreachable. Effectively orphaned, she and two siblings had to make their life in Pyongyang. At military boarding school, Monica learned to mix with older children, speak fluent Korean and handle weapons on training exercises. I liked the clear, simplistic prose and Macias does draw some interesting parallels between the places she's lived. But there is almost a clinical sense of curation in the selective stories she chooses to tell, as if it's an essay with a point to prove. Despite the layered obstacles, Macias says she has fond childhood memories of her school life and classmates.

Macias’ father, Francisco Macias Nguema, was executed months after he sent his three children to North Korea. His nephew, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, launched a military coup and ousted Francisco from the presidency. Nguema was put on trial, accused of having perpetrated atrocities, and shot by firing squad in September 1979. Do a lot of the defectors face discrimination in South Korea, I believe so yes. Must it be difficult to rebuild your life as an immigrant in the South? So hard I expect, especially when often times they have left their family behind and may never know what will happen to them but also economically, competitively etc. However considering the circumstances people have to flee in I would argue that they've left for good reasons. A fascinating account of a woman’s quest for autonomy, and her bravery and determination to find the truth. It’s an investigative story to understand her true father, a powerful but controversial figure, the real man behind his many personas. A woman who was raised between countries, in search of her true home' Lily Dunn, author of Sins of My Father A cursory Google will tell you that Francisco Macias developed a cult of personality, a one party system and appointed himself President for life. In 2013, Macías gained media attention following the publication of her memoir, I'm Monique from Pyongyang ( Korean: 나는 평양의 모니카입니다), which was written in Korean. In this book, she recounted her experiences in North and South Korea and how they shaped her perspectives on the issues of the two countries. [5]

Fascinating memoir. Monica Macias has led a very interesting and unexpected life, from growing up the daughter of a man remembered as a brutal dictator of Equatorial Guinea to being raised in North Korea under the protection of Kim Il-sung to her humble travels around the world to better understand her identity. You won't find a recounting of atrocities or a political discussion on the merits or demerits of such complicated places as North Korea or a country immersed in post colonial dynamics like Equatorial Guinea, but her story is full of daily life experiences, with highs and lows, with lovely friendships and bittersweet memories, of real people living in real places even if that place is Pyongyang. Her life is obviously very interesting but she seems to have missed the chance to give us details of what is obviously an extremely interesting life and it is more just brief descriptions of what she did from year to year.