I Met Loh Kiwan

About

Loh Kiwan is a North Korean refugee making his way through a world that doesn't want him — from the border crossing to Brussels to London, navigating languages he doesn't speak, customs he doesn't understand, and a bureaucracy designed to keep people like him invisible. His story is told by Kim, a South Korean TV writer who encountered Loh's case in a news report and became unable to look away. Cho Haejin constructs a dual narrative that reveals as much about the person telling the story as the person living it. Kim's growing obsession with Loh's journey mirrors her own displacement — quieter, more privileged, but no less real. The novel asks what it means to witness suffering and whether the act of telling someone's story is generosity or appropriation. A novel about the distance between two Koreas — measured not in miles but in the gulf between someone who escaped and someone who can only imagine what that means.