When Two Become One: Combining Stories to Create Synergy at The New Yorker
Tammy Kim’s article for The New Yorker, Two Koreas, Two Cults, Two Internets, weaves North Korean censorship and South Korean corruption together to draw a delicate parallel between the separate countries. Breaking news in South Korea forced Kim to “reframe and rethink” her original piece, leading to the unexpected combination of two stories that admittedly could have stood alone. But ultimately the two tales — the two Koreas — linked together passively assert that the North and the South “have more in common than they wish to admit.”
Kim’s piece began as a suggestion from the New Yorker’s Science and Technology editor to consider an article about the September leak of North Korea’s state-managed website domains. And with that, Kim began her research.
Kim follows an exhaustive, borderline-obsessive documentation process when putting together a piece. Most intensive is the detailed digital log that lists her every input — every email sent, reply received, hour researching. These habits likely linger from her former career as a social justice lawyer. “I’m probably wasting a lot time,” Kim says, but she doesn’t seem convinced of that admission. In fact, her systems seem to be some iteration of a personal accountability mechanism. Kim’s “day job” is as a Fact Checker at The New Yorker — one of the only publications left employing such positions — which forces her to invest in writing and reporting “before and after work.”
Part of that investment, Kim says, is making sure you are continually engaging your networks. This is where a lot of story ideas come from, explains Kim, “simply talking to people about what is going on.” For this piece, Kim remembered a connection with a binational Korean coder Taeyoon Choi. She enlisted his help and the two arranged a meeting at Choi’s Manhattan workspace; at this stage, Kim’s piece was only about the North Korean website leak.
In her article, Kim paints a picture of her and Choi huddled over his laptop, exploring one North Korean website after another. They can both read Korean, which helped, but Choi can also read code. As he inspected the backend source code, Kim recalls, Choi showed her how different websites had different levels of sophistication. He pointed out how different idiosyncrasies showed the hand of the coder.
Although eventually excluded from the article because it felt “too technical,” Kim and Choi found comments, embedded between the strings of html, that had been left by the North Korean coders. The comments didn’t contain state secrets or anything particularly enlightening, but for Kim, the daughter of South Korean immigrants, the discovery touched on a sense of humanity. It was an “intimacy with something,” she describes, connecting her and Choi with someone from the other Korea.
Only a couple weeks into her work on the North Korean piece, news broke about the discovery of a tablet that further incriminated South Korea’s President Park Geun-hye as a “puppet” for her cult-affiliated, long-time confidant. To some, the news-break may have appeared unrelated to Kim’s original piece. Kim recognized, however, the stark contrast between technology in the North and the South and yet the exacting role it played in fostering systemic, familial corruption and control in the two nations.
Control through technology has always been deeply exercised in Kim Jung-Un’s North Korea; the propaganda-ridden, state-run sites that form the only “web” his citizens know is one prime example. But South Korea, under the leadership of Park Geun-hye, has moved to heavily monitor the tweets, blog posts, and internet searches of its people, as Kim highlights in her article. Understanding the local language helped Kim scour local, South Korean newspapers to map the entirety of the scandal encapsulating Park Guen-hye’s presidency. This included the mobilization of technology to virally spread propaganda that was regarded as helping her win the election.
Kim admits combining the two stories to draw a parallel may feel “strained” or “odd” at first glance. But, as with most writing, stories often communicate different ideas at different levels, she explains.
On the surface Two Koreas reports on two, separate but timely, news events in the nations bound by geography. The deeper commentary, though, describes the politics of divided nations who believe themselves to be incomparably different from one another, yet both have fallen victim to corruption through the “poisonous notion of inherited loyalties.”
Kim explains her point-of-view, in framing this article: “to me, the Koreas still come from the same place; they are intimately connected.” Her sentiment echoes the hope of many in Kim’s generation, who wish to see the North and the South come together one day.
Being from Korean heritage herself, Kim says, was “helpful” for this story but it was not a necessity. She references her “built-in cheating mechanism,” which turns out to be running things by her parents, if she is ever unsure about her interpretation. But, she says, having a source that speaks the language (like Choi) is really all a journalist would need.
“You have to use everything you have in journalism,” exclaims Kim, who recalls an instance where she even used a co-worker’s wife as a translator on different piece.
Using everything extends to investing time in reading fiction and poetry too. “It helps keep your writing more creative,” says Kim. Despite saying she needs to do more of it, her investment is apparent to anyone who reads her work. A perfect example in Two Koreas is how Kim presents the technological surveillance by South Korea’s President, whose late father was a dictator in the 1960s, as “a digital echo of her father’s iron fist.” This beautiful turn-of-phrase is not an exception in Kim’s work but she is disciplined and avoids the overuse of allusion.
The New Yorker, after all, is known for using elegant prose to communicate deeply important issues. In Two Koreas, Kim’s ability to present and then delicately unwrap for the reader an unlikely parallel between these two Koreas brings new meaning to both stories — an unexpected synergy.
