
' The pain in my side hasn't been diagnosed but I'm sure it's Korea. A little Korean tumour there between the pancreas & liver, or maybe a Korean tear in the muscle around the ribs, a Korean hernia, a persistent Korean funk.. .the Hermit Kingdom took a huge piece of me, she vigorously broke me down & forced me to start life over'. Locked up for three & a half years for smuggling hashish, young American Cullen Thomas found himself struggling to survive in South Korea's harshest prisons. In this evocative memoir, he describes the extraordinary people he encountered: the Pakistani people-traffickers awaiting the death penalty for murder, the Columbian emerald smuggler, the carefree Peruvian luggage thief who travelled the world in a business suit, the American who killed his two sons, the Korean gang leader who inspired him to find dignity & purpose in his life inside prison. As he learned to adapt to both the prison regime & the unspoken rules of Korea's Confucian society, he found within himself a kind of freedom & gratitude to the men he'd come to know, the struggle he'd passed through, to Korea herself.