Our Twisted Hero [Hardcover]

The plot: our 12 year old narrator, Han Pyongtae, arrives at his new school in rural Korea. Fresh from big city schools in Seoul, he expects to earn the highest marks and the respect of his peers. Instead, he encounters a classroom bully in the form of Om Sokdae, the tallest of his classmates. Om Sokdae extorts food, candy, and prized possessions from the other children. He has managed this for years, and no longer has to resort to violence to gain what he wants. Om Sokdae holds his classmates in terror. Worse, the teacher will not intervene. His orderly class is to his liking.

_Our Twisted Hero_ is the story of how Han Pyongtae copes with this situation. In such a short book the author has provided a powerful story with a powerful message.

American readers will be fascinated by this glimpse inside Korean society and the Korean school system. But this is not just a Korean story-- Han Pyongtae's story seems universal. His struggle is not only with the bully, but with the perceptions of the other children, feelings of injustice, and the confidence of his parents. Hopefully, teenagers and adults all over the world will find _Our Twisted Hero_ and benefit by it as I have. A marvelous little story.

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The newcomer is aghast at the schoolyard cult of personality created by the monitor and refuses to go along with it, resulting in his ostracization. The class monitor doesn't merely intimidate the others with physical force, rather he relies on more subtle approaches, getting subordinates to take action for him, and cultivating a climate of fear. Of course, when the narrator attempts to report the misdeeds of the monitor to the teacher, there is no hard proof, and none of the other children will support his claims. Eventually the narrator finds the psychological isolation too difficult and decides to go along with status quo. This proves to be a very easy and rewarding path as he is made a crony of the monitor, and he finds life under the monitor's rule to be less distasteful than he had expected. Of course, at the end, a new teacher upsets the applecart and like the arrival of the adults in Lord of the Flies, restores order to the world of the children while chastising them for letting themselves fall into such an arrangement. Here, the narrator is alone in refusing to denounce the monitor, as the class is transformed back into the messy democracy the narrator was used to in Seoul.

For a book that only takes an hour to read, it presents a fairly powerful package. The structure of the Korean school system will be of interest to Western readers as Mungol makes the most of the device of using children to illustrate the flaws of the adult world. The story, in its shortness and simplicity, could serve as a valuable aid for educators seeking to teach children about dissent. The one flaw is the rather too pat ending, where we see the class monitor as an adult being dragged away by police for criminal activity. In real life, the dictators either manage to hold on to power or come to decidedly messier ends.