Tokyo
AFTER years of lonely street demonstrations and little-noticed newspaper columns, Kang Chol Hwan, a North Korean defector, learned recently that his life had irrevocably changed.
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 Seok Jae-hyun for the New York Times.
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"I was introduced as someone who wrote a book that was read by George Bush," Kang Chol Hwan said.
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"I was introduced as someone who wrote a book that was read by George Bush," he said in a recent interview at a museum cafe in Seoul, South Korea, only 150 miles south of the North Korean slave labor camp where he was imprisoned with his family in 1977. He was 9 years old.
Burning with memories of his family's 10-year imprisonment in the camp, which still functions hidden from outside eyes but not from satellite cameras, Mr. Kang teamed up with Pierre Rigoulot, a French journalist, to write a memoir, "The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag." Printed in five languages since 2000, including English, the book was well received just about everywhere but in South Korea, where it languished in obscurity, its harsh critique of the North out of step with South Korea's official policy of engagement.
Despite its considerable merits, the book seemed destined to fade from view, and Mr. Kang with it, until this spring when, at the urging of former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, President Bush picked it up.....