Cullen Thomas's memoir, Brother One Cell, is a thriller about an American college graduate, nicknamed the Jolly Marauder, who grew up on Long Island dreaming about pirates, adventure, and becoming a storyteller someday. Armed with an English major and big plans, Cullen took a job teaching English to school children in South Korea, quickly realizing that it was an insufferable grind. So he came up with a new plan: smuggling hashish into the country from Malaysia to finance a proper tour of the world. A friend had done it successfully, but Cullen got caught while collecting his contraband in the post office and was sent to prison for three and a half years. I've always been drawn to prison and war memoirs because they are like life only intensified, so you read looking for lessons about survival. Brother One Cell could be dark, but it is full of humor, poetry, and philosophy. From his cell window, Cullen could see a tree in the courtyard where he played basketball with murderers, thieves, drug dealers, and human traffickers. The tree kept getting cut down and down and down, but never lost its grace and dignity.

As a child on suburban Long Island, Cullen Thomas devoured Tintin comic books and the tales of Richard Francis Burton, the Victorian explorer. He thirsted for high adventure in foreign parts. At age 23, he got it: a sentence of three and a half years in South Korean prisons for mailing himself a kilogram of hashish.

At age 23, Cullen Thomas was arrested in Seoul and sentenced to three-and-one-half years in prison for smuggling hashish into the country. He provides a view of South Korean society few Americans will ever see and describes how his experience transformed him.

In the early 1990s, Cullen Thomas wasn’t sure what to do with his life. So he traveled to a place where a lot of Americans were going, a place where they were desperate for English teachers. In South Korea there was plenty of work.
“Whereas in New York,” writes Thomas in his new book, Brother One Cell: An American Coming of Age in South Korea’s Prisons, “I felt as though I had few good options and saw few inviting prospects, in Seoul, somehow almost everything and anything seemed possible. In the early to mid-1990s, South Korea became the eleventh largest economy in the world ... [T]he country was waking to a new dawn. Seoul was exploding with energy, and you could feel a wild, entrepreneurial fervor on the streets. There was this sense that things were unrestricted, without clear rules, there for the taking.”

Cullen Thomas is a stupid American who owes a lot to the South Korean prosecutor who pretended to believe that the kilogram of hashish he posted to himself in Seoul from the Philippines was for personal consumption. The prosecutor was fascinated with the American, as were jailers and inmates. Their prisons are neither terrifying nor violent places, but the 3½-year sentence was physically tough. In winter, the ink in his pen froze in the unheated cell. The food was mostly low-grade rice and kimchi and Thomas became ill with parasites and some nasty skin ailments. But the writer also meets a Tolstoy-reading Colombian gem smuggler, who teaches him how to survive, and a Peruvian thief who steals luggage from airports and hotels and who tells him exciting tales. Thomas has an easy, honest style that makes even the boredom fascinating. What makes Brother One Cell work is how the 23-year-old turns his arrest to his advantage, learning a life of asceticism and rationalising it all in a way his explorer hero, Richard Burton, might have understood. “I’d entered a forbidden city, lived among a bizarre and wondrous people, gained knowledge of a province previously unknown to my race."

A powerful autobiography of a young American, who left for South Korea in search of adventure and came back more than four years later deported, after having spent three and a half years in Korean prisons. Struggling to survive in extreme conditions, the rare foreign convict met with a colourful group of life-hardened men, who inspired each other to suffer their sentence with dignity and strength. Despite his rough years – or thanks to them – Cullen found within himself a sense of freedom, as well as gratitude for his co-prisoners, the Korean community and everything he had experienced.

In the early 1990’s, Cullen Thomas was a middle-class American 23 year-old living the post-collegiate dream of international travel: pick-up basketball games inside Beijing’s Forbidden City; fever-stricken hikes up the Rif Mountains in Morocco; riding the rails across Russia on the Trans-Siberian Express; teaching English in the booming economy of South Korea.
What set these adventures apart was one extraordinary mistake: In 1994, while vacationing in the Philippines, he naively mailed himself a package of hashish. When he tried to claim this package on his return to Seoul, his life devolved into a series of grueling interrogations, a hasty and surreal trial, and a three-and-a-half year Korean jail sentence, with no hope of appeal. Brother One Cell, published this month by Viking, is his memoir of that time.

As a child on suburban Long Island, Cullen Thomas devoured Tintin comic books and the tales of Richard Francis Burton, the Victorian explorer. He thirsted for high adventure in foreign parts. At age 23, he got it: a sentence of 3 1/2 years in South Korean prisons for mailing himself a kilogram of hashish.

South Korea hasn’t been particularly kind to Cullen Thomas. In fact, she’s been a real bitch. “The pain in my side hasn’t been diagnosed, but I’m sure it’s Korea,” he deadpans in the introduction to his hair-raising memoir: “A little Korean tumor there between the pancreas and liver.” Given the details that follow, frankly, it’s incredible that Thomas can hear the country’s name mentioned in his presence without convulsing with fear and loathing, let alone research and write a book about the place.

A young American in search of “adventure”, Thomas spent seven months in the Hermit Kingdom teaching English, and another three-and-a-half years in its prison system for smuggling hashish. A rare foreign inmate struggling to survive the soul-destroyingly harsh conditions, he “grew up” among a motley crew of life-hardened convicts: Pakistani human traffickers awaiting the death penalty for murder; a philosophical Colombian emerald smuggler (yes, such people do really exist); a carefree Peruvian thief who traveled the world in a business suit; a fellow American who killed his two sons; and a Korean gangleader who inspired the prisoners to do their time with dignity and strength.

The story that emerges out of this bleak scenario is unexpectedly life-affirming—a triumph of the human spirit over jackboot-stamping adversity that never strays in sentimentality or cliché. Thomas writes so freely and passionately of his experiences in Seoul Detention Centre and the broken down palaces of Uijongbu and Taejon that it is sometimes hard to see where the horrors—and there are plenty—end and the moments of enlightenment and self-discovery begin.

Indeed, Korea, for all its nightmarish associations in Thomas’s mind, is painted by the author with genuine affection. Brother One Cell is, in places, more like a glowing travelogue than a prison diary. We get maps, a couple of history lessons, and even an outline of the Confucian culture that not only binds the country’s social fabric and the fascinating rituals and philosophy of its penal system, but also provided the key to Thomas’s own personal salvation.This is a very moving book, and its perspective is both rare and timely: a mature and positive American voice lost in a foreign landscape.

In his introduction to The Best American Travel Writing 2008, editor Anthony Bourdain writes that the pieces that “spoke the loudest and most powerfully to me were usually evocative of the darker side, those moments fearful, sublime, and absurd; the small epiphanies familiar to the full-time traveler, interspersed by a sense of dislocation—and the strange, unholy need to record the experience.” With this in mind, Bourdain and series editor Jason Wilson have assembled a wide-ranging and wonderfully eclectic collection that delves headlong into those darker moments and subtle realizations, looking to absorb, provoke, and offer a moving record of what it means to travel in the twenty-first century.

MEDIA: Books: Cullen Thomas’s soul-searching tale of hard time in a Korean prison; Tom Bissell’s chronicle about a visit to Vietnam with his war-hardened Marine father; and Larry Brown‘s final, gritty portrait of life in the South.

Every expatriate in Asia has known this guy. He is the one that cultivates a patch of marijuana in the hills near Lake Biwa. He smuggles condom-wrapped ecstasy tablets up his ass from Ko Samui. He buys magic mushrooms in a Cambodian bar for resale in Singapore, or horse-trades cheap methamphetamine in a Seoul nightclub. And now and then you hear of these guys getting busted, and later you wonder what ever happened to them.

In 1994, Thomas was a bright young man just out of college, looking to satisfy his wanderlust by teaching English in South Korea. His taste for adventure was formed in early childhood when he and his brother invented an imaginary character named the "Jolly Marauder," a pirate-nobleman with a fearless heart and a take-no-prisoners attitude. Thomas claimed the Jolly Marauder as his life model, which influenced his decisions to accept the teaching job in Seoul, work there illegally without a contract, and buy a cheap kilo of hashish in the Philippines to sell back in Seoul for a cool 10 grand. The fantasy ended, however, when Thomas was caught by the police and sentenced to three and a half years in a South Korean prison. In his memoir, Thomas explains how that time of incarceration represented his real education. Surprisingly, he found little brutality (no rape) in Korea's penal institutions, but there were language barriers, unfamiliar foreign customs, extreme codes of social ierarchy, and almost no individual freedoms. He had to overcome all of this, as well as his own personal demons, to get to a place of higher understanding—something that, amazingly, he seemed to accomplish. His account of that journey is gripping.

Like a bastard child of Paul Theroux's travel writing and Joan Didion's crisp introspective prose, BROTHER ONE CELL is a scary, funny, honest-as-hell account of growing up and paying your dues inside-gulp-a Korean prison. Cullen Thomas probes with equal intensity his own life and mistakes, incarceration's mental and physical toll, the experiences of his fellow inmates, and the humbling road to redemption, achieving a symphonic narrative harmony that makes his story impossible to forget. This is memoir at its highest level.

Cullen's story, and that of his fellow inmates, is an extraordinary journey into an inescapable nightmare. He begins his sentence as a bitter young man—confused, scared, and struggling to come to terms with his terrible lot. What transpires throughout the course of this wonderfully written memoir is at the same time provocative and entirely heartbreaking.