These developments made Bandi disillusioned with the North Korean system and he started to write dissident literature.
[2] Bandi's collection of political poems, The Red Years (Korean: 붉은세월; Hanja: 붉은歲月), was published in South Korea in January 2018.
[6] Bandi's short story collection, The Accusation (고발; 告發), was smuggled out of the country and published in Seoul in May 2014.
When she was arrested by Chinese border troops, she was helped by Do Hee-yun, a human rights worker from South Korea.
In 2013, a Chinese friend recruited by Do eventually smuggled out Bandi's manuscript while visiting North Korean relatives.
To protect his identity, they have deliberately added biographical misinformation into his stories and altered names of people and places.
[10] To Hui-un, the leader of a North Korean defectors' NGO, compares him to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who smuggled his manuscripts out of the Soviet Union.
American journalist Barbara Demick, who has reported on the country for many years, said, "I find it hard to believe that this was written by somebody in North Korea".
According to her experience, it is hard to recognize the regime's internal contradictions for most North Koreans until they have spent a large amount of time outside the country.
Lydia Lim, a student of Korean literature at Princeton University, concluded that the stories had indeed been written by an official state writer living in North Korea, based on the assessments of the "somewhat obscure locations" referenced in the work by several North Korean defectors, and the idiosyncrasies of Bandi's word choices.
[11] The Accusation, comprising seven stories set in the 1990s around the time of death of Kim Il-sung, was published in English and many other languages beginning in 2017.