From North Korea to Bury Council

Jihyun Park is standing as a Tory candidate in next month’s local elections in Bury, Greater Manchester. But she is not from the area: she grew up in North Korea – and witnessed at close hand the horrors of that regime. She watched relatives starve, and her brother almost beaten to death by soldiers. Her diet consisted of nothing but corn, and she was taught not to smile, and never to laugh. “Nobody smiled in my village,” she told David Collins in The Sunday Times. “You couldn’t laugh, because if somebody heard you, the police would come to your apartment and want to know about the joke. People living in countries which enjoy freedom take little things like this for granted.” Yet their flat was covered with portraits of the country’s leaders, Kim Il Sung and his son Kim Jong Il – and they really loved them. “We didn’t have any information from outside,” she explains. “We didn’t have anything to compare our lives to.” But in 1998, when her brother got into trouble for not paying taxes, she fled to China, where she was sold into a forced marriage. She had a son with her husband; then she was reported as an illegal alien, and deported. She spent six months in a labour camp, before escaping back to China, to find her son. Finally, in 2008, Park, now 52, and her second husband flew to the UK as asylum seekers. They ended up in Bury. “We were given this house but there was nothing in it, no furniture, no heating. But everyone helped us. The council. Our neighbours. We will never forget this.” She loves electioneering – something she’d have been arrested and taken away for doing in North Korea. But what she loves most about life in Britain, she says, is “being able to smile. For me, this is freedom.”