UNIQUE LIVES
U.S. journalist Laura Ling is in Toronto to share her harrowing tale of spending 140 days in a North Korean jail,
Laura Ling is on the phone, “exhausted beyond belief.”
The fatigue is not from jetting to a far off clime. The journalist and former admitted workaholic has a 4month-old baby keeping her up at night.
Ling is best known for what happened to her while doing her job in 2009, arrested by North Korean soldiers after crossing into the country over China’s border, with her colleague, Euna Lee.
The two women — initially sentenced to 12 years of hard labour — were released after 140 days, when former U.S. president Bill Clinton flew to the repressive country and met with the dictator, Kim Jong-il.
Ling’s sister, Lisa, a familiar face to TV viewers with her own journalistic career, used every source and tip in her arsenal to get her sister back. The pair penned their story in 2010s Somewhere Inside: One Sister’s Captivity in North Korea and the Other’s Fight to Bring Her Home, told in tagteam sections that gives both sides of the drama. Ling brings her story to Toronto Monday, as the next speaker in the Unique Lives & Experiences lecture series, sponsored in part by the Star. Writing the book was a healing experience, she says in a phone interview.
The sisters wrote much of the book sitting on the same couch, each with a laptop and sharing a blanket.
They didn’t read each other’s parts until they were done, so as not to influence each other’s writing. You and your sister have covered the worst stories imaginable. What draws you both to such subjects?
Our grandmother influenced us, because she helped raise us.
She was a very strong woman and raised us to have strong independent voices. For me, growing up in a homogeneous non-diverse community outside Sacramento had some influence. Because of that sheltered upbringing, I wanted to see the world and seek out cultural situations that were different from my own.
There’s different, then there’s dark. You guys don’t do fluff pieces. Many of them have been serious and risky, but I do think that within so many of those stories have been rays of hope in such instances of despair. Capturing humanity at its best, and worst? But that is something I also experienced in my captivity in North Korea. It was without a doubt a nightmare, one of the most terrifying times of my life, but there were also very touching moments of humanity and exchanges of compassion between some of my guards and me. You went into North Korea a workaholic delaying starting a family. Aside from motherhood, what’s changed? I’m still out there doing documentaries. I just did a half-hour for the E! network, reporting on the rise of synthetic drugs amongst young people. Reporting and journalism is still my passion, but my main priority and job is being a mom. Every day I can’t help but feel incredibly blessed and grateful. Are you recognized in public for your captivity? I get recognized by people who say that they followed our story and prayed for us. That never ceases to blow me away. I am so overwhelmed with gratitude, because I wasn’t aware of how big a story it was while I was locked in a room by myself. To know that so many people were thinking of us touches me to this day. Even Michael Jackson was willing to perform there to get you out. Isn’t that crazy? Very surreal. What are your thoughts now about North Korea and its people? The international community continues to be aware of what’s going on there. Hundreds of thousands of people continue to be imprisoned, political prisoners, and their families. But I have to have hope that it may not be the international community, but the North Korean people themselves that help determine their fate. Laura Ling appears at Roy Thomson Hall Monday at 7:30 p.m. Tickets available at 416-875-4255 or roythomson.com.