THROW OFF THE CHAINS
The North Korean refugee and human-rights activist Yeonmi Park shares her journey to emancipation
When people used to ask me what it was like growing up in North Korea, I thought initially that they couldn’t understand because of my language. That maybe if I improved my English, I would be able to describe it better. But eventually I realised that there’s no way on Earth they can comprehend it exactly, because it’s like imagining life on Mars.
In North Korea, the regime won’t let anyone come in and they do not let their people go out, so the entire country is isolated. They cut off the internet, they decide when we have electricity and there is one TV channel that only plays propaganda. It’s almost like being in a cave, where you don’t know what is happening outside. From birth, they tell us that the Kims are our gods. When Kim Il-sung died, they told us that he was a god whose spirit is with us for ever, who loved us so much that he gave us his son Kim Jong-il (the father of the current leader Kim Jong-un). I was told that they knew what I was thinking and even how many hairs were on my head.
Every day is directed by the regime. We had a running radio at home that we couldn’t turn off, so there was a morning music blast before people had to go out to do the assignment the government had given to us. That could have been helping the farmers, working on the railway or cleaning our neighbourhood collectively. Then, the fathers had to go to do the work they were allocated by the government. Often, the mothers engaged in black-market business, selling things like rice, clocks and clothes. Children went to school, where 98 per cent of what was taught was propaganda; when they taught us tenses, they would say: ‘We killed Americans, we are killing Americans, we will kill Americans.’
In North Korea, a medical doctor’s salary for a month is one dollar, and people cannot even buy a kilogram of rice with that money. Therefore, there is no way you can survive on what the government provides the people. To find food, you can dig out the inside of a tree and eat that. I ate a lot of roots, plants and flowers, and my protein was grasshoppers and dragonflies. Grasshoppers were amazing in the fall time before the harvest, and that was my favourite season, but in the winter everything is frozen, and things don’t grow back by the spring, so a lot of people die during this time from lack of food.
When I escaped in 2007, I was 13 years old and living in a northern border town. One night, I looked out my window at the Chinese sky, which was so bright. I was starving, and I thought that if I went to where the lights were, maybe I could find some food. There was a woman who wanted to help me go to China, and I was so desperate I didn’t ask why. At that point, I didn’t care what was happening to me, I was going to die anyway from starvation. She sold me and my mother to human brokers as slaves. Once we arrived in China, my mum was sold for less than 100 dollars; I was over 200 dollars, because I was a virgin. And that’s how we left. We were traded and raped in China; that was the price.
When I managed to leave China with my mum in 2009, with the help of a missionary group, we went on to South Korea, where people told me that everything I believed in North Korea was a lie.
It made me think that if everything I knew was a lie, then how could I know what they were telling me was not a lie? It was a very gradual process to accept the truth.
Books actually helped me understand the world. When I read
1984 and Animal Farm by George Orwell, that’s when I knew what was happening. Orwell talks about ‘doublespeak’ and ‘thoughtcrimes’ in 1984, and how language can control thoughts. North Korea stole these ideas: they came up with new language and removed words from our dictionary, like ‘love’, so people do not even know what love is. Growing up, I never heard anyone say: ‘I love you’. The only love that we knew of was when we were describing our feelings for the Kims. I also did not know the word ‘compassion’, and no one taught me the concept. And when there were so many people dying around me, I did not know that I was supposed to feel sorry about it. A lot of people think humans inherently know what justice and injustice are, but we learn those concepts.
Freedom is a complex thing. At the beginning, I thought that freedom was amazing and I could do everything I wanted. But I realised that freedom is actually a responsibility. When you are free, you are responsible for the choices you make. I’m sure that for someone who was born with these choices it isn’t scary, but for me, coming from North Korea, where they told me what kind of haircut to have, where I had to live, who I would marry, what I studied, what I could think, what song I should sing and even what my favourite colour should be, suddenly the choices had to come from me. A lot of defectors have a hard time with their own freedom, because freedom is not easy – but it is so worth it.
I was really lucky because I made it. Right now, coming out of North Korea has become impossible. The regime has put wire fences around the border, and they make those fences highly electrified, so if you touch them you are killed instantly. And as if that isn’t enough, they are also planting landmines at the border to keep people in. That’s why I am doing everything I can to fight for their human rights, to raise awareness and bring justice to my homeland. North Korean people continue to be forgotten by the rest of the world, and I don’t know how we can move forwards as humans if we have left 25 million behind.
I look at Chicago, where I live now, and this is a place I wouldn’t have even imagined in science fiction in North Korea. The cars, the skyscrapers, everything that we have is because we had freedom to think differently, freedom to imagine, freedom to dream. It is the most beautiful thing to be able to imagine things, and create this wonderful system of cities, and the movies and shows we watch. My personal dream is to be content with what I have. I used to think that if people had enough food, everyone would be so happy and you would never complain about anything. But happiness, I learnt, is a relative thing. As a young girl, my dream was not to be free, but to have one bucket of bread, because I never thought a person could have that much food. That dream came true. So, now I want to keep that perspective: to know how to be grateful and how to be content. As long as I remember that, I can be the richest and happiest person in my heart.