Tyranny, Slavery and Columbia U | Yeonmi Park | EP 172
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Hello everyone. Something too serious today, really. I would say I'm privileged to be talking to Janmi Park, born in 1993 in North Korea, author of "In Order to Live" (2015), a book which I just finished reading today, and human rights activist and TED speaker. Yonmi Park grew up in a punishing totalitarian society based on Stalinist and Maoist principles, perhaps the last Stalinist-era totalitarian state on earth, devoted to the worship of Kim Jong-il and his family. But at the age of 13, she and her family made a daring escape to China in search of a life free of tyranny and, indeed, a life at all.
In her viral talks, viewed online nearly 350 million times, and in her book, Park urges audiences to recognize, think about, and resist the oppression that exists in North Korea and around the world.
Hi there!
Hi Dr. Peterson, it's an honor to be on your show. It's very nice to see you. I finished about the last third of this book this morning and it makes for harrowing reading, there's no doubt about that. So you lived through some of the harshest times. I would say you and your family likely lived through some of the harshest times in North Korea in the 90s, after the Berlin Wall fell and the Russian communists stopped supporting North Korea's economy.
Maybe we could start, I think, by just allowing you to tell your story. So you can start wherever you'd like.
Thank you. Exactly as you mentioned, after the Soviet Union collapsed, they stopped helping the North Korean regime, and the North Korean regime is run by a central government economy. So they decide how much rice you can eat that day per person based on their class. So even though the biggest irony of North Korea is that it was founded on the idea of equality, to make everybody the same—the communism—and then they call it themselves a socialist paradise, but they've made it into North Koreans into three big categories of classes, and within those three categories, they divided into 50 subcategories of classes. So it became the most unequal society that you can imagine right now in our human history.
I was born in the northern part of North Korea, so during that great famine that was man-made, famine by the Kim regime, that's where most of North Koreans died—in the northern part where I was born. And the people in Pyongyang, the capital, they were still very fed. So the modern example that I found was actually "The Hunger Games." There is a capital, and they divide 13 different districts; they make everybody else outside the capital on the verge of surviving. So people do not think about what is the meaning of life, what is freedom—all they have to think about is the next meal. Like, can I find food to feed my child? And in Pyongyang, they are really very fed, and they have every intention to maintain the system and the regime.
So that's where I was born at—in 1993. Seeing the dead bodies on the streets was literally an everyday thing. I never knew that was like weird; and that's what got me. The first thing when I came out, people were saying, "Why is there no revolution in North Korea?" And first of all, we don't even know the vocabulary of revolution in North Korea. It's a country where they don't teach us about the word love. There's no romantic love in North Korea. I never heard my mom telling me that she loved me. The only word that we know love is that written form of the word where we describe our feelings towards that dear leader—not about to another human. So there is no word for love, no word for human rights or dignity, I mean freedom. And that's why, you know, people in North Korea, they don't know they are oppressed. They don't know they are slaves.
You said the information control was so total that you had absolutely no idea what was happening in the outside world and you believed at that time that despite what you saw around you, that other countries were much worse.
So even here, right now in the 21st century, North Koreans do not even know the existence of the Internet and we do not even have electricity. So of course, in school I never even seen the map of the world. I never even knew. So in school in North Korea, they teach me that—they don't teach me that I'm Asian, they teach me that I'm Kim Il-sung's. And North Korean calendar begins not when Jesus Christ was born, but when Kim Il-sung was born. So they cut out entire information and people literally get executed for watching foreign information and that is a crime to be dead in North Korea. So you do not have the freedom even to travel abroad. It's an entire black hole of information—you don't know outside that cave what's happening. But of course, like the leaders, like Kim Jong, went to school in Switzerland. The type of elite go out, but the people at the bottom most of them never even seen a map of the world and we don't even know what Africa or other continents, other races, and that was like me.
And you described the conditions that you grew up in. So you're, first of all, what stands out quite remarkably is the degree of hunger. So tell me a bit about what it was like when you were a kid in the 90s in North Korea with regards to eating.
North Koreans are on average three to four inches shorter than South Koreans because of the malnutrition. And I'm like five-two, but most of North Korea are shorter than me. So if we are above 4'10", you must go to the military. So tons of North Korean adornment are around 4'10" or even below that right now.
So this severe malnutrition affects our brain development. North Korea's average life expectancy is like if somebody lives up to 60, we think they lived a really long life. Like my grandmother, who died from malnutrition before her 60, everyone thought, "Oh, you should live long enough to do that." So it is a different plan that we are talking about.
Being in North Korea, of course, like the only way for me to get my proteins was eating, you know, grasshoppers, dragonflies, a lot of insects, tree barks, plants, flowers, and that's how we survived. Most of the people died in the spring because that’s when there's no real insects and plants. And that's where every spring, there's most people dying and the majority of people die in that time.
Yes, and you said that for you and for the people around you, spring wasn’t a time of hope and renewal, but the absolute worst time of the year. And so maybe you can explain that?
Yeah, so every spring, I remember my skin should be cut off from the vitamin likeness that I would get. And it's like the season of death. Every spring, people who couldn't wait until the summer, when the plants grow, and that’s when we all know that tons of people are gonna die. And as you remember, I escaped in the spring, in March of 2007. One day I had a really bad stomachache and my mom took me to the hospital. But in North Korea, of course, there's no electricity, there's no x-ray machines, none of that. Literally, all nurses using one needle to inject every patient in the hospital. And people don’t die from cancer in North Korea—they die from infection and hunger, mostly. And the doctor literally told my mom that she has appendicitis and I think we gotta operate on her like right now in this afternoon. And they do not use anesthesia, it’s very—people don't use any anesthesia in North Korea. They would cut my belly open that afternoon and I was fainting. And they said, "Oh, she’s just manually, she gets an infection; she doesn’t have any appendicitis." But then they closed my bag and then literally from our hospital to the bathroom, there were parts of human bodies piled up. And you see children like chasing the rats, eating just rats even human eyes first, and then children catch these rats and they eat, and they somehow die from—you know what it is—they just eat the children back. So this cycle of us eating rats and then eating humans is going to continue and continue.
Yeah, and you said that was happening in the hospital. You also mentioned that in that episode that you woke up before the surgery was over because the anesthetic ran out.
Yeah, it was—it was not even like actually a full anesthetic; it was more like a dose of like a sleeping pill, like a lot of tons of it. So, you know, most people in North Korea right now, even when they cut their legs open, they were sorry their bones, they do not give any anesthesia because it's free health care. Then you mentioned as well—and so we can talk about your familial situation—that in the 1990s, the average wage in Korea was the equivalent of two dollars a month.
And so a dollar ninety a day is what the UN regards as the line between poverty like absolute privation-related poverty and enough to barely subsist on a dollar ninety a day. And so North Koreans were making as much in a month as the UN allows for poverty in a day. And you describe—well, eating virtually nothing, rice was a luxury. Other forms of food, especially protein, were virtually unheard of, including fruit. And you in some of the most memorable sections described going out into the fields with some other children, and you were about seven or eight years old, I guess, at this time, and catching dragonflies and roasting them with a lighter. And that was where you got your protein.
That's, yeah, I mean I ate tons of grasshoppers. I remember always, even though it was free education, let me go to school. So in North Korea, there’s no concept of “minor” either, and there’s no concept of “I.” They don’t allow us to use the word “I.” So even though, like I said, I like food, they say we like food, we like our country. And in that scenario, when we go to school, they all view us as revolutionaries. Therefore, even the children when they go to school, even eight, seven, nine years old, we all have to work in construction zones.
So therefore, children, even when they can afford to go to school, it doesn't really mean much to them to go to school, and most of the children now in North Korea cannot afford to go to school and stay at home. And that was, like, my job. And parents go out to find food, children would like clean and bring the drinking water. We don’t even have sewage and go into mountains and bring a lot of firewood because we don’t have gas or coal or anything. We have to find anything we can find in nature to cook food, so it’s almost like a 16th-century lifestyle. We go to the river and we bathe in the summertime, and in the winter, we don’t bathe—only a few times we take baths.
And that’s why sometimes I cannot believe that this is the same life that I’m living in right now.
So you mentioned earlier the class distinctions that were drawn in North Korea, and this is a characteristic of other totalitarian states, including those, predicated on, hypothetically, predicated on absolute equality. You saw this happening in the Stalinist era and also in Maoist China, where if your family members were associated with a group that was deemed oppressive, then that still might impede your chances of survival, let alone progress, three or four generations later. So you and I believe your family, if I remember correctly, your grandfather or great-grandfather was a landowner.
And so what did that mean?
So exactly, that's what North Korea does—you know, right now they still have this thing called guilt by association. So if one person does wrong in North Korea, it doesn’t mean just you or the one gets punished; three to eight generations get punished. So when there was one high-ranking official escaped, they killed more than 30,000 people because of one person's defection. And that’s the cause that I had to bear, me speaking out afterward of my three-generation family back in North Korea that punished. So that's like my great-grandfather, I think, was a small landowner before the colonies and everything began in the 1900s. Only that, my grandmother was—her status was down.
And the trickiest thing about North Korea’s status is that there’s not even something called “marrying up.” Some other countries, if you marry somebody from higher status, you can go up with them. But in North Korea, there’s only going down. If your high status merges somewhat low, you go down with them. That’s how they prevent mixing different classes.
Right, and so that’s one of the consequences of this idea of group guilt. And so the system is predicated on the idea—was predicated originally on the idea that the landowning class was oppressive, tyrannical and well, they were thieves, they were immoral thieves essentially as an entire class. And then that class guilt became so pervasive that it wasn't escapable across generations. That's where the idea of group guilt takes societies. And how would you contrast that to what you see in the West?
It is so unbelievable, like I mean I went to school in America, to university, and I was talking about this, you know, I mean, America also had slavery and like all those oppressions, but now they are collectively being guaranteed for their history and how many generations ago was that even? And then people still trying to punish people who were not doing it at the time. And how do you choose your ancestors? I think that’s what was the hardest thing for me to be North Korean—that I mean I wish I had that option to choose those things back then, but it’s not within your control.
And now also in America, I see these trends of people going after people who ancestors were perhaps the slave owners. But how is it even relevant to that individual right now who they are? It’s not only they contributed back then. So this idea of like, you know, the scared collectively, we associate them and I just never knew that the rest of the world was gonna be also like this, in a different degree. But this is something that mainly North Korea holds against its people. They literally call your blood tainted because your father or your great-great-grandfather did something that means you are forever—your blood is tainted. You are not redeemable.
And almost now in America, I see that because of my people, their ancestors, the slaves, they are like, "reading over they should be forever guilty about their privilege." And like the idea of this word “guilt” is also very—it’s very hard to even look at this, and it’s so heartbreaking. Why would you cause that kind of shame on other humans? Why? It's not their fault at all.
Yeah, well that’s a good question. But why would you want that to happen?
Well I think it’s part of a demand for some hypothetical radical equality. I mean it is the case that some people are born—we're all born with different advantages and disadvantages, and some of those are linked to our ethnicity and our race from time to time—and there’s an attempt to, at least in principle, level the playing field. But it gets very dangerous when you try to equalize the outcomes and when you enter the realm of guilt by group—that's a catastrophe. Everywhere that's ever been instituted is just a complete catastrophe, because exactly the same thing happened in the Soviet Union and in Maoist China.
Your family, your father in particular, but also your mother—they and many Koreans in the 1990s when things fell apart so catastrophically—there was the emergency re-emergence of free enterprise in some sense. It was illegal, highly illegal. But tell us what your father and your mother did to survive.
So as you say, in the 90s, until then, in North Korea right now, you cannot own cars, you cannot own houses; everything is private, no private property. North Korea, you don't even own yourself. Everything is state-owned, so therefore trading is illegal. That is a crime, committing a crime. But after the 90s, the Soviet Union collapsed, people had to find their own means to survive outside the North Korean government.
So the regime created this ideology called duty ideology, self-reliance ideology. So they told the people, “Okay, you live on your own. We are not gonna give you public distribution; you should figure out your thing.” Then like, how do we figure things? We don’t have freedom, we cannot even trade. So people started getting into this thing called the black market.
But all right, so simultaneously, so what was happening in North Korea simultaneously was that the centralized government distribution system collapsed completely when it was no longer subsidized, and the North Korean government decided that everyone was now on their own while simultaneously making any ownership and any trade whatsoever illegal and punishable with extreme punishments. So you were on your own, but forbidden to do anything that would get you out of your condition of starvation and privation.
Exactly. Like, now I’m thinking back, people said, “Oh, what were you allowed to do in North Korea?” I literally sat down one day like, “What was I allowed to do on my own?” Literally just breathing. That is the only thing that I was allowed to do on my own. The regime literally tells you what to read, what to listen to—they even send you to prison if you dance in the wrong way. If you wear jeans, they say it’s a symbol of capitalism—they send you to prison. If women wear pants sometimes, they say, “Oh, you know, women have to wear skirts.” And if you watch the wrong movie—and even the haircut—they tell you what kind of hair.
It was a funny joke for the Westerners, saying, “I cannot believe in North Korea, you have to follow the haircut guidelines.” That’s how controlling the regime is. They intervene in every aspect of your life.
And literally, there are sometimes when we have had electricity, they would give us this radio that we cannot turn off. We can lower the volume but can never turn off at home, so they force us to listen to this propaganda.
Right, and it’s stuck on one channel; you can’t move the station selector to listen to anything else—that’s illegal as well.
Yes, and that’s the thing. The regime doesn’t allow us to do anything and then, but let us somehow find a way to survive. And of course, that means breaking the rules in North Korea. My father was involved in the black market where he started selling dry fish, sugar, rice, clothes, clogs, and then later the metals, like copper and silver, copper. And of course, that was illegal. And that's how he was sent to the prison camp.
Right, and so he started to trade, and you mentioned in your book that the trading, as far as you were concerned, that the trading activity that emerged as a consequence of the black market gave North Koreans their first small taste of freedom. So what do you mean by that? Why did that strike you that way?
Because trading is a very empowering act. Because until then, North Koreans have to rely on everything from the regime. Like, literally, even the water—everything. But when we started being creative and they say, “Okay, I can find the corn at a cheaper price in this region and then bring it to the other region, or maybe fabric from this region to the other region.” So we start getting more control over how we even think on how to look.
But it was like North Korea’s marketization was extremely controlled and still very limited, but that was almost giving the people now to think, “Oh, there is a life when I take my own control of my life.” It’s better than relying on the government who just promises to take care of everything but who never does.
So your conclusion was that there was a direct connection between the act of engaging in free trade, say, at the personal level and the idea of freedom itself, because it forces you to think for yourself. Any trade, when you trade, it’s not like you’re thinking about, “Oh, how am I gonna like become a better revolutionary for the region?” You think for yourself, like, “How is it gonna benefit me, my family, if I do this?” But for North Koreans, thinking for yourself was something so unheard of. Like, when we are born, the first thing they teach us is how to bow properly and respect.
And the first thing that my mom taught me as a younger was not even whisper, because the birds and mice could hear me. She told me that the most dangerous thing in my body that I had was my tongue. If you slip out a wrong word, that is end of our, like, entire family plan. That’s how much dangerous your tongue is.
Yes, so you carefully discuss your experiences with free trade and attribute to that the dawning idea of autonomy and individual freedom, whereas the act of trade is deemed illegal and immoral by the totalitarians, and that’s associated in some manner with their insistence that private property is theft and that capitalism, by its nature—which would include any free trade of any sort—is also corrupt and malevolent.
Right, so your mother, you talked about the restrictions on your speech—that even the mice had ears, so to speak—your mother was almost thrown into a prison camp because of comments that an uncle of yours made. I believe he was visiting from China. And so can you tell that story?
So when I was really young, we had some relatives from China. He came and told my mom that Kim Il-sung, the first king, died. And that he said he didn’t die from hard working for the people, because when the Kims died, they told us that, you know, like literally they are terrible. Some people, the Kims, are starving like all of us; they cannot even sleep—they work tirelessly for us. How grateful we are for having a leader who’s that selfless and towards my mom actually. She didn’t die from like those exhaustion from hard working; rather he died from some heart attack caused by medical condition.
And then my mom was a true believer there. She was telling her friend, best friend, that, “Can you believe how far on? My bad people are saying like these ridiculous rumors about our dear leader?” And she was more like telling out of anger that she heard it was like she was questioning it. But even that was so in North Korea right now, like you and me, there's one person, three of us sitting here, I'm watching you and you're watching the other person and that person watching me. So even though I'm being a nice person, not gonna report on me, I know that someone watching me gonna report on me. But if that person is not reporting on me, then he’s gonna be also reported by the other person.
So you’re being spied and you’re just spied on someone. That kind of system made us to not trust in another human. It carried our trust in another person. We are always paranoid. So that was a good lesson for my mom to learn. Even she thought all her life that I was her best friend, she was a spy and she told her officials, and my mom almost like risked killing all of us. But the thing is, because she never slipped the water to another person and she studied from the intention of defending the revolution, they pardoned her and told her, “Never ever say something like that to anybody.” So even my father never knew what was happening there.
Right, so even though she thought the rumor was a lie, when she talked about it, she was outraged. That was still enough for a firm and a full investigation with a tremendous amount of danger associated, and it was luck, in large part, that she escaped from more severe punishment. And the fact maybe that she had small children definitely—like right in North Korea, like when you have a newspaper, every front page has Kim. But when you turn in the back of the newspaper, you don’t see the photo of the Kims by mistake. If you read the newspaper, your family goes through generations of this consensus account. So if you rip it...
Oh yeah, so it's like if you get a newspaper you’re gonna be very careful how the photo is gonna be positioned.
So every household in North Korea has portraits of Kims. If your house caught on fire, the first thing is that you are holding your Kims one out; you have to hold the portraits to your death. Otherwise, it’s going to kill the residents of your family. Again, so this is like the Kims are gods to us—they are almighty, who came with our thoughts. I literally believe that it was like North Korea copied the Bible in its exact Bible. Kim Il-sung was a god loved us so much that he gave his son to us, Jesus Christ—like Kim Jong-un. His body dies, but his spirit's with us forever and ever. Therefore, he knows how many hair I have, what I think, and what my future will be. So if we sacrifice ourselves right now for the revolution, we are gonna show him in the paradise afterlife.
So North Korea, therefore, is the number one Christian persecution country.
Because it’s so like, so they copied it in such a way they cannot show it to North Korean people. There are some other ideologies like that that exists in another country, so that's why they don't want a lot of religion in that way.
So you spent a lot of time when you were a kid completely on your own because your dad—your father was eventually put in a prison camp for a long time. And then your mother spent a lot of time away from you because she had—well, she had to do what she needed to do to raise money so that you could survive. But also she was trying to deal with the situation with your father.
So you and your sister—how much age difference is there between you two?
Three years, and she’s older.
Yes! I was eight years old and she’s 11 years old, and you spent a lot of time on your own—months, years?
Three years, four years. So what would—tell me about a typical day, a typical week when you were on your own. So you'd get up in the morning, you said the roosters would crow—there's no electricity; the roosters would crow. You were living in a city at that time.
At that time I was moving around a lot. So initially, I was left alone with my sister when I was eight years old and 11. My sister and I were living like for three years. And then our relatives separated us. Our uncle took my sister and my aunt took me to the countryside. That’s how I lived also for two years, like that way.
And so my typical day is like, you know, when the rooster cries in the summertime, usually at 5:30 AM and the winter time at 7 AM—they're pretty accurate. So North Korea can afford the clocks, and that's how we follow, you know, rooster, the timeline we get up and we go to the mountains and do the daily work.
We go, and the regime also assigns the children to raise a rabbit at home and then we skin them and give the skin to the regime so they can make the soldier's coats with it. So everybody gets assignments from the regime.
And also the thing is that they don't even have fertilizer, so they make sure that everybody brings their own bathroom stuff to the school. So tons of them—even when you're a child, you get tons of assignments from the regime. Every single one of them is associated with something.
And get your assignment and get it done, collecting—yes.
Well, you said that as a school child, all of you, you and all of your friends, your peers, as well as the adults were all set out all the time to collect dog waste and human waste and that that was actually stolen from toilets because it was valuable—it had to be handed over to the state because that was the only source of fertilizer.
Yeah, so even that—I remember my one of the culture shock was when I was in the trash cans for the first time in my life because there was no trash can in North Korea. We literally had nothing to throw away. And coming to the West where people were having these trash problems, I was like, “Where the heck am I?”
And in North Korea, even your own poop is so valuable that they fight for food—it's like the worm poop. And if you don’t bring the kora, you're gonna be punished by the Russian.
So the kisses rather than they even school, they don’t study—they send out us to hunting for poops and everywhere, and gather them, bring it to school afterwards.
Right, well that was one of the most striking parts of the book. I’d never, I’ve read a fair bit about poverty-stricken existence under totalitarian regimes, but that was the first time I’d encountered that particular wrinkle, let’s say.
So all right, so you’re eight years old and your sister is 11 and you get up with the roosters and you have work to do. What are you eating at that point? How much are you eating, and where do you get your food?
It really depends. In North Korea, it’s not when you eat—it’s so random, like what you get that day. It’s—you know, that’s a thing, I never seen a cookbook. You know how do you find the half pounds of pork and flour and like scalding like we just eat whatever we have at that moment.
So if that day we had potatoes who were like frozen outside because we didn’t have a place to put them, then they become very dark colors—we cook them and then we put lots of water in it and then some dried cabbage in it, because you know usually water fills you up, so a lot of food has a lot of soup in it in North Korea to fill you up. And you know, we make sure that we have enough food for the evening; we divided each meal depending on how much food we have that day in the morning.
I’m always like to the public distribution for each one of us and how much you can eat per day, certain meal. And some days, we just cannot eat.
And who was distributing it?
I was—the my sister was the one more like chopping mousse because she was bigger. She was doing more manual work and I was the one more like cooking and doing the domestic work.
And where was the food coming from, apart from what you gathered? Apart—in some cases, my mom, before she goes away like for several months, she leaves us with a few kilograms of corn and like other grains; then we have to divide it for like six days. You know we don’t know when she comes back!
Well, you told me to come back. You told a story at one point about your mother leaving: I believe she was gone for several months and she left you some money. And you and your sister spent it on sunflower seeds and something else—some cookies on the way back from where your mother left from. And then you had no money for all the time that she was gone!
Exactly! So we learned that lesson—the first time she left us, she gave us some money. And then we never had those kind of money, big money in our hands. So on the way back, we bought sunflower seeds and some cookies in the plastic bag, and then we had nothing left for us.
And we were not even—so in North Korea, we don’t even have phones. It’s not like you can call up somebody, “Where are you?” Like a lot of times, they go out and they never come back. They might die, you know, disease or station—like, or accidents. A lot of people never hear back from. So going on a journey in North Korea is like higher chances of you never seeing them again.
And so even though mom would say, “I will come back,” but we never knew she would. And once that happened, the first time we learned the lesson, mom would like leave us a few kilograms of grains and then we would divide as much as we could so we would never know until she comes back. And you said that all you ever thought about and your sister as well was food and that you dreamed about bread, and you fantasized about bread, and you talked about how much bread you could conceivably eat. And that you were possessed all the time with hunger.
I know, I'm like still thinking as a child like I never ate till I’d fell full because so I never knew what was like limits of my own stomach—that I never knew how much should I be fed, so I feel like full.
So I really compare how much I can eat more so my sister said, “Like I’m hundred and thousand, then like a mountain and 10 million in whatever the number; whoever comes bigger.” And that’s how we were just like dreaming of—it was the only thing on your muscle!
But that's the thing when people talk about like the civilization right—it falls when you don’t eat; people like become animals. You lose all those dignity—all you’re thinking is just food, basic survival. And that’s what my people always telling me: the basic survival.
Yeah, and you were at that time too, you were seeing death everywhere as a consequence of starvation.
I still remember like one day my son, I walked by near the well as I go. People bring the drinking water. There’s a young man—I don’t know like maybe teenager—he lies down and his intestines comes out of him. And he was still alive and like, “I’m hungry, give me something.”
But as a young mind, I don’t even feel sorry—that's the thing haunts me the most. Is that I feel nothing in my life. And because every single thing I saw was like that, and now I’m thinking, was I a psychopath? Like, how did I feel nothing about it? But that’s like being so desensitized. North Koreans are like.
I think if you’re in shock, you’re in shock all the time. I mean, you said in many of the experiences you had, for example, that you felt like you were outside your body, watching. And that’s a classic sign of dissociative stress. And you are in a situation like that all the time.
All the time! So I don’t think that you have to consult your conscience about that. It’s in your book itself, there’s no shortage of empathy on display. So I don’t think there’s any issue of you not having the full range of human feelings. It’s just you were in situations that were so terrible that no one, fortunately, no one in the West essentially can even imagine.
Imagine being in a situation like that—none of us, to speak of, or a very small minority of us have ever been hungry forever, let alone for any protracted period of time, and certainly not to the point of chronic malnutrition. That just doesn't happen here.
And so okay, so you lost your fa—your father was imprisoned when you were about eight. And what happened to him? What were the consequences for him?
He was doing quite well in some sense by North Korean standards with his trading. So he was good at what he was doing, and your mother helped him. But he got imprisoned after, especially after he moved up into more dangerous commodities. You said that he started to trade metals and that he was hiding the metals in cars, railway cars that were reserved for, for I think I’ve got this right, for Kim Jong-il?
Yes, yes! And because they wouldn't be searched.
Yes, so at every train in North Korea, we only have one train line, and that goes from one side of the country to the end. It sometimes takes a month to go because the low electricity and the railways are very bad. So, and that's why there’s always one cargo reserved that carries things to the Kims from—and what's in that car, just out of curiosity?
I mean we hear these rumors, they grow. I mean the parts of the country that have the best land for, you know, growing up or growing something like the best of the best from the country especially reserved for them. And nobody actually knows what's even in there. Even when those people who search that cargo cannot go—and the people who regard it, they have to do body search and enhance checkout for them. So that’s how severe is controlled.
So really nobody knows what they're carrying inside, and my father was able to do something with them and then carry the metals in that cargo, hiding. And he was bribing the guards to allow that to happen.
Yeah, and then he got caught.
Yeah.
And what kind—talk about the prison situations. The prisons—because just normal life in North Korea is unbearable by all accounts, but the prisons take that to a whole new level of hell. So what would have your father experienced in the North Korean prison camp?
So there are three types of prisons in North Korea. One is called Gualiso; it is concentration camp. Usually, you are born there, so because you grabbed, like I said, one day my grandfather committed a communism crime. Then they take the old, the generation to there, and it is like a permanent living condition there. You live there forever, for the rest of your life, and you’re born there.
Because of the group guilt of your ancestors, which never goes away, right? You can never redeem the—by your group—whatever your ancestors did forever, you’re there. So they don’t even consider these inmates as human enough. They don’t even teach them whose leader is—they don’t even know what Kim Jong-un is in that concentration camp.
You said they're not even allowed to look at the guards?
Yes, but the fact is every deliberation where my father went was a prison camp. But those people know what Kim Il-sung is. But the thing is, they also treat them like animals. They don't let them see the guards' eyes.
And of course, the conditions are, I mean, it's a holocaust of what the UN cited in 2014. The UN did a three-year investigation and the only resemblance that we found in our history is the Holocaust. This is a holocaust happening in North Korea, like again.
And do you have any idea how many people are in the concentration camps, the worst of the prisons? Do you know what the estimates are?
They say around 200,000.
And what about the total prison population? Do you have any numbers for that?
Because so many are dying, so when you go to the prison, a lot of them die within three months. So those numbers are very hard to get, and it’s the most secretive country in the world. Like even though America cannot figure out North Korea, so we know that their positions—we can even see satellites seeing those public executions happening, but it's very hard to estimate how many are going in and how many are dying after like three months.
And so your father was in prison for how long?
He was sentenced to more than 10 years. Initially, I thought it was 17 years, but the North Korean chairman's records stated it was like an 11-year sentence in a prison camp. He got out, something for five—maybe four years later for the sick leave—which means he was dying.
That’s the thing, right? He played a trick on the wards. Right, so they think holistically once you get killed, you go back to prison again. And he was a very like a businessman; he learned cars and got him out. And that's how he got him out during his sentence.
And so you saw your father again after a couple of years.
How many years were you without him?
I think four years. I saw him again when I was 12.
Right, and you described that in the book. And so what did you see when you saw your father?
What happened to him?
So when I was reading this book by George Orwell, 1984, it talks about a man like Winston who had a lot of wits, and after all the torture, he became empty. Right? Like a lot of people read that book as fiction to them, but for me that was like my father. When I saw my father again, of course, he had no hair, he just got out of the prison camp. I mean, all he got was just bones—like literally skin on the bones.
And other things, I didn’t even feel anything; that’s like what I’m saying. I guarantee it’s like I felt nothing. He was just so empty—his eyes were just hollow and empty—and then he was starting singing songs like, “I didn’t do enough for my country.”
Like he was so guilty that he was not a revolutionary or whole. And if he wasn’t him, and in some ways that was worse than killing him. They killed his soul permanently that he never came back until he died.
He felt guilty that one day he committed for the regime to his death, but he told me, “Never betray the dear leader.” And I don’t know what he did to him, but he came out as a completely different person.
So it was not long after that that you and your family decided to leave North Korea to escape. You were 13. Your dad died; he died of cancer, yeah?
And it wasn’t long after he got out of the prison that that was the case, and then you guys decided to make your way to China.
No, I escaped actually. So my sister, at 16, she escaped first with her friend. And I told you I said I got my stomachache, she left me a note to say, “Go find this lady, she will help you to stay.” Initially, we didn’t plan to—I didn’t plan to escape with my mom; I was going to escape with my own sister.
But because I got sick, my sister had to leave first. I found the note and found a lady with my mom and told her that she told me if I go to China, she said, “I was going to find my sister.”
Right, and then, I mean, but when you’re so desperate, like you don’t even know what China is like; we don’t have internet to look, search what’s going on in China. Just hoping because China is the only place that had the lights at night. And if you look at North Korea from a satellite image, it’s quite interesting because the entire country is black at night, and it’s surrounded by the bright lights of South Korea and all of Southeast Asia.
But you have this immense territory, the whole north of Korea that’s completely dark. And you talked about standing with your boyfriend at that time looking at the lights in the distance of China, but you didn’t know anything about it at all, and had no idea what was going to happen to you if you escaped into China.
No, I did not even know what was China. I just saw the lights, and maybe if I go where the lights were, I thought maybe I would find a bottle of rice. That’s how innocently we thought about it.
Right, and some of that motivation was direct hunger, right? You were hoping to find somewhere where you could at least get enough to eat.
Yeah, it was—that's the thing! It's something when people say you're so brave that you risked your life for freedom. Like no, I wasn’t! I didn’t even know what freedom was then! Like how do I know what freedom is? I just was literally escaping to find some food to survive from hunger, and that’s how we crossed that frozen river that night with my mother and myself when I was 13 years old to China, leaving my father behind back in North Korea.
So tell us what happened. Tell us about what happens to North Koreans as they move with the traffickers into Korea, because that's a whole story in and of itself. And it was something you had no idea about.
I know this is a thing like people—the world is obsessed talking about slavery, but this is a slavery that’s happening just right now at this very moment, that we are talking about this. So there are like 300,000 North Korean defectors are in China, and they are all enslaved by Chinese people.
I was one of them in 2007. We found this lady miraculously. She would help me to go to China. I didn’t even know why she brought the girls. So in North Korea, it's the most heavily guarded border with the people with the machine guns—and Kim Jong literally buries land mines on the border so people would not escape. So entire country is concentrating camp.
Entire border is served. We will luckily bribe the guards, cross the frozen river to China, and of course, the first thing I see was my mom being raped in front of me.
And you said that your mother offered herself as an alternative to you?
Yeah, and you were 13 at the time. And that was your first introduction to sex of any sort, because there was no sexual education or contact for young people.
There was no sexual education and no romance, no dating, anything like that. So that was your first introduction. I don’t imagine you even understood what was happening.
No, I—that’s the thing! Like, I go there, and I was like something 60 pounds—I was very manly, maybe 50 something, but I’m so small, and this man was like, “I want to have sex with her.”
And then my mom was like, “What do you mean? Like she’s only a child!” And then he said, “I want to have sex with her, so just take me instead.” And he was raping her in front of me, but I’m like, I just never seen a sex video ever, never even knew what rape was. That word was not even in my head; I just seen something so horrible that I didn’t want to see.
And after that, they took us to this house where they would like literally make us stand up, make us turn around, take our teeth and everything, and making price on our body.
Now let me fill in a bit of background there. So the way you lay that out in this—in your autobiography is that there's a heavy demand for North Korean women in China, especially rural China, and the fundamental reason for that apart from desire for labor is that China instituted a one-child policy back in the 60s.
And many, many female fetuses were more aborted than male. So there's a disproportionate number of young Chinese men who have no partner and no probability of acquiring one because there’s an absolute shortage of women.
And so you and your mother were valuable commodities because of the shortage of women. Exactly, yes, I’ve got that right.
And there was a price on you; you were—you both had a high value.
Yeah! And so—and that’s when you entered what was essentially the world of slavery.
It's, as you said right now, in China literally 30 million young men has no hope of finding women in their life—30 million men in China right now. So because of the regime, the Chinese regime do not want these men to revolt even because of dissatisfaction with their lifestyle. In a way, the regime doesn't crack down on this human trafficking either. We are almost the price they are using to pay for this regime, not a reward.
And then so when we go, I was 13 years old; I was a virgin, so my price would be about less than $300 in 2007. And my mom's price was—it’s $100. That’s how literal human beings worth right now in this 21st century.
And then each trafficker buys us, price goes up. So the second trafficker comes and buys us and then pays more price, then they sell us to the Chinese farmers or the men or sell us to brothers or prostitution and a lot of other undergrounds words and sell us like products—like commodities.
And that’s—and then I remember—that's the thing at 13—they were asking, “So in China, in order to be here you gotta be sold.” And I didn’t even know what to mention. After Kim was like, “What do you mean you’re selling a human? I’m not a puppy! Like how do you serve me?”
And they were like, “No, you gotta be sold here.” And they said like literally to me was that, “Well, if you don’t want to be sold, you can go back to North Korea.” We can’t let you guys go back, but the thing is going back to North Korea is death. Like even though miraculously regime doesn’t punish me, there's no chance for me to find food.
I mean, that's the hardest thing. It's like there’s no place for us to go. Outside of North Korea, like if we leave that country, whatever the condition is, it’s better than being in North Korea, because at least in China we are being fed. It doesn’t matter—we are being raped, tortured, but we are at least being fed, and that’s how we stayed in China.
And that's how I got separated from my mom because you know they can charge two people’s price, so they sold my mom and sorted me separately. And that's how I got separated from all my family at 13.
Yeah, well you said at the beginning, when you went into China, that you didn't tell the smugglers, the traffickers, that you were travelling with your mother. You said that she was younger than she was, and you said that you were older than you were—exactly because they weren't going to take you otherwise.
Yeah, so and you had no idea what was in store for you at that point, also.
No, I did not know. But she told me, “Oh don’t tell them you guys are mother and daughters”—to say, “Or maybe aunt or something.” And told my mom, “You’re much younger.” You’re much older and because human trafficking was something that I didn’t hear about in my life.
I was so scared because in North Korea there’s no bad news. Every news is happy news. How amazing we are winning in the revolution. So I never even knew what rape was. In America if you watch news, like somebody is raped, you know what babies. But in North Korea, they steal every information from you. Like news is not actual news, so not knowing what babies—not knowing what human trafficking is and just completely into a new, just another planet.
But you had enough to eat?
Yeah.
And was that the first time in your life that you'd actually had enough to eat? Were you able to find enough so that you could eat until you were full? Did you experience that at that point?
That’s when I learned another thing—it didn’t matter that I had food, to you again, because I lost everything that mattered to me. Like I lost everything. And so I want to kill myself. Like I finally get to the place where there is food for me, but that means me being a slave and I’m losing every single one of them in my life.
And I was going to kill myself.
And at that point this broker told me, “If you help me become my mistress, help me with my trafficking business, then I’m going to help you with your own family.”
Why did you decide to stay alive? What kept you going?
Because my mother—he told me at that point. He said if I don’t kill myself and helping him, then he said he was gonna buy my mom because he’s the one who sold my mom to a farmer, right?
So at that point, you were separated and your mother was the enslaved wife, so to speak, of a farmer in a rural community.
So she had to be bought back, and that’s the deal he offered you?
Yes, and so you decided to stay alive because you thought you could help your mother?
Yeah, it wasn’t for you—no, I was, yeah! It was—then my life mattered to something. Like it meant something. I could do something more than that. So he offered to bring my father, and that’s how I brought my father to China from North Korea.
And that October, when I was turning 14, in October 2007, I saw my father again.
And so then you were with this man, Hong Wei, was that his name?
Hong Wei, and you describe a very complex relationship with him—he was violent and a gambler, so he would spend vast amounts of money raised by this trafficking trade and disperse all of it in gambling fits. And he was violent to you, but you also believe that over time he came to love you.
And so what do you make of that in retrospect? It’s an unbelievably complicated situation to say the least!
You know, even though actually it’s the thing last year he came out of prison in China after 10 years serving sentence, and I sent him money from the U.S. to help him. And it was for me to—that’s the thing I—and then I could—I actually this morning I woke up from this nightmare of my time with him. How violent he was, or my day.
I was like so—it was hard up like all those nightmares I went through. But the thing is, like nobody’s a pure evil, nobody’s pure like anger. I think that’s what it is.
Like as much as he was so evil, I’m still haunted by nightmares; he still—I sat with my parents, he still gave my father the last moment that I can cherish. And I think that’s life, really, it’s not that simple.
Yeah, so you were with him for how long?
Two years. And what occurred after that? You went to Mongolia?
What was the trek from him now?
So he bought your mother back, and so you’re together living with him, you and your mother.
Yes! You can’t find your sister yet at that point?
No, I couldn’t find my sister.
Your father, is he still alive at that point when you’re with Hong Wei?
Yes!
So during that time, after finding my mom, he brought my father six months later and then my father died three months, three months later after I saw him again.
And you said you had changed dramatically after you left North Korea. You stopped being a child very, very rapidly, right?
And you started to take care of your mother and to make the decisions. And also when your father saw you, once he came to China, that he could hardly recognize you.
I mean, I—I still think I became—I don’t know what I became. It took so hard for me to fear something again. Like when I had my own son, actually in 2018 when I met you, right, at the lecture, that’s the year when I for the first time first felt something.
And like I was so grateful that I was feeling things ever again, and so at 13, I learned how not to fear ever. And I don’t know how it was possible even, so my father came and then he died.
So I buried his ashes in the middle mountain and after that Hong Wei, he blew all his money from gambling, he couldn’t even have—you said when your father did come though, you did revert to being a child from time to time—that you would sit on his lap, and that you would turn back into a younger child and then go back into whoever you had become when you went to China.
Yeah, I think there were many versions of me back then to survive whatever the virgin that was feeding me to survive, I think I became that person.
It was so complex; I don’t even know who was I, which person was I—like I became so many persons, and I still think I just don’t even know how that was possible.
So because, you know, my father before he died, like he was keep telling me about his childhood, and I think he just really missed me being a child.
I think something they brought that out of me. So yeah, so my father is a very hard thing for me to deal with.
But so he died and then Hong Wei couldn’t afford to have us; he couldn’t even be able to buy us food.
In China, that's really bad—he couldn’t even be able to feed us.
So he was thinking, okay, I’m not gonna let you go.
And how do we go? Where do we go? Even though your mother at that point, she was insisting that you sell her again, if I remember correctly.
Yeah, I did sell my mom because I couldn’t feed her. She was the only way for me to bet in China. I was being sold again, so I sold my own mom and then gave the money to Hong Wei, and he lost it in a one-night game of poker.
So three months later, I brought my mom and made her to run away from the farmer that I sold her, and then we luckily found the North Korean lady who operates in a chat room—I don’t know if you know this—they bring these girls, so it was better than to go to prostitution.
That’s the thing! I had the option of going to prostitution or going to a chat room and I thought it’s much better than being touched by men physically than going to a chat room.
Well, you said that with Hong Wei, that that was your introduction to sex, essentially, and that it was catastrophic for you.
And so after Hong Wei could no longer afford to feed everyone, that’s when you entered the chat rooms, and you were in—you were working in the chat rooms for how long?
Maybe six—over half a year? Maybe less than a year, I think, so like eight—maybe eight months or nine months of time.
And the people that organized the chat rooms took the vast proportion of the money, yes?
I think you got one dollar out of seven, it was something like that?
Something like—but even that dollar you had to buy food and clothes and other things.
So but the thing is there was better there than going into prostitution.
In that chat room, we met another North Korean fellow defector, and then she told me there was a way out of all this, which means going to South Korea.
And then they say—I told them, “What do you mean South Korea?” I thought South Korea was colonized by America. It’s like a horrible, horrible capitalistic country.
And she was like, “No, South Korea is free!” And that’s I remember still the time I learned the word “free.” That day I was asking her, “What do you mean I’m gonna be free in South Korea?”
And she, of course, did not know freedom meant freedom of speech, none of that. She literally told me, “Oh, in South Korea, you can wear jeans and you can watch some TV and no one's gonna be arresting you for that.”
And that's how we conceived the freedom as North Koreans—like freedom meant wearing jeans.
So I asked her then, “How do I do that?” And she was saying, “Oh, then you gotta become Christians.”
There were Christian operations in China. If we become Christians, they were gonna help us to go to South Korea.
And that was a deal that we become Christians.
And they were going to help us. So at 15, I became a Christian.
They made us study the Bible, and if we proved our faith to them, then they would help us to go to South Korea.
And that was a deal that we become Christians.
And they were going to help us.
So at 15, I became a Christian.
Like they made us go fasting—I mean like real, like manage all our lives. But they said God can do more than that.
So they go like fasting with a three-year-old child in our group, a toddler. We go fasting and make us memorize Bible verses, and they come check us like if we memorize it or not.
How do you view that interaction with the Christians in China in retrospect? Was there any of that that was useful or was it just another belief that you had to adopt to survive?
So truly, honestly, Dr. Peterson, until I read your book "12 Rules for Life," I would say this, I was so so against religion, because so right now I am with Christians at 15, studying the Bible, and then they found out about what I did to survive in China and in the chat rooms.
Yes, and they—I remember the pastor was saying, “You’re so dirty, like you can never be washed.”
And he literally—like some Corinthians, some verse telling me that how some things can never be washed and how I was so dirty for doing what I did to survive.
And that was actually a lot harder, and some in some ways to going through all that journey, because when I was going through it, I didn’t think that was a bad thing.
I thought, “Like, something you have to do to survive,” because my father always told me life was gifts—you have to fight for it, no matter what how hard it is. You should never give up on life!
And then I’m suddenly now with this missionary telling me what I did was wrong—I should have died instead of doing something that dirty to survive.
So it was very tough to deal with, like keep thinking for the rest of my life: Was it worth it?
Well, but also, you were at that point too—you said that the reason that you didn’t kill yourself was because you wanted to help your mother. You had other people that were dependent on you. It wasn't just you. And you were still looking for your sister too.
You had no idea what had happened to her at that point, yeah?
I didn’t know! But the thing is, now what I’m thinking of is that no matter what, he was better than those people talking about inclusion and all of that, because he risked his life through saving lives.
Those pastors, those missions were sent to prison for lifetime sentence in China, no matter what people are saying, like you gotta see their actions—these people actually cared about humanity.
That anybody that I met, having all this flowery loving language they are using, so that’s the thing, like it’s so hard to understand humanity that even though it hurt me so long, I’m like forever grateful for what he did for us.
And namelessly, I’m like I made a name for myself, if I’m lying to people, I don’t know, but he never did. And he didn’t even tell me his name.
We asked him, like, “Tell us your name so we can at least thank you afterwards.” Again, it’s not Louise for making a name; I’m doing this because of love—love for Jesus—that he loved us; that’s why I’m loving you guys so much.
So in a way, he was the only person who showed me with the actions that humans can love another that like unconditionally.
So it’s just very complex.
So he—it was his group that took you, you and your mother, to Mongolia.
They told us how to go to Mongolia, because in the desert, there’s no way you can make it out. It’s like it’s a random luck. It’s a pure luck. That’s why I think maybe they were more religious; they were waiting for God’s sign to send us, because it’s not like God taking us.
If you’re getting into the Gobi Desert, most of chances like mostly you’re never going to be found by any human being on earth. So you decided that you would just go into the desert and take your chances?
Yeah! And that was you and your mom, and then we have five other people in our group and one baby with us. So it was a people group.
And then they told us to go follow the northwest direction with one compass and then if you cross eight wire fences, hopefully that’s gonna be Mongolia for you. There’s a random chance of taking the luck.
And so why was Mongolia a reasonable target or were you just out of options?
Because it didn’t cost money. If we wanted to go to other countries like Thailand, we had to pay the brokers, but we didn’t have money.
So Mongolia was the—by walking, crossing the walls, when you walk, you don’t pay anybody, so now really nobody escaped through Mongolia because it’s too dangerous now.
Most of the facts are escaping through Thailand. But we were the last people who ever crossed the desert to make it too successfully.
So what happened in Mongolia?
You did run across authorities, yes?
Yeah, we did. After how long?
How long were you in the desert?
We were actually only there one day, but it was 2009 in February, minus 40 degrees—minus 40, yes, in the desert in Mongolia.
So usually guys would think nobody’s crazy enough to cross the desert right now in this temperature because you can die, like even within a few minutes if you don’t move in the desert for even 10 seconds, you’re frozen there.
You are constantly moving every second, and you said you had almost no clothing at that point because they told you to pack light.
Like my mom—how come you didn’t freeze? I mean, minus 40 is unbelievably cool.
Yeah, it’s a miracle! Life is a miracle! It’s like some things you cannot explain in a human way.
It’s just like people say, “It’s a lot.” Maybe you can say it’s a lot—I don’t know.
I remember like everything was frozen, and we didn’t even have gloves or scarves—that’s the thing!
And now I’m not complaining about how cold Chicago is like, “No!”
We were wearing this bare, no snow jackets, none of that!
And we—I all I remember was we reminding each other we gotta keep moving because when you are frozen, it gets very sleepy, and like you’re losing a lot of senses.
And then maybe you wanna rest, and then we will remind you to, “No, we gotta keep going!”
Like dragging each other, moving every second counts—you gotta move.
And did all eight of you make it and the baby as well?
We made it! Because initially, we have to drug the baby. If the baby cries, the guards are gonna hear us. So we would give him the sleeping to him to make him sleep, but sleeping in that frozen weather is a dangerous thing!
So we have to constantly waking him up, passing around between people to keep him awake, and he made it too!
So you were picked up by the authorities, and you were put in a holding camp, essentially?
Yeah, it didn’t seem, compared to many of the other things that you had been through, it didn’t seem as awful—is that reasonable?
So, tell us about that.
So the thing was in Mongolia, it wasn’t something physical hardships we went through, so much it doesn’t matter, but the thing is this: Later we learned like so in Mongolia, they wanted to send us to North Korean side, I mean to the Chinese side and then send us back North Korea.
So we literally brought the lasers and like poisons to kill ourselves in front of them, and we thought like they were sending us to the Chinese side.
But later we learned that these soldiers had never intention, but they loved looking at our reactions.
How do you react?
Really?
Yeah, that’s the thing!
It’s so unbelievable, I know!
It’s like literally—I remember like trying to comment later, tell my mom like we did everything we could to make it, and we luckily—stopped us right before we cut off our reserves.
But the team who came after us, they went too far.
So she didn’t swallow the poison, and then they took her to the hospital, and she became like mentally like lost a lot of her senses afterwards.
So it was a game for a lot of people like teaching us, you know, seeing someone like—and I think that’s like very hard at this point—like tonight to make sense of like being a human.
Like, you know, it’s just so hard to know this is like the same life that I’ve been having. It was like some dream or something.
So you were, after that, you were reasonably treated in Mongolia, but you were also subject to a lot of interrogation. And why was that?
Because one is they were trying to screen the spies out because North Korea sends a lot of spies disguising as defectors and send them so they can assassinate like me—someone who speaks out—or get information who my relatives are and then send back to North Korea so they can punish the family members of the defectors.
So a lot of the factors, just like spies can do. But not only that, South Korea also had a very heavy discrimination towards North Koreans.
The country is still very—they blame the victims when it comes like the rape, you know.
There’s like, “Because of you, Gary, not a man.”
So I remember like during my interrogation, he asked me like, “Do you have a tattoo in your body?” And I was 15 years old, and I was like, “No, I don’t have tattoos.”
Like they were looking for marks of that would prove that you were engaged in prostitution, exactly.
So I was like, “No,” and it’s like, “I’m gonna take off your clothes here.” Like, are you sure? It’s like, “Yeah.”
And that’s when I realized like really like there was no injury at all, like there’s nothing better country like, of course!
There’s all degree of bad and good, and South Korea, actually is another hard place for North Koreans to adjust.
And like two years ago, there was a mother and son died in the middle of Seoul, South Korea, from starvation because of the ignorance from South Korean public towards them.
They died from starvation in the middle capital of Seoul.
I mean South Korea!
So you went through this lengthy interrogation process in Mongolia, and then it was decided—and your mother was with you—and it was decided at that point that you were genuine refugees and you made it from there to South Korea.
Yeah, and was that to Seoul?
No, from Mongolia, several months into integration, they take us to another two months of the intervention at the South Korean intelligence facility.
Then they take us to three months of re-education?
Right, and that’s when they taught you how to be integrated to some degree into South Korean culture.
So talk about that too—that’s very interesting.
Yeah, so they give us these three months of training periods where they introduce us to new planets, and that's once they've identified you as genuine refugees exactly.
So then you got in in that stream—once they’re proven, proven.
Sometimes they even go through those lie detectors with other defectors.
They really make sure that you’re not a spy and saying everything is true.
Once that is proven, they process a three-month training period where they tell us what bank is.
Right? In North Korea we never know what bank or ATM machine is.
They tell us like how to ride a bus, how to ride a subway—you know, like what did you—what did you think of all that?
I mean, you’d been in China for some time, so this wasn't the difference between North Korea and other countries wasn’t quite as shocking, I presume, but what was happening to you when you started to understand the massive difference between North Korea and the rest of the world?
And also the fact that everything that you had been taught since you were born and everything your parents had been taught—all of that was—every single bit of it was a lie.
What was that doing to you?
That was the thing! Like as you said, I remember they said, “Oh, Koreans were started by Kim Il-sung by Americans,” and like in North Korea, literally they tell us Americans are pastors! They are the most evil thing, right?
And at that point my reaction was, “So if everything that I believe was a lie, how do I know that what you’re saying is not a lie?”
Like how do I ever trust? Ever, ever again! And it was the hardest thing ever to trust.
It took many years. And when I read by George Orwell’s book, “Animal Farm,” that’s when I realized, “Oh, what they’re telling is actually true!”
But until that point, I didn’t trust—was asking why was—why was George Orwell’s book so relevant to you?
Why did it have that effect?
Do you know?
It’s so—I was reading this “Animal Farm,” not even knowing what that is, and it was—I was seeing my grandmother in all those pigs, and these young pigs, then when they, like, later when those young pigs are born, they don’t even know what life was beforehand.
They didn’t even know the alternative life looks like, right?
Because the first speakers were afraid to speak out, and all that terror they kept styling.
So until I was reading that book, I was only blaming the Kim dictatorship because of the dictatorship that we suffered, but when I was reading that book, I could see all these people were voluntarily, involuntarily supporting in this dictatorship by terror.
They were silenced. But it was therefore too that we end up in this—everybody did something, contributed something, that made us North Korea into, you know, the perfect dystopia that we are reading.
The book—contributing?
What are they contributing?
By keeping silence!
But by keeping silent, yes!
Because when they had something to say. Exactly!
Because the old, not because you’re brave, but I think, but because the alternative is worse.
Yeah, that’s—and it was Orwell.
It’s so, so interesting to me that it was Orwell that opened your eyes to that. I mean, it makes perfect sense—but it's still really something.
Yeah, I know! It’s like that—that book, I think that’s when I realized, "Oh, everybody was responsible."
And that's when I started thinking about speaking out.
That's when you started thinking about speaking out, I see, I see.
And so you made a conscious decision at that point.
Yeah, why?
Because I knew the price of silence, because like that—that was a price real pain, right?
Like not even knowing—that’s the thing! Like when people said, “Why no revolutions?” because we don’t know we are slaves in North Korea!
How do you fight to be free when you don’t know you’re a slave?
And that’s a different thing!
Like the fact that my people don't even know they're oppressed—that’s the thing like—what carries me to this point about my father is not like I—I of course I would be grateful he lived in freedom one day, but the heartbreaking thing is he didn’t even know life could be this beautiful.
He didn’t even know that life could be so different for other human beings.
I just wish he knew before he goes, so he doesn’t remember his life. So the heart is fearless with the sadness, you know?
And that’s the thing with North Koreans—we are talking a different theory of oppression. You don’t even know life can be this way and, yeah, so that was my time of understanding what happened and started believing in this freedom.
So you’re in the re-education process in South Korea, learning to be a South Korean, learning to some degree how to fit into the culture, learning to some degree how to be free.
Did you start reading at that point, or when were you—and when were you, for example, when did you encounter Orwell?
Was that when you went to university later?
Before my university.
So when I was 16, I think 16 years ago.
And how did you come across the book?
It was, so I was in this defector school because I was 15 years old, almost 16 years old. They did a placement exam for me, and as you said, like I don’t even know the map of the world, my grade came out like seven years old like intelligence!
Right, so you got out of—like you got out of the re-education process, and then you lived—where did you live with your mother after you left the re-education process?
Plus something—like a public housing in the countryside, where a lot of mentally ill