Via One Free Korea comes this interview with 21 year old North Korean defector Yeonmi Park that explains what life was like for her in the “Socialist Paradise”:
In an interview with the Irish Independent, Yeonmi told how her first memory is of being told by her mother at the age of four “not to even whisper because the birds and mice could hear you”.
“That’s what I learned from my mum and that was really early – so that’s the way she could protect me from that terror,” said Yeonmi.
People are not really “living” there, she says of life in that country. “They are surviving there, and surviving is not that easy actually.”
When she was nine, she was forced to watch her best friend’s mother being executed on the street before her eyes.
Her only crime had been she had watched a James Bond movie and shared the DVDs with neighbours.
Watching her body crumble to the ground was a seismic moment in how Yeonmi viewed the world.
“She was a very nice, gentle mother,” she said.
“Always I knew that in North Korea when they kill the people, they justify themselves by saying these are criminals trying to destroy our socialist paradise.
“But I knew that lady. She was not that bad. She was not going to destroy our country,” she said.
“She was just being killed because she watched the Hollywood movie, James Bond. And that’s why she got killed.”
That same year, Yeonmi’s life changed catastrophically when her father, a mid-ranking civil servant, was arrested and imprisoned for selling precious metals to China on the black market.
Her mother, too, was interrogated and thrown into jail. Yeonmi and her sister, Eunmi were left to fend for themselves, at the age of nine and 11, foraging on the mountainsides for grasses, plants, frogs and even dragonflies to avoid starving to death. “Everything I used to see, I ate them,” she said. [Irish Independent]
You can read more plus watch a video interview with Yeonmi at the link. Make sure to read One Free Korea’s commentary as this link as well.
