More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
I wasn’t dreaming of freedom when I escaped from North Korea. I didn’t even know what it meant to be free. All I knew was that if my family stayed behind, we would probably die—from
We would swing our arms in unison, singing cheerful songs with lyrics like, “How bright is our socialist country! We are the new generation!” We usually did the same thing going home at the end of a day of study. In North Korea, schoolchildren do more than study. They are part of the unpaid labor force that keeps the country from total collapse. I always had to carry a set of work clothes in my school bag, for the afternoons when they marched us off for manual labor.
In North Korea, you can’t just choose where you want to live. The government has to give you permission to move outside your assigned district, and the authorities don’t make it easy.
His ID card had been destroyed when he went to prison—only human beings can have IDs and he was considered subhuman.
young men go into the army for ten years. But because his parents were so rich and powerful, it was arranged that he would have to serve for only two years.
Beijing refuses to grant refugee status to escapees from North Korea, instead labeling them illegal “economic migrants” and shipping them home.
North Korean women were in demand in the rural areas of China because there were not enough Chinese women to go around. The government’s population control strategy prohibited most couples from having more than one child—and in Chinese culture, a male child is more valued.
The whole concept of religion was foreign to me. In North Korea, we worshipped only the Kim dictators, and our faith was in juche, the doctrine of nationalistic self-determination created by Kim Il Sung. Practicing any other religion is strictly forbidden and could get you killed. But in North Korea, fortune-tellers are popular (although not officially sanctioned), and many people are superstitious about dates and numbers.
It makes me sick to think about what I and so many girls and women had to do to survive in China. I wish it had all never happened, and that I never had to talk about it again.
Customers paid about $5 to sleep with the women, and the women got to keep $1. That was actually an excellent percentage for a brothel, which was why the women wanted to work there.
I had to accept Christ as my savior to get to South Korea, then I was going to be the best Christian these people had ever seen. We had to worship every morning and then study the Bible all day. The pastor had us write out page after page from the book of Proverbs in Korean.
The NIS agents explained to us that we had to be interrogated and investigated before we could enter the country.
The first thing they taught us at the Hanawon Resettlement Center was how to sing the national anthem.
South Korea, I learned to hate the question “What do you think?” Who cared what I thought? It took me a long time to start thinking for myself and to understand why my own opinions mattered.
Now I realized that I had to think all the time—and it was exhausting. There were times when I wondered whether, if it wasn’t for the constant hunger, I would be better off in North Korea, where all my thinking and all my choices were taken care of for me.
But it was discovering George Orwell’s Animal Farm that marked a real turning point for me. It was like finding a diamond in a mountain of sand. I felt as if Orwell knew where I was from and what I had been through. The animal farm was really North Korea, and he was describing my life. I saw my family in the animals—my grandmother, mother, father, and me, too: I was like one of the “new pigs” with no ideas. Reducing the horror of North Korea into a simple allegory erased its power over me. It helped set me free.
Like witnesses taking the stand, one by one, my sisters made a case against the heartless regime that treated all of us as if we were trash to be discarded without a thought.
