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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Yeonmi Park
Read between
December 2 - December 8, 2024
never knew freedom could be such a cruel and difficult thing. Until now, I had always thought that being free meant being able to wear jeans and watch whatever movies I wanted without worrying about being arrested. 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.
read to fill my mind and to block out the bad memories. But I found that as I read more, my thoughts were getting deeper, my vision wider, and my emotions less shallow. The vocabulary in South Korea was so much richer than the one I had known, and when you have more words to describe the world, you increase your ability to think complex thoughts.
read literary classics like Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, and Tolstoy’s short stories. I fell in love with Shakespeare. 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
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It amazed me how quickly a lie loses its power in the face of truth. Within minutes, something I had believed for many years simply vanished.
Don’t Beat Someone, Even with Flowers, written by a famous Korean actress and humanitarian named Kim Hye Ja, who became an ambassador for the World Vision
I learned something else that day: we all have our own deserts. They may not be the same as my desert, but we all have to cross them to find a purpose in life and be free.
Chosun
One Young World:
From Women in the World:
