Saturday, July 27, 2024
DISCLAIMER: All of the information presented in this article comes from Yeonmi Park’s own words. This of course means that each and every detail must be met with an appropriate level of skepticism. Her account has been met with both criticism and praise. Regardless of accuracy, her story provides plausible and haunting information pertaining to the daily lives of North Korean citizens.
All of the information presented in this article comes from Yeonmi Park’s own words. On Tuesday, Joe Rogan sat down to speak with Yeonmi Park about her story of defecting from North Korea. Her story is of utmost importance for the insight it provides into what facets of everyday activities can be affected by living in a totalitarian state.
“The only freedom North Koreans have is breeding.” She admitted to Rogan, as the two talked about the intricacies of everyday toils in the regime, and what it took for Park to escape.
The horrors of being a citizen in North Korea are by no means unheard of, nor is the extent to which they coordinate their efforts of starvation and broad sweeping tyranny with help from China.
“Nobody thinks about anything other than surviving. As long as we keep 10% alive in the capital, they are successful.” said Park.
Most of us know about how North Korea’s supreme leader Kim Jong-un starves his people, but the pervasiveness of his cruelty appears to be far more expansive than just that.
In the interview, Park details the normalcy of seeing bodies at train stations and in rivers, the presence of cannibalism in their black markets, and the slavish conditions that are imposed upon all of the citizens nearly indiscriminately.
When Park spoke on seeing bodies every day, she said, “It was as normal as breathing air.” She asserted that bodies would regularly be found waiting at train stations, rigidly frozen from the cold while anticipating a train that would rarely come. According to the defector, trips by train that would take an hour to travel in the U.S. could take up to a month in North Korea, due to the lack of electricity.
She also detailed a story of a mangled and starving teenager she saw when she was a young girl. Park told Rogan that she saw the young man laid on the ground, with his intestines sprawled out behind him. Flies swarmed the teen’s innards as he begged for food, which Park said she felt nothing about.
According to Park, the prevalence of death in the country leaves citizens incapable of feeling any certain way about it. She described it by saying, “The Holocaust is happening again, and we are denying it again.”
There’s not much to doubt about this sentiment. On the western stage, politicians and activists are attentive to similar atrocities in countries that are more ‘relevant’ to speak about, such as in Afghanistan. But when it comes to North Korea, especially when considering China’s support that keeps this prison state functioning, much less attention is afforded.
Park spoke to the influence of starvation in the country, as a means to suppress the citizens, saying “You can do all of the higher thinking when you have food in your stomach.” And that, “I didn’t know the limits of my stomach because I never tested it; I never felt full.”
This isn’t the only outcome of starving civilians. “At black markets, you don’t ask what meat it is. Luckily I was too poor to afford meat.” Park recalled. Following this, she implied where the missing children of the state go. She said “Murder is not a thing. Sometimes you just lose your children and don’t even know what happened.”
Speaking of these two things in conjunction, leaves only the assumption that, on occasion, the body parts of North Korean children are filling the stomachs of people who don’t have food otherwise. And according to Park, no questions are asked.
Park says that her father was placed in a concentration camp for 3 or 4 years, among hundreds of thousands of others.
She claimed that when people who experience the camps get out, their voices are noticeably different. Speaking on her father’s return, when she was about 9-years-old, Park said “I didn’t recognize him. Even his voice changed. It’s like complete fear, terrified to the point of not even knowing they’re terrified.”
Her father was arrested for selling metals on the black market. For those who don’t know, all trading is completely banned in the North Korea. This leaves a nation that upholds self-reliance as its primary national virtue incapable of living up to it.
When Park defected, she was only 13 years old. She received help getting into China from a woman who approached her and offered it. But, after crossing a frozen river to get into the country, Park and her mother were apparently immediately captured by Chinese human traffickers. Her mother was then raped, and the two were evaluated to be sold.
Park says that they were assessed for their sexual value. Her mother was valued at around $65. Park herself was worth a little less than $300. The traffickers told her, “If you don’t want to get sold, you can go back to North Korea.”
Park spoke of the struggles she faced in China, claiming that “two years in China felt like 1,000 years.” Even after her escape, Park found herself in a situation of being continually monitored. She continued with, “You don’t know when you’re going to get arrested. Whenever you go indoors, you look for where you could run.”
Eventually, after being sold to her third trafficker, Park says she was given the proposition, “If you become my mistress, I’m going to help get your family to you.” And so she did, but the thought of escape loomed. She says that eventually the man let her go, concluding that “He loved me in the most evil way possible.”
She says that she soon joined a Christian charity hidden in China, and attended their meetings for several months. They apparently helped coordinate her escape to South Korea, once she proved that she was a converted Christian.
Park’s father ended up dying in China, and she eventually escaped via the Gobi Desert. She said that she traveled with a small group who made the trek in February of 2009. Park says that they chose the winter because during that time guards would not expect people to be making the trip.
The group apparently told the Mongolian soldiers who stopped them that they were heading for South Korea. Park says that when they were stopped, the guards offered them pills and razors to choose between killing themselves and being sent back to North Korea. This was apparently a stunt used in order to scare them, for whatever reason.
She was then passed between detention centers where she was interrogated by Mongolian officials to determine if she was actually from North Korea. This is what she says allowed her to eventually be shipped out to South Korea to stand before the embassy and receive citizenship.
Following her acceptance into South Korea, Park says she experienced freedom for the very first time. Since her initial encounter with liberty, Park has advocated for greater input on behalf of the west when speaking of North Korean atrocities.
Unless stories such as Park’s are given a larger platform for consideration, this heinous injustice will continue until all that’s truly left in North Korea are those who helped purge the nation’s citizens of their health, and their dignity.