https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=7bgNK0DXsbM
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 in the after Soviet Union collapsed, they were stopped helping North Korean regime and North Korean regime is like run by central government economy. So they decide how much 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, the idea of equality make everybody the same, the communism, and then they call themselves as a socialist paradise. But they made it into North Koreans into three big categories of classes and within three categories, they divided 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 this great famine that was manmade famine by Kim regime, that’s where most of North Koreans died in the northern part where I was born. And the people in the capital, they were still very fed. So the model 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 verge of surviving. So people do not think about what is the meaning of life, what is freedom, or they have to think about is next meal. Like, can I find food to feed my child? And the people in Pyongyang, they are really well fed and they have every intention to maintain the system and the regime. So that’s where I was born. I mean, in the 1993, seeing the dead bodies on the streets was literally everyday thing. I never knew that that was like a weird word. And that’s what got me the first when I came out, people were saying, like, you know, why there is no revolution in North Korea? And first of all, we don’t even know the vocabulary revolution in North Korea is 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 the leader, not about another human. So there is no word for love, no word for human rights, dignity and freedom. And that’s why 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 other despite what you saw around you, that other countries were much worse. So even to the very nineties, twenty first century, North Koreans do not even know the existence of 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 race. And North Korean calendar begins now when the Jesus Christ was born, when Kim Il Sung was born. So they cut out entire information and people literally get executed for watching for information. And that is a crime to be dead in North Korea. So you do not have a freedom even to travel abroad. It’s an entire block of information. You don’t know outside that cave what’s happening. But, of course, like the leaders like Kim Il Sung, he went to school in Switzerland. The type of elites go out, but the people at the bottom, most of them do not even never even seen the map of the world. We don’t even know what Africa, other continents, other race. And that was me. And you describe 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 Korea with regards to eating. So it’s a North Koreans are on average three to four inch shorter than South Koreans because of the malnutrition. And I’m like five to the most of North Korean men are shorter than me. So if we are above four, ten feet high, you must go to military. So tons of North Korean adornment are around four, ten, like even below that right now. So this severe malnutrition affects even 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 who died from malnutrition before her 60, I thought, oh, you should live long enough to do that. So it is a different planet we are talking about being in North Korea. Of course, like only way for me to get my proteins were eating in a grasshoppers, dragonflies, a lot of insects, tree barks, plants, flowers. And that’s how we survive. And most of people die in the spring because that’s when there is no like really insects and plants are. And that’s where every spring, there’s most of people dying and majority of people dying 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, every spring, I remember my skin should like cut off from the vitamin lackness that I would get easy. And it’s like season of death every spring. The people who couldn’t wait until the summer, so the plants grow. And that’s when like we all know that tons of people die. And I remember I escaped in the spring and the March of 2007. One day I had a really bad stomach ache 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 a nurse using one meter 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 appendix that thinking we got to operate on her like right now in this afternoon. And they do not use anesthesia. It’s a very like people don’t use anesthesia in North Korea. They would have cut my belly open that afternoon. And I was fainting and they said, oh, she just manually she gets infection. She doesn’t have any appendix. But and then they closed me back. And then it literally from our hospital to the bathroom, there were like piles of human bodies piled up. And you see children like chasing the rats, eating just rats, eating human eyes first. And then children catch this rat and they eat it and they somehow die from I don’t know what it is. Then rats eat the children back. So this cycle of us eating rats and they eat us back is going to continue and continue.