North Korean Defector Shares Horrifying Story Of Life In North Korea And Her Great Escape To America

what was it like growing up in north korea why did you want to leave so north korea or mostly when i describe it it's not like even different country it's like a different planet right they don't in this 21st century they don't have electricity right and they if you look at the satellite photos it's the darkest place on earth like literally so i say like we have earth day every day in north korea very good for the environment and we don't even know what internet is like people have no clue right and they don't have any other information so north korea literally calendar begins when kim your son was born now when the jesus christ was born right and they don't even tell us that we are asians they say uh you are kimierzong race really yeah that's the the racism or you know the highest so they do not let you know what the house would look like and i didn't even not know africa different continents i never seen the map of the world wow all i knew was north korea americans but they say american masters that's like a one word really yeah so how did you know that you had it bad or how did you know that you wanted to leave i did not know i had a bad because i i remember they were showing us these footages of americans and showing the homeless people right and they look at america there's no birds because everybody ate the older birds so i heard that yeah we didn't though um actually that's not that's that's not completely untrue what was it the passenger pigeon you guys know this yeah they used to go out with nets and just catch pigeons and then eat them and they drove it to extinction interesting so that actually happened but we we do have a lot of birds and there's pigeons everywhere yeah like there's pigeons on boats exactly yeah so so what happened and they show they they cannot they like eat the snow because they are so hungry basically they are describing what we are having in north korea and and then in schools like that like they say there are four american investors you killed two american ambassadors the how many american ambassadors left his care then as a younger you said two american ambassadors so even though when they teach you math it has to be propaganda interesting everything has to lead to one thing is brainwashing us wow so north korea is like apparently a religion it's a kingdom right yeah they keep your sons of parents were christians so he copied the bible said i'm a god i love you so much so i'm giving my son kim jong his body dies but no no he's experienced with us forever therefore he knows what you think how much hair you in your head wow i mean if the people believe in bible i mean why would you blame people not believing that right because they cut out every information so people do not know even what is critical thinking is so how did it come to be that you decided to leave hunger i was 13 years old i was luckily by then i was living this border town and at night time i could see lights coming from china and i was thinking maybe if i go build a light store i might find something to eat wow i did an interview with some new zealanders who rode motorcycles through north korea into south korea have you ever did you ever hear of them no so they organized what what these individuals wanted to do was travel motorcycle they wanted to ride motorcycles along famous route so they did like the silk road they did the coast of south america and then they they wanted to do through north korea into south korea but there's no real roads to do it so it's very difficult but they were telling me how when they went through there they were saying like this is what they explained to me and so this is hearsay and i just well you know you can correct me that if there was like a farm and a cow died yeah they couldn't eat the cow no that someone would have to come and take the meat and spread it around the country evenly to everybody or something like that no what would happen so north korea there are three it's a cat system they begin with the communism right let's make everyone equal but now they got ended up with 50 different classes within the same people 50 yeah wow they divide three big categories and they divide the subclasses to 50 different classes and you never can go you can only go down so that's how they prevent people mixing around being married there's no like you marry up if you marry somebody in a different class you go down with them you don't go up with them wow so in that case so if the so one of the execution that my mom saw was this young man he had tb tv is a huge problem in north korea managing tuberculosis yeah so he uh ate the cow in the farm and then they were executing him for eating for eating meat yeah so i never ate beef in my life because cows are supposedly working the farmers so you don't have a private property nobody can own anything we cannot own house we cannot own cars house nothing we can own right it's a communism so you own nothing and you must be very happy yeah that great reset looks better every day doesn't it really it completely freezes you yeah it's a liberation you own nothing yeah so this if the cow dies of course the officials got to come and take it for them and if the normal people eat it you're gonna be executed what do they do with the cow the official type elites they divide with themselves so they they take it for like the upper caster yeah open cast takes it and they call even the shocking thing is like this uppercase don't even call normal north koreans are people they call us like trash rubbish what that's how we do north korea different cats treating each other wow is that because of like uh like historical family things like oh you weren't part of the revolutionary party and that's how you end up in a lower class so this is like what like made me very sad america is like here all about white girls like your ancestors on the slaves therefore you must be guilty and you are privileged in north korea the same thing because maybe my great great great grandfather was a landowner or not fighting for the communist side then they said your blood is tainted forever now might how do you choose your ancestors right you can never do that how do you choose your skin god you cannot do that and so they punish you by being associated to that it's called guilt by association right i mean we're we're going through this and it's getting worse so i definitely want to talk about the comparison between wokeness and stuff but we'll we'll get there so you were 13 and you were hungry yeah and you saw china and you decided to leave so how long did it take what did you do from there so i was initially gonna go with my own sister who was 16 years old i was 13 and then one day i got really sick so they took me to hospital and by north korea we don't have like electricity x-rays right doctor just literally rubs your belly and then nurse is using one needle to inject everyone wow people don't die from cancer in north korea we die from hunger and infection mostly and then they operated on me that day without any anesthesia and then they said it's appendix but it's okay people caught bones in order with any anesthesia is a common thing so i woke up and they were like no you see you got malnutrition and infection inside you they closed me back and then i i could not go right i might mostly die from infection so she had to leave so she escaped first with her friend and then was there retaliation from the government for your family it was too quick and the another thing is that in north korea a lot of people die from starvation so they say oh i'm gonna go to work and then father leaves home and he doesn't come back and he died on the road to work so this appearance is a very common thing for the people you know death is like always near i mean you see the death bodies on the streets every day it's like trash right so i never thought that was like you know i'm normal i thought it was in the morning when you go to train station they're like so many bodies left died and then they just collected like woods right they are very bodies get very rigid and just put them together and then they don't even like bother to bury them just like put on like on the one side and you see like rats eating human flesh you see these children chasing these rats they're eating human eyes first then somehow these rats have disease so children die then rats eat us back this cycle between rats and kids eating each other yikes yeah okay so after the hospital um you're still 13 at this time yeah and then you know what's what happened next so i found a note that she my sister left me and said go find this lady she's gonna help you to go to china so i that was like right after i got out of hospital i took my stitch i was like now walking very worse there but i went to my mom to find her you took your own stitches out no they did and then the next day i with my mom and to the lady we found her and then she said oh i can help you to go to china but just don't tell them that you are mom and daughter and then just tell them your order than like 13 right they say you're maybe 18 or 19 and told to my mom you're like 35 she was in her 40s i had no clue why they were doing that but which was they were selling us wow and traffickers yeah so what so so what happens next so i cross this frozen uh river yalu river and i mean there are guards with the machine gun standing there is gonna shoot you if you cross but because the human traffickers drive the guards we were able to go and as soon as we arrived in china the first thing was my mom being raped in front of me but the thing is i never so there's no sex education in north korea right i don't even know the word sex by then i don't even know what kiss was like love doesn't exist we don't know the concept of love in north korea now that that sounds like the most villainous thing i've ever heard yeah they i mean we know love but it's only love when we have love for the dear leader of course in the reaching fund but they do not talk about women's love so i never heard my mom says like i love you ever i never knew that was a word that people used that that's something i didn't know i mean i i still imagined with all of the problems of north korea people you know i i have this vision of this like dystopian world where the the young men and women run and embrace and they're like if the guards find us it'll all be over like human emotion still exists in this place people still understand these concepts but i suppose if the if if the authorities the powers suppress knowledge from you you can't have these concepts so this is the thing like in north korea there's no concept from compassion we have no concept for human rights liberty love you know all these things it's like why georgia ever talks about who controls the language controlling those right double speak they write a new language for you so therefore you don't you're not capable understanding this concept that we know here so now you leave north korea you find yourself in china but you've been sold to traffickers yeah so now you have another problem yeah i know and this i mean it it it sounds like that's this is it's hard to quantify but it sounds worse no hunger is the worst thing any i mean if you don't you die yeah so in china i remember like they told us they don't even bother to force us right like oh if you don't want to be sold you can go back to north korea in which would mean death yeah which means you're gonna even if you don't get caught you're gonna die from starvation anyway and one thing that changed my mind was for the first time in my life i was seeing a trash can and i did not know what it was right what is that one thing and like where you throw things like what is trash like things that you don't need like what do you mean you have things to throw away that's when i was like i told my mom i want to stay and they sold my mom for less than hundred dollars in 21st century so you were separated from your mom yeah and they sorted me for less than 300 and like because i was virgin and that was something valuable in china so that's how i got separated from everybody and became alone so then uh how long were you in in the situation for almost two years yeah and that's when i brought my mom to me i made a deal with the human trafficker who bought me and i was gonna kill myself but he said oh if you become my mistress i'm gonna help you to get your family so i did and he brought my mom back from a farmer that he sold and he brought my sick father from north korea oh wow so he then brought your father and your mother into china yeah or the mother your mom was in china but your dad then came yeah and uh so what happens next you know we'll just we'll make our way to how you made to america you know yeah i know it's a long journey uh but my father had uh this uh colon cancer he got from the prison camp and he passed away uh before the beijing only begin 2008 i remember the world was celebrating but like north koreans you have to be invisible you are always scared to get caught by the authorities so he passed away i buried his ashes around 3am in the middle mountain i was 14 years old and then one year later we met missionaries from south korea and they said oh if you become christian we're going to help you to be free and then i was thinking like why do i have to keep believing in something to be saved but you know you're so desperate that didn't matter even if they told me you gotta believe in water i'm gonna believe in the rock water whatever it was so i became christian i i proved my faith to them and they told us we gotta walk across the globby desert and then if you're lucky enough not to die from the cold because it was minus 40 degrees in february in the middle of desert and then if we don't get caught by the guards then we might survive so i don't know the probability of making that journey and now nobody going that mongolia a lot it's too risky nobody does it so then you went to the mongolia route where did you end up after after that so after mongolia we were in the detention center several months and then they bring in mongolia they were moving around and then they brought us to south korea then they make us go through this insane process of screening like they check if you're a spy or not are you actually north korean or not and then they put us in this training three-month program and tell us that americans are not bastards [Laughter] south korea is not colonized by america like you know they tell us what like bank tell me atm machine and i literally thought somebody inside the machine gave me money right everything is such a thing and in north korea we don't know what bank is so just tell us how to take a subway like tara's like we are like babies we are adults but babies never seen anything like this when you uh first got out of north korea were you surprised by the kind of foods that they had in china yeah it was shocking like yeah describe your experience what was like the first thing you had or what was the most shocking thing about it but the thing is you think when you are starving like thank god you think you're gonna eat a lot but your stomach is not useless oily fatty food so i remember i was throwing up constantly and i get because i've never seen this many cars and buildings in my life north korea 90 70 percent of those are not peeps and only of them are in pyongyang too so never seen a traffic and never seen a like crosswalk right so i mean but the thing is also i lost everything by the time i was in china like i was a slave so it wasn't i could enjoy anything there i was every day was a survivor i remember like every day i feel like i live thousand years today every day i goes by and before i go to sleep i put on my shoes on i always have to look for the extra when the police comes where do i run where they jump so ready to run every single day like you live like that so now you've made it to south korea they put you through this screening they want to make sure not a spy but was there a point where they finally opened the doors and said freedom is yours yeah what was that like scary it was so painful so scary yeah i mean like they remember i remember they said like for the first time so introduce yourself and in north korea we don't say i like it we don't allow to say i we said like we like water even though that's because that's like the meme it's not a meme's actually no no there's there's a joke where we make fun of communists by replacing the letter i with we oh they totally do that wow really yeah and then like nobody asks you what do you think in north korea right so they tell you your favorite color is red because a revolutionary color your favorite country is north korea because your favorite food is this right so now in south korea they say oh if you don't know just tell us your favorite colors like what the heck is that do i suppose know what's my favorite color so thinking for yourself was something not trained it was hurting my brain it was so painful by literally saying being free is not easy like if i was guaranteed that i'm gonna have frozen like enough potato if i go back to north korea i would go back wow wow really it was hot so like if you if you could have survived you would have chosen to go back yeah for sure in the beginning yeah in several years time i would have gone back it was very painful to be free but you you you learned you figured it out you adapted i adapted i i learned like what freedom was you know it for me to learn freedom was like responsibility and once i made that connection it became like under more manageable right but it's scary like in north korea when you're born your life is determined for before you're born based on your class your parents everything so what do you mean you choose your own major right like they say what school do you want to go to i don't know so what major do you want to do what do you do with your life i'm like do i have to know can just somebody tell me what to do i'm very good at like being followed it seems like we're seeing uh this transformation united states where young people want exactly that they want to be told what to do they want the government to do it for them or they've gone uh a lot of young people especially the millennial generation so not not not so young anymore in in like my life i was always told you have to go to school you have to go to college you have to do these things and everyone kept trying to tell me what i was supposed to do and for me i was no i'm not going to do it but a lot of people i know went to college and just did what they were told when they get out of college they ask now tell me what to do yeah so they're not used to being out there in the wilderness on their own and of course this is very very very different from say north korea but it's part of this this shift i suppose where we used to be i mean americans are fairly obstinate you know don't tell me what to do i'll do what i want but we're starting to see that shift now so we're really close to getting into modern politics but so i'll just ask you this so how did you end up you know so you're you're you're adapting to south korea at what point did you decide now i'm gonna make an even bigger journey and choose for myself to go to america oh so i invited to a conference that was uh in ireland you know dublin and and it was a free conference so they wanted to it's like a youth leaders like a leadership conference every country participates so they asked north korea they called up north korea and ms in london would you send a delegation from north korea and then they said we only can send three because you have to spy on each other so two is a lot easier to run but three like you're watching or i'm watching we are watching everybody right so it's like we only can send three and they're like okay how about we sponsor two you sponsor one and recognize you know so they were like okay we're gonna bring these defectors then it's cheaper for them very practical so they invited me for free and then i decided to be a speaker i applied to this speaker it was very hard to become a speaker and the speech that i gave became very very violent and i was in the university in south korea so that led me to write a book and penguin randomized was in new york so they brought me to write a book in new york and then i wanted to continue my education and i they told me there's a school at colombia was in new york so so here you are yeah that's how i'm here so the interesting thing i suppose now is that uh you come here you go to college the the current culture war in the united states is there's a very negative depiction of colleges that they're embracing critical theory marxist ideology and wokeness sounds like there's there's similar aspects to what you experienced with um the ideology being you know told what you can and can't like and things like that not identical obviously but well before the show you said that the woke was crazier yeah i think that's what i said i could be the fox news like north korea is not even just nuts this is uh i mean where do i even begin but i mean it just entire four years i was i mean so in north korea by time when i was born the revolution happened such a long time ago people are not passionate believers of communism right collectivism they just so much fear if you don't you get executed so you have to do it and like one thing first thing my mom told me as a younger was don't even whisper because the birds and mice could hear you and she was like your tongue is the most dangerous weapon that you have the things you say is not gonna just only kill you it's gonna kill three generations of our family or together so be careful what you say right when i go to school in the morning she would not say oh be careful with the strangers be careful with your mouth i i'm worried that we're headed in that direction exactly you know with uh with censorship with big tech with people scared to speak out there are a lot of people that say you know i i was tweeting about anonymity i wasn't really tweeting about anime but i was tweeting about people who don't use their names on social media and people said i'm scared that i'll lose my job i can't risk my job and my life from speaking out and if people don't speak out we we slowly slip into the nightmare version of whatever that is where the thing is yeah the things you're describing yeah this is how we go there this is how it begins wow yeah that's what i like at colombia oh this is how the revolution began right because i mean at columbia this genuinely these kids feel like they are so oppressed they get triggered they actually cry right by the injust they fear how they are so oppressed and they are the victims and they're not faking it they really really truly believe in the thing is what makes me so sad is that north koreans have to be brainwashed because we don't have any information here on youtube of your finger you have entire history what's stalling it what the mouth is you have know what this rod has taken us to humanity but these people are so completely brainwashed they think white men are the source of every single evil that we have i suppose i think it's uh scarier to me that you can warn us and say hey this is how the revolution started in north korea hey this is what it's like when you have this communist utilitarian system and no matter how many times we scream it there are a lot of people in this country that reject the idea that your warnings matter and they actively pursue these situations i suppose they think they'll be like the higher caste maybe those who live in pyongyang they have paved roads yeah they have electricity yeah but they'll probably just end up being the farmers and the outskirts who are executed for speaking out improperly oh yeah they get so much purges in pyongyang so i think but the thing is like north korea designed starvation right it's like a hunger games there are 13 districts and there's a capital right on purpose kim jong-un starves us like the other way kim jong-un admitted that 11 million north koreans are severely managed he never did that before but now he doesn't bother hiding it like yeah we have like almost 60 60 of the population are severely managed why is doing that because one missile test that he does he can feed 25 million north koreans for entire year from 2017 he did 40 tests why if we just cut down a few tests nobody have to die in north korea why i don't so this is what i can't understand and maybe maybe you'll you'll have some insight having obviously been from the country wouldn't it be better for the the party for kim jong-un for his his close circle wouldn't they be wealthier if if north korea was successful and prosperous with a well-fed population with new technologies and electricity wouldn't he live better and safer no but then he cannot be a god right right now you think about it when you're full then you are starting to think about meaning of life you can think it was philosophy music art right but with north koreans every day they don't care what's going on am i gonna be able to find it next to me or not am i gonna make it tonight to naomi that's all they care so people entire population is dedicated surviving so now kim jong-un has no internal challenges it's not like other countries there's internal any region there's no one single distance in north korea have you ever heard that there's a house arrest no what's his what's his goal what does he want wasn't he educated in the west in switzerland yeah it's a psychopath he knows how humans should be treated that's the thing like it's so he's a psycho but he knows how people should supposed to be treated but he doesn't right he goes there he's a he thinks he's a god i think so because a lot of people who met him when they're younger they call him like little janitor right yeah like so everybody's like below him so i don't think he's just completely himself brainwashed that he's a god so do you think the us is uh i mean the u.s is massive how many how many people uh do do we know the population of north korea in america or the the population of north korea do we do 25 million 25 million yeah so i mean the u.s has about 10 times the population uh it's it seems far far-fetched i suppose or maybe people just believe it can't happen here but do you think that what you're seeing in the us will bring us to a a situation like north korea i'm lying right now living in chicago yeah i mean this chicago is a war zone you cannot even walk out in during the middle of day in the downtown where there's police cars right there people commit crime and this as i mean you say system is broke like literally during the lootings right police standing there and this guy's destroying nike store in the magnificent maya and why don't you arrest them and then my friend said like why don't you arrest them and then he's like i know who torres and this guy just started shooting at him whoa police is right and he had to run for his life he has a video i'm not joking like oh my gosh he was started shooting at him and police are standing there nothing thanks for checking out this clip from the tim cast irl podcast if you want to see the full show come back to this channel youtube.comcast irl monday through friday at 8pm where you can leave comments and super chat and we actually will read your comments on the show don't forget to like share subscribe and if you want exclusive members only content segments you can't get anywhere else go to timcast.com become a member and we even have full bonus episodes thanks for hanging out and we'll see you all next time you

Channel: Timcast IRL

Views: 614,904

Keywords: timcastIRL, timcast IRL, podcast

Id: AQsjESHkW8w

Length: 28min 9sec (1689 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 26 2021