Stories of Us — Yeonmi Park: My Terrifying Escape from North Korea

i never thought in america i had to be worrying about brainwashing and propaganda we have a brainwashing going on in this country my name is janmi park and this is my story i was born in north korea and i escaped when i was 13 years old i did have a one order sister and i had two loving parents but in north korea there is no word for love so my parents never told me that they loved me the first thing my mom told me as younger was don't even whisper because the birds and mice couldn't hear you you never knew who was a spy how they were watching when i was eight or nine my father was arrested by the regime accused him that he was engaging in the trading he initially sold rice dried fish sugar clocks and then later he stole the medal because of that he got punished and he was sentenced more than 10 years growing up as a child seeing their bodies on the streets that was my daily routine life you know we go to river we don't have the running water we have to go river to our base drink the water you know wash our clothes but then just like that the body is floating by it doesn't bother you that's something you have seen every day and you drink the river water north korean people if we eat breakfast we don't think about oh what i'm gonna do how i'm gonna improve my life if you find lunch you're like okay how i'm gonna find dinner all we are thinking every single second is i'm hungry i'm hungry how do i eat my grandmother died from malnutrition my uncle died from starvation so they were purposely letting us die you do not own yourself in north korea you are owned by the state regime decides what we read what we watch what we listen to how we even dance they control how you move your body you do not have freedom for your haircut even you do not get to decide what you wear so if you wear your jeans you go to prison because it's like jeans are the symbol of capitalism literally people get executed like by reading a bible and that's how like real life is for north koreans the only reason i escaped was luckily i was living in the border town of north korea you know literally north korea is the darkest place on earth we do not have electricity so i was able to see some electricity coming from china and that's when i thought maybe if i go where the lights were i might be able to find a bottle of rice but like there's guards with machine guns they put the highly electrified wire fences seal the entire border so entire country became a concentration camp but luckily my sister who escaped left near not saying go find this lady she's gonna help you to escape so i found the lady and she bribed the guards on the border i took my mother with me i told her to come with me to china so i crossed the district one young man and my mother and myself three of us crossed the frozen river into china we met the chinese broker and then said that i wouldn't have sex with her like me i did not even know what sex was like there was no sex education in school so obviously i don't even know what rape was and and of course my mom is like she's a child and then she offered herself so he raped her my mom in front me it's just unbelievably horrible and that was my introduction to sex and then they invited to another human trafficker to buy us i was confused like how do you say a human like i thought like we only said puppies how about jimmy you said me i'm a human being they sold my mom for less than a hundred dollars and then they sold me separately because i was a virgin so they served me less than three hundred dollars so right now in china due to one child policy there are 40 million chinese men cannot find women to marry them sometimes in this rural very village they are so poor entire town of men by one girl and then they rape them constantly until she dies and they buy another girl and then do the same thing that's how they treat you we are not even human beings to them in this age of time when we are talking about slavery that happened hundreds of years ago there are people who are not being sold the same way i was sold to another human trafficker who was a han chinese and i was going to kill myself i couldn't take it i i lost everybody i knew i don't even speak the language he told me that if i become his mistress he was going to help me to find my family so i was letting him rape me and then we made another north korean defector woman and she says oh you know what they're missionaries is gonna help us to escape if we become christians and i'm like what the heck is missionaries i never even knew the word religion like kim's a religion and then she's like oh there's like a people who believe in god and jesus they're gonna help us and in that missionary shelter i proved that my faith to them and that's how i became free when i got to south korea they told me oh everything you believed was a lie kim's are not gods he cannot read their minds they copy the bible they are dictators and when i read the georgia western animal farm that's when everything made sense to me and that's also i understood for the first time the price of silence and north korea didn't become that way in one day because the people who are in there in the system were scared and they did not speak up that's how eventually it came to me where i did not even know that i was slave i did not even know that i was asian i never even knew what africa or different continents and none of that i knew nothing about the rest of the world there is no word for oppression there is no word for liberty there is no even word for gay and of course there is no word for compassion why do religion get rid of these words is because who controls the language who controls the thoughts so if they get rid of these words in our dictionary that means we don't know the concept of human rights we don't know the concept freedom and that's how they can control our thinking you know america was like our sworn enemy that i had to kill them if i see them and they told us that americans are cold-blooded and monsters i was like so scared to come to america thinking like i'm going to this like enemies land they're going to eat me alive right and then as i landed houston airport these people just like holding their children eating chips and burgers and smiling like this is only american thing when you take the picture americans put the biggest smile in the world when you see that like you don't even need a textbook tell you that americans are not bad when i came to this country and i stepped on the land i just felt the spirit of justice this is the only country that i did not face racism [Music] this is the only country that i accepted as who i am so in 2018 i gave birth to my son and there was a birth certificate kmi two days later or something so literally mother was like north korea father was american in freedom only north korean american can have a baby together i was so grateful that the best thing that i could have given to him is that american citizenship so i went to columbia university live in new york and most of them are like left every single class in colombia the conclusion was america was founded upon an idea of racism and bigotry and slavery the only way we can fix it is tearing down the u.s constitution and tearing this down country and rebuild the socialist paradise on top of that and this is what being fed to american minds every single day there's no room for debate and that was a propaganda and brainwashing machine and when i hear about them supporting socialism of course my reaction is have you not learned anything from history if something failed like three times by that time you should be learning something and like okay let's move on this thing is really not gonna work but no it's someone with the left they think it didn't implement it correctly so why don't we do it again here every single one of them said the same thing like we are gonna give you the paradise and they did not they say oh the capitalism is so evil so greedy i'm like do you know without capitalism how do you even have internet how do you even have electricity like read that capitalism do you know like your clothes that you're wearing because of the free market that we have all of this south korea was the poorest country when they adopted the u.s democratic system they copied it literally they became the asian tiger the gdp difference between north korea and south korea is a 40 time difference one is the 11th largest economy in the world and the other country do not even have electricity in this 21st century same potential same history same people under the two different systems one is communism one is capitalism what happened they say we don't have electricity because of american investors we don't have rights because of american bastards we die because american investors every single problem comes down to blaming somebody else blaming the system blaming history blaming the constitution because of white men there was a slavery because of why men that women are like being treated equally because of white men that we have climate change i mean like it's not about something about you that you want to fix and this is exactly north korea does i am also fighting for my freedom of speech i get censored on youtube and twitter because i talk about china and never in my life i thought in america i had to fight for freedom of speech even in america the freedom is not guaranteed and it's slipping away every single day i just hope it's not too late to fight back thank you for watching this video to keep prageru videos free please consider making tax deductible donation you

Channel: PragerU

Views: 1,529,393

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Id: 1RrdxIqDmTA

Length: 11min 4sec (664 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 08 2022