There is a saying in North Korea: Women are weak, but mothers are strong,
Says Yeonmi Park, a human rights activist who fled the isolationist state (North Korea) when she was thirteen years old. At twenty-one, she, a girl robbed by her youth finally speaks against North Korea, the unimaginable country she was fortunate enough to escape from. Calling for a global movement to shed light on `the darkest place in the world’,she describes a country like no other, a place where the internet is banned along with songs, books, international phone calls and voicing basic opinions.
I was abducted at birth, even before I knew the words like`freedom' and 'human rights'-she says.
In her speech, she speaks about the horror of watching her friend’s mother being executed after watching a Hollywood film. She also describes how she was made to watch her own mother being raped. She didn’t escape for freedom, she didn’t escape for a voice but only to have a bowl of rice. She says when the compass stopped working in the Gobi desert, she followed the stars to freedom.
According to Yeonmi,we need to focus less on the regime and more on the people who are being forgotten. She also criticizes the westerners for laughing at Kim Jong Un instead of treating him as a ‘murderer’.
In her new book,’In Order To Live’ Park allows the readers to have a glimpse into her indomitable spirit that carried her forward to a life that she now possess.
