Yeonmi Park Escaped North Korea's Totalitarian Hell Only to Face Slavery and Human Trafficking in China

[Music] hello everyone something too serious today really i would say um privileged to be talking to janmi park born in 1993 in north korea author of in order to live 2015 a book which i just finished reading today and human rights activist and ted speaker yonmi park grew up in a punishing totalitarian society based on stalinist and maoist principles perhaps the last stellarist-era totalitarian state on earth and devoted to the worship of kim jong-il and his family but at the age of 13 she and her family made a daring escape to china in search of a life free of tyranny and indeed a life at all in her viral talks viewed online nearly 350 million times and in her book park urges audiences to recognize think about and resist the oppression that exists in north korea and around the world hi there hi dr peterson it's an honor to be on your show it's very nice to see you i finished about the last third of this book this morning and it's it makes for harrowing reading there's no doubt about that so 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 well wall fell and 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 and thank you exactly as you mentioned in the after soviet union collapsed they were stop 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 it 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 uh i was born in the northern part of north korea so during this uh that great famine that was man-made feminine by king regime that's where most of north koreans died in the northern part where i was born and the people in kenya in the capital they were still very fed so the modern example that i found was actually the hunger games there is a capital and they divide 13 different districts they make everybody else out of the capital on verge of surviving so people do not think about what is the meaning of life what is freedom all they have to think about is next meal like can i find food to feed my child and in pyongyang they are really very fed and they have every intention to maintain the system and the regime so that's where i was born at i mean in the 1993 of seeing the dead bodies on the streets it was a literally everyday thing i never knew that that was like weird words 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 it's 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 that fear leader not about to another human so there is no word for love no word for human rights dignity i mean freedom and that's why you know people in north korea they don't know they are 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 here right nine this 21st 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 animal kim you're some ways and north korean calendar begins not when the jesus christ was born when kim your son was born so they cut out entire information and people literally get executed for watching foreign 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 black hole of information you don't know outside that cave what's happening but of course like like the leaders like kim jong he went to school in switzerland the type elites go out but the people at the bottom most of them do not even never even seen the map of the world and we don't even know what africa other continents other race and that was like me and you described the conditions that you grew up in so you're first of all what 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 two but most of north korea are shorter than me so if we are above 4 10 feet high you must go to military so tons of north korean adornment are around 410 like even below that right now so this severe malnutrition affects in 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 every thought by a dollar oh you should live long enough to do that so it is a different plan that we are talking about uh being in north korea of course like only way for me to get my proteins were eating you know 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's no like really insects and plants are and that's where every spring there's most people dying and majority people die in 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 yeah so every spring i remember my skin should like cut off from the like vitamin likeness that i would get busy 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 are gonna die and as you remember i escaped in the spring and the march of 2007 one day i had a really bad stomachache 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 all 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 uh she has appendix i think we gotta operate on her like right now in this afternoon and they do not use anesthesia it's a very like people not don't use any station north korea they would call my belly open that afternoon and i was fainting and they said oh she's just manually she gets an infection she doesn't have any appendix but and then they close in a bag and then literally from our hospital to the bathroom they were like parts of human bodies piled up and you see children like chasing the rats eating just rats even human eyes first and then children catch these rats and they eat and they somehow die from i don't know what it is then let's eat the children back so this cycle of us eating rats and they eat a spike is going to continue and continue yeah and you said that was happening in the hospital you also mentioned that in that episode that you woke up before the surgery was over because the anesthetic ran out it was yeah it was uh it was not even like actually a full anesthetic it was more like a dose of like a sleeping pill like a lot of tons of it so you know most of people in north korea right now even when they cut their legs open storing their bones they do not give any anesthesia because the it's a free health care and vision do not provide anything for the people so yeah you mentioned as well and so we can talk about your familial situation that in the 1990s the average wage in korea was the equivalent of two dollars a month and so a dollar ninety a day is what the un regards as the the line between poverty like absolute privation related poverty and enough to barely subsist on a dollar ninety a day and so north koreans were making as much in a month as the u.n allows for poverty in a day and you describe um well eating virtually nothing rice was a luxury other forms of food especially protein were virtually unheard of including fruit and you in some of the most memorable sections you described going out into the fields with some other children and you were about seven or eight years old i guess at this time and catching dragonflies and roasting them with uh with a lighter and that was where you got your protein that is uh that's yeah i mean i ate tons of grasshoppers i remember always even though it was a free education let me go to school so in north korea there's no concept of minor they or and there's no concept of i they don't allow us to use the word i so even though like i said i like food they say we like food we like our country so and in that scenario when we go to school they all view us as a revolutionaries and therefore even the children when they go to school even eight seven nine years old we all have to work in a manner construction zones so therefore children even when they can afford to go to school it doesn't really mean much to them go to school and most of children now in north korea cannot afford to go to school and stay at home and that was like my job and parents go out to find food children would like clean and bring the drinking water we don't even have a sewage and go into mountains and bring a lot of the firewood because we don't have gas or coal anything we have to find anything we can find in the nature to cook food so it's almost like 16th century of lifestyle that we go to the river and we bathe in the summer time and in the winter we don't bathe and only a few times we take baths and that's why syria sometimes cannot believe that this is the same life that i'm living in right now so you mentioned earlier the class distinctions that were drawn in north korea and this is a characteristic of other totalitarian states including those predicated on hypothetically predicated on absolute equality you saw this happening in in the stalinist era and also in maoist china where if your family members were associated with a group that was deemed oppressive then that still might impede your chances of survival let alone progress three or four generations later so you and i believe your family if i remember correctly your grandfather or great-grandfather was a landowner and so what did that mean so exactly that's what north korea does right now they still have this thing called the guilt by association so if one person does wrong in north korea it doesn't mean just you or the one get punished three to eight generations gets punished so when there was one high ranking official escaped they killed more than 30 000 people because of the one person's defection and that's the cause that i had to bear me speaking out afterwards of my three generation family back in north korea that punished so that's like that my great grandfather i think were small landowner before the colonies and everything began in the 1900s only that time because of that that my grandmother was her status was down and the trickiest thing about north korea's status is that there's not even something called marrying up some other countries if you marry somebody from higher status you can go up with them but in north korea there's only going down if your high status margin is somewhat low you go down with them that's how they prevent mixing different classes and right and so that's one of the consequences of this idea of group guilt and so the system is predicated on the idea or was predicated originally on the idea that the landowning class was oppressive tyrannical and and well they were thieves they were immoral thieves essentially as an entire class and and then that class guilt became so pervasive that it wasn't escapable across generations that's where the idea of group guilt takes societies and how would you contrast that to what you see in the west it is so it's unbelievable like i mean i went to school in america to university and or talk about this you know i mean america also had a slavery and like all those oppression but now they are collectively being guaranteed for their history and how many generations ago was that even and then people still trying to punish people who were not doing it at the time and how do you choose your ancestors i think that's what was the hardest thing for me to be north korea is that i mean i wish i had that option to choose those things back then but you it's not within your control and now also in america i see these trends of people going after people who ancestors more perhaps the like slave owners but how is it even relevant to that individual right now who they are it's not only they contributed back then so this idea of like you know the scared collectively we associate them and i just never knew that the rest of the world was gonna be also like this in a different degree but this is something that mainly north korea holds against its people they literally call your blood tainted because your father your great great grandfather did something that means you are forever your blood is tainted you are not like redeemable and almost now in america i see that because of my people their ancestors on the slaves they are like reading over they should be forever guilty about their privilege and like the idea of this word guilt is also very it's very hard to even look at this and it's so heartbreaking why would you cause that kind of shame on other humans why it's not their fault at all yeah well that's a good question but we why you would want that to happen well i think it's part of a demand for some hypothetical radical equality i mean it it is the case that some people are born we're all born with different advantages and disadvantages and some of those are linked to our ethnicity and our race from time to time and there's an attempt to at least in principle level the playing field but it gets very dangerous when you try to equalize the outcomes and when you enter the realm of guilt by group that's a catastrophe everywhere that's ever been instituted it's just a complete catastrophe because exactly the same thing happened in the soviet union and in maoist china your family your father in particular but also your mother they and many many koreans in the 1990s when things fell apart so catastrophically there was an the emergency re-emergence of free enterprise in some sense it was illegal highly illegal but tell us what your father and your mother did to survive so as you say in the 90s until then so in nursery right now you cannot own cars you cannot own houses everything is private so no private property north korea you don't even own yourself everything is state-owned so therefore trading is illegal that is a is a ul committing of crime but after the 90s the slovenia collapsed people had to find their own miss to survive outside the north korean government so the regime created this ideology called duty ideology self-reliance ideology so they told people okay you alive on your own we are not gonna give you public distribution you should figure out on your thing then like how do we figure on things we don't have freedom we cannot even trade so people started getting into this thing called the black market but all right so simultaneously so what was happening in north korea simultaneously was that the centralized government distribution system collapsed completely when it was no longer subsidized and the north korean government decided that everyone was now on their own while simultaneously making any ownership and any trade whatsoever illegal and punishable with extreme punishments so you were on your own but forbidden to do anything that would get you out of your condition of starvation and privation exactly i like it now i'm thinking back people said like oh what were you allowed to do in north korea i literally sat down one day like what was i allowed to do on my own literally just breathing that is the only thing that i was allowed to do on my own the regime literally tell you what to read what to listen to they even send you prison if you dance in the wrong way if you wear jeans they say it's a symbol of capitalism they send you prison if women wear like skirt like a pants sometimes they say oh you got a women have to wear the skirt and if you watch the wrong movie and even the haircut they tell you what kind of hair it was a funny joke for the westerners say i cannot believe in north korea you have to follow the haircut line the guidelines that's how controlling the regime is they intervene every aspect of your life and literally when there are sometimes when we have even electricity they would give us this radio that we cannot turn off we can lower the volume but can never turn off at home so they force us to listen to this propaganda right and it's stuck on one channel you can't move it move the station selector to listen to anything else that's illegal as well yes and that's the thing like the regime doesn't allow us to anything and then but let us somehow find a way to survive and of course that means breaking the rules in north korean my father was involved in black market where he started selling dry fish sugar rice clothes clogs and then later the meadows like copper silver copper and of course that was illegal and that's how it was sent to prison camp right and so he started to trade and you mentioned in your book that that the trading as far as you were concerned that the trading activity that emerged as a consequence of the black market gave north koreans their first small taste of freedom so what what do you mean by that why did that strike you that way because it's a trading is a very empowering act because until then north koreans have to rely on everything from the regime like literally even the water everything but when we started being creative and they say okay i can find the corn like a cheaper price in this region and then bring it to the other region and bring or maybe fabric from this region to the other region so we start getting more control over like how we even think how to look and but it was like north korea's marketization was extremely controlled and still very limited but that was almost giving the people now to think oh there is a life when i take my own control of my life it's better than relying on government who just promise to take care of everything but who never does so now the younger generation has placed its market hydration and thirst for more freedom to being in the market system so your conclusion was that there was a direct connection between the the act of engaging in in free trade say at the personal level and the idea of freedom itself because it forces you to think for yourself any trade when you trade it's not like you're thinking about oh how am i gonna like become a better revolutionary for the region you think for yourself like how is it gonna benefit me my family if i do this but for north koreans thinking for yourself was something so unheard of like when we are born the first thing they teach us how to bow properly and respect and the first thing that my mom taught me as a younger was not even whisper because the birds and mice could hear me she told me that the most dangerous thing in my body that i had was my tongue if you sleep out a wrong word that is end of our like entire family plan that's how much dangerous your tongue is yes so you you you carefully discuss your experiences with free trade and attribute to that the dawning idea of autonomy and and individual freedom whereas the act of trade is deemed illegal and immoral by the totalitarians and that's associated in some manner with their insistence that private property is theft and that capitalism by its nature which would include any free trade of any sort is also corrupt and malevolent right so all right so your mother you talked about the restrictions on your speech that even the mice had ears so to speak your mother was almost thrown into prison camp because of comments that an uncle of yours made i believe he was visiting from china and he so can you tell that story so when i was really young uh we had some relatives from china he came and told my mom and kim your son the first king died and that he said he didn't die from hard working for the people because when the kims died they told us that you know like literally they're terrible some people kim's are starving like all of us they cannot even sleep they work tirelessly for us how grateful we are for having a leader who's that selfless but towards my mom actually she didn't die from like those exhaustion from hard working rather he died from some heart attack caused by medical condition and then my mom was a true believer there she was telling her friend best friend that can you believe how far on my bad people are saying like these ridiculous rumors about our dear leader and she was more like telling out of anger that she heard it was like she was questioning it but even that was so in north korea right now like you and me and there's one person three of us sitting here i'm watching you and you're watching the other person and that person watching me so even though i'm being a nice person not gonna report or new i know that someone watching me gonna report on me but if that person is not reporting on me then there he's gonna be also reported by the other person so you're being spied and you're just spied on someone that kind of system made us to not trust in another human it carried our like trust in another person like we are always paranoid so that's a good lesson for my mom to learn even she thought all her life that i was her best friend she was a spy and she told her officials and my mom almost like risked killing all of us but the thing is because she never slipped the water to another person and she studied from the intention of defending the revolution they like pardoned her and told her never ever say something like that ever to anybody so even my father never knew what was happening there right so even though she thought the rumor was a lie and when she talked about it she was outraged that was still enough for a firm and a full investigation with a tremendous amount of danger associated and it was luck in in large part that she escaped from more severe punishment and the fact maybe that she had small children definitely uh like right in north korea like when you have a newspaper every front page has becomes but when you turn in the back of the newspaper you don't see the photo of kim's by mistake if you read the newspaper your family goes through the generation of this consensus account so if you rip it oh yeah so it's it's like if you get a newspaper you're gonna be very careful how the photo is gonna be positioned so every household in north korea have them portraits of kings if your house caught on fire the first thing is now you're holding your china one out you have to hold the portraits to your death otherwise it's going to kill the residents of your family again so this is like the kings are gods to us they can't they're almighty that who came with our thoughts i literally believe that it was like so north korea copied the bible in its exact bible kim your son was a god loved us so much gave his son to us jesus christ like kim jong-un his body dies but he spirits with us forever and ever therefore he knows how many hair i have what i think what my future will be so if we sacrifice ourselves right now for the revolution we are gonna showing him in the paradise afterlife so north korea therefore is number one christian persecution country because it's so like so they copied it so like similarly they cannot show it to north korean people there's some other ideology like that exists in another country so that's why they don't want a lot of religion in that way so you spent a lot of time when you were a kid completely on your own because your dad your father was eventually put in a prison camp and for a long time and then your mother spent a lot of time away from you because she had well she had to do what she needed to do to raise money so that you could survive but also she was trying to deal with the situation with your father so you and your you and your sister um how much age difference is there between you two three years and she's older yes i was eight years old and she's 11 years old and you spent a lot of time on your own months years three years four years so what would tell me tell me about a typical day in a typical week when you were on your own so you'd get up in the morning you said the roosters would crow there's no electricity the roosters would crow you were living in a city at that time that time i was moving around a lot so initially i was left along with my sister when i was eight years old and 11 my sister we were living like for three years and then our relatives separated us our uncle took my sister and my aunt took me to the countryside that's how i lived also on our two years like that way and so my typical day is like you know when the rooster like cries in the summer time usually 5 30 a.m and the winter time is 7 a.m they're pretty accurate so north korea can afford the clocks and that's how we follow the you know rooster the timeline we get up and we go to the mountains and do the daily work we go and the regime also assigns the children to raise a rabbit at home and then we skin them and give the skin to the regime so they can make the soldier's coats with it so everybody gets assignments with the regime and also the thing is that they don't even have fertilizer so they make sure that everybody bring their own bathroom stuff to the school so tons of them so even when you're a child you get tons of assignments from the vision every single one of them associated something and get your assignment and get it done collecting yes well you said that as a school child all of your you and all of your uh um your your friends your peers well as well as the adults were all set out all the time to collect dog waste and human waste and that that was actually stolen from toilets because it was valuable it had to be handed over to the state because that was the only source of fertilizer yeah so even that so i remember my one of the my culture shock was when i was in the trash cans for the first time in my life because there was no trash can in north korea we literally had nothing to throw away and coming to the west where people were having these trash problems like where the heck am i and in north korea even your own poop it's so valuable that they fight for food it's like the worm poop and if you don't bring the kora you're gonna be punished by the russian so the kisses rather than they even school they don't study they send out us to hunting for poops and everywhere and gather them bring it to school afterwards right well that was one of the most striking parts of the book i'd never i've read a fair bit about poverty-stricken existence under totalitarian regimes but that was the first time i'd encountered that particular wrinkle let's say so all right so you're eight years old and your sister is 11 and you get up with the roosters and you have work to do what are you eating at that point how much are you eating and where do you get your food it's uh it really depends in north korea it's not when you eat it so random like what you get that day it's uh you know that's a thing i never seen a cookbook you know how do you find the half pounds of pork and flour and like scalling like we just eat whatever we have at that moment so if that day we had uh potatoes who were like frozen outside because we didn't have a place to put them then they becomes very dark colors we cook them and then we put lots of water in it and then some dried cabbage in it because you know usually water fills you up so a lot of food are has a lot of soup in it in north korea to fill you up and you know we make sure that we have enough food for the for the evening we divided each meal so depending on how much food we have that day in the morning i'm always like to the public distribution for each one of us and how much you can eat per day certain meal and some days we just cannot eat and who was distributing it i was the my sister was a one more like chopping mousse because she was bigger she was doing more manual work and i was the one more like cooking and doing the domestic work and where was the food coming from apart from what you gathered apart is sometimes my mom before she goes away like for several months she leaves us with a few kilograms of corn and like other grains then we have to divide it for like six days you know we don't know when she comes out well you told me to come back you told a story at one point about your mother leaving i believe she was gone for several months and she left you some money and you and your sister spent it on sunflower seeds and and something else some cookies some cookies on the way back from from from where your mother left from and then you had no money for the all the time that she was gone exactly so we learned that listen the first time she left us gave us some money and then we never had those kind of money big money in our hands so on the way back we bought sunflower seed and some cookies in the plastic bag and then we had no nothing left for us and we were not even so in north korea we don't even have phones it's not like you can call up somebody where are you like a lot of times they go out and they never come back they might die you know you know disease or station like or accidents a lot of people never hear back from so going on a journey in north korea is like higher chances of you never seeing them again and so even though mom would say i will come back but we never knew she would and once that happened the first time we learned the lesson mom would like leave us few kilograms of grains then we would divide as much as we could so we will never know until she comes back and you said that all you ever thought about and your sister as well was food and that you dreamed about bread and you fantasized about bread and you talked about how much bread you could conceivably eat and that you were possessed all the time with with hunger i know i'm like still thinking as a child like i never ate till i fell full because so i never knew what was like limits of my own stomach was i never knew how much should i be fed so i feel like full so as a young man i literally thought if i even eat the mountains of food i thought i would never never fear full so really compare how much i can eat more so my sister said like i'm hundred and thousand then like a mountain and 10 million and whatever the number whoever comes bigger and that's how we were just like dreaming of it that was the only thing on your muscle but that's the thing when people talk about like the civilization right it falls when you don't eat people like become animals you lose all those dignity all you're thinking is just food basic survivor and that's what my people always telling me the basic survivor yeah and you were at that time too you were seeing death everywhere as a consequence of starvation it's i i still remember like one day my son i walked by near the well as i go people bring the drinking water there's a young man i don't know like maybe teenager he lies down and his intestines comes out of him and he was still alive and like i'm hungry give me something but as a young mind i don't even feel sorry that's the thing haunts me the most is that i feel nothing on my life there's and because every single thing i saw was like that and now i'm thinking was i your sex psychopath like how did i feel nothing about it but that's like being so desensitized north koreans are like i think if you're in if you're in shock you're in shock all the time i mean you said in many of the experiences you had for example that you felt like you were outside your body watching and that's a classic sign of of dissociative stress and you are in a situation like that all the time all the time so i i don't think that you have to consult your conscience about that it's in your book itself there's no shortage of empathy on display so and i i don't think it's a comment on your character it's a comment on the absolute horror of the situation that you found yourself in and obviously you were capable of great loyalty to your family members and even to some of the people that treated you very very badly i mean the the men that you were involved with in part once you escaped from north korea you had ambivalent relationships with but i mean in some you you were able to see their humanity despite the terrible situation that you had been placed in by them so i don't think there's any issue of you not having the full range of human feelings it's just you were in situations that were so terrible that no one fortunately no one in the west essentially can even imagine imagine being in a situation like that none of us to speak of or very small minority of us have ever been hungry forever let alone for any protracted period of time and certainly not to the point of me of chronic malnutrition that's just that just doesn't happen here and so okay so you lost your fa your father was imprisoned when you were about eight seven or eight and and what happened to him what was the consequence consequences for him he was doing quite well in some sense by north korean standards with his trading so he was he was he was good at what he was doing and your mother helped him but he got imprisoned after especially after he moved up into more dangerous commodities you said that he started to trade metals and that he was hiding the medals in cars railway cars that were reserved for for i think i've got this right for for kim jong-il yes yes and because they wouldn't be searched yes so at every train in north korea we only have one trend line and that goes from one side of the country to the end it sometimes takes a month to go because the low electricity and the railways are very bad so and that's why there's owner always reserve one cargo that carries the things to kim's from and what's in that car just out of curiosity uh i mean we hear these rumors they they grow i mean the parts of the country that has the best land for you know growing up or growing something like the best of the best from the country that especially reserved for them and nobody actually knows what's even in there even when the those people who search that cargo cannot go and the people who regards it they have to do body search and enhance checkout for them so that's how severe is controlled so really nobody knows what they're carrying inside and my father was able to do something with them and then carry the matters in that cargo hiding and and he was bribing he was bribing guards to allow that to happen yeah and then he got caught yeah and was put in a so what kind talk about the prison situations the pri because just normal life in north korea is unbearable by all accounts but the prisons take that to a whole new level of hell so what would have your father experienced in the north korean prison camp so there are three types of prisons in north korea one is called gualiso it is concentration camp usually you're born there so you're because you grab like i said one day my grandfather communism crime then they take the old the generation to there and it is like a permanent living condition there you live there forever for the rest of your life and you're born there you can be born there because of the group guilt of your ancestors which never goes away right now you can never redeem the by the your group your whatever your ancestors did forever you're there so they don't even consider this inmates a human enough they don't even teach them whose leader is they don't even know what kim jong-un is in that constitutional account you said they're not even allowed to look at the guards yes but that is every deliberation where my father went was a prison camp they but those people know what kim song is but the thing is they to also treat them like animals they don't let them to ever see the guards eyes and of course the the conditions are i mean it's a holocaust of what the unsightly in 2014 the u.n did three years investigation and the only resemblance that we found in our history is the holocaust this is a holocaust happening in north carolina like again and do you have any idea how many people are in the concentration camps the worst of the prisons do you know what the estimates are they say around 200 000 and what about the total prison population do you have any numbers for that because so many are dying so when you go to the prison a lot of them died within three months so those like numbers are very hard to like get and it's the most secretive country in the world like even though you the america cannot figure out north korea so those we know that their positions we can even satellites seeing those public executions happening but it's very hard to estimate how many going in and how many dying after like three months it's hard to like calculate the numbers and so your father was in prison for how long uh he was sentenced to more than 10 years uh initially was i thought was 17 years but north korea shared the record it was like i think 11 year sentence prison camp he got out something for five four maybe years later for the sick leave which means he was driving that's the thing right he played a trick on the wards right right so they he think holistically once you get killed you go back to prison again and he he was a very like a businessman he learned like cars and get him out and that's how he he got him out during the his sentence and so you saw your father again after a couple of years how many years were you without him i think four years four years i saw him again when i was 12 right and you and and you described that in the book and so what did you see when you saw your father what what what had happened to him um so when i was reading this book by georgio in 1984 it talks about the man like winston who had a lot of wits and after that all the torture he became empty right like and a lot of people like read that book as a fiction to them but for me that was like my father when i saw my father again of course he had no hair he just got a prison camp i mean all he got was just bones like literally skin on the bones and other things i didn't even feel anything that's like what i'm saying i guarantee it's like i felt nothing he was just so empty his eyes were just hollow and empty and then he was starting singing songs like i didn't do enough for my country like he was so guilty that he was not a revolutionary or whole and if he wasn't him and in some ways that was worse than killing him they killed his soul permanently that he never came back until he died he felt guilty that one day he committed for the regime to his death but he told me never betrayed like the cheerleader and i don't know what he did to him but he he came out as a completely different person so it was not long after that that you and your family decided to leave north korea to escape you were 13. your dad died he died of cancer yeah and it wasn't long after he got out of the prison that that was the case and then you guys decided to make your way to china no i i escaped actually so my sister at 16 she escaped first with her friend and i told you i said i got my stomachache she left me a note to say go find this lady she will help you to stay initially we didn't plan to i didn't plan to escape with my mom i was going to escape with my own sister but because i got sick my sister had to leave first i found the note and found a lady with my mom and told her that she told me if i go to china she said i was going to find my sister right and then i mean but when you're so desperate like you don't even know what china is like we don't have internet to look searched and what's going on in china just hoping because china is the only place that had the lights at night and if you look at north korea from a satellite image it's quite interesting because the entire country is black at night and it's surrounded by the bright lights of south korea and all of southeast asia but you have this immense territory the whole north of korea that's completely dark and you talked about standing with your boyfriend at that time looking at the lights in the distance of china but you didn't know anything about it at all and had no idea what was going to happen to you if you escaped into china no i did not even know what was china i just saw the lights and maybe if i go where the lights were i thought maybe i would find a bottle of rice that's how innocently we thought about it and right and some of that motivation was direct hunger right you were you were hoping to find somewhere where you could at least get enough to eat yeah it was that's the thing it's something when people say you're so brave that you risked your life for freedom like no i wasn't i didn't even know what freedom was then like how do i know what freedom is and i just was literally escaping to find some food to survive from hunger and that's how we crossed that frozen river that night with my mother and myself when i was 13 years old to china leaving my father behind back in north korea so tell us what happened tell us about what happens to north koreans as they move with the traffickers into korea because that's a whole story in and of itself and it was something you had no idea about i know this is a thing like people the world is obsessed talking about slavery but this is a slavery that happening just right now at this very moment that we are talking about this so there are like 300 000 north korean defectors are in china and they are all enslaved by chinese people i was one of them in 2007 uh we found this lady miraculously she would help me to go to china i didn't even know why she brought the girls so in north korea is the most heavily guarded border with the people with the machine guns and jim zone literally buries land mines on the border so people would not escape so entire countries are concentrating camp entire border is served we will luckily bribe the guards we cross the frozen river to china and of course the first thing i see was my mom being raped in front of me and and you said that your mother offered herself as an alternative to you yeah and you were 13 at the time and that was your first introduction to sex of any sort because there was no sexual education or contact for young people there was no sexual education and no romance no dating anything like that so that was your first introduction i don't imagine you even understood what was happening no i that's the thing like um i go there and i was like something 60 pounds i was very manly maybe 50 something but i'm so small and this man was like i want to have a sex with her and my mom's like what do you mean like she's only a child and then you say i want to have sex with her so just take me instead and he was raping her in front of me but i'm like i just never seen a sex video ever never even knew what rape was that word was not even in my head i just seen something so horrible that i didn't want to see and after that they took us to this uh house where they would like literally make us stand up make us turn around take our teeth and everything and making price on our body yeah now let me fill in a bit of background there so the way you lay that out in this in your autobiography is that there's a heavy demand for north korean women in china especially rural china and the fundamental reason for that apart from desire for labor is that china instituted a one-child policy back in the 60s and many many female female fetuses were more aborted than male so there's a disproportionate number of young chinese men who have no partner and no probability of acquiring one because there's an absolute shortage of of women and so you and your mother were valuable commodities because of the shortage of women exactly yes i've got that right and there was a price on you were you both had a high value yeah and so and that's when you entered what was essentially the world of slavery it's uh as you said right now in china literally 30 million young men has no hope of finding women in their life 30 million men in china right now so because of the regime chinese regime do not want this men to revolt even because of dissatisfaction with their lifestyle in a way regime chinese region does not crack cracking down on this human right trafficking either we are almost the price they are using to pay for this mcmahon not reward and then so when we go uh i was 13 years old i was a virgin so my price would be less than 300 in 2007 and my mom's price was that's 100 that's how literal human being worth right now in this 21st century and then each trafficker buys us price goes up so the second trafficker comes and buys us and then pay more price then they sell us to the chinese farmers or the men or to sell us to brothers or prostitution and like a lot of other like underground words and sell us like uh products like commodity and that's and then i remember that's the thing at 13 they were asking so in china in order to be here you got to be sword and i didn't even know what to mention after kim was like what do you mean you're selling a human i'm not a puppy like how do you serve me and they were like no you gotta be sold here and they said like literally to me was that well if you don't want to be sold you can go back to north korea we can't let you guys go back but the thing is going back to north korea is a death like even though miraculously regime doesn't punish me there's no chance for me to find food i mean that's the hardest thing it's like there's no place for us to go outside of north korea like if we leave that country whatever the condition is it's better than being in north korea because at least in china we are being fed it doesn't matter we are raped tortured we are at least being fed and that's how we stayed in china and decide and they sorted me separately from my mom because you know they can charge two people's price so they sold my mom and sorted me separately and that's how i got separated from all my family at 13. yeah well you said at the beginning when you went into china that you didn't tell the smugglers the traffickers that you were traveling with your mother you said that she was younger than she was and you said that you were older than you were exactly because they weren't going to take you otherwise yeah so and you had no idea what was in store for you at that point also no i did not know but she told me oh don't tell them you guys are mother and daughters to say or maybe aunt or something and told my mom you're much younger you're much older and because human trafficking was something that i didn't hear about in my life i was so scared because in north korea there's no bad news every news is a happy news how amazing we are winning in the revolution so i never even knew what rape was in america if you watch news like somebody raped you know what babies by north korea they steal every information from you like news is not actual news so not knowing what babies not knowing what human trafficking is and just completely into a new just another like planet but you had enough to eat yeah and was that the first time in your life that you'd actually had enough to eat were you able to find enough so that you could eat until you were full did you experience that at that point that's when i learned another thing is it mattered it didn't matter that i had food to you again because i lost everything that mattered to me like i lost everything and so i want to kill myself like i finally get to the place where there is a food for me but then that means me being a slave and i'm losing every single one of them in my life and i i was going to kill myself and at that point this broker told me if you help me become my mistress help me with my trafficking business that i'm going to help you with your own family why did you decide to stay alive what kept you going because my mother he told me at that point he said if i don't kill myself and helping him then he said he was going to buy my mom because he's the one who sold my mom to a farmer right so at that point you were separated and your mother was the enslaved wife so to speak of of a farmer on a rural on in a rural community yeah so she she had to be bought back and that's the deal he offered you yes and so you decided to stay alive because you thought you could help your mother yeah it wasn't for you no i i was yeah it was uh my then my life mattered to something like it meant something i could do something more than that so he offered to my bring my father and that's how i brought my father to china from north korea and that october when i was turning 14 and then october 2007 i i saw my father again and so then you were you were with this man hon hongwei was that his name way and you describe a very complex relationship with him he was violent and a gambler so he would spend vast amounts of money raised by this trafficking trade and disperse all of it in gambling fits and he was violent to you but you also believe that over time he came to love you and so what do you make of that in retrospect it's an unbelievably complicated situation to say the least you know even though actually it's a thing last year he came out of prison in china after 10 years serving sentence and uh i sent him money from the u.s to help me and it was for me to that's the thing i and then i could actually this morning i woke up from this nightmare of my time with him how violent he was or my day i was like so was hard up like all those nightmares i went through but the thing is like nobody's a pure evil nobody's pure like anger i think that's what it is like as much as he was so evil i'm still haunted by nightmares he still i said with my parents he still gave my father the last moment that i can cherish and and i think that's life really is it's not that like simple yeah so you were with him for how long two years and what what what occurred after that you went to mongolia what was the what was the trek from from him now so he bought your mother back and so you're together living with him you and your mother yes you can't find your sister yet at that point no i couldn't find my sister your father is he still alive at that point when you're with hong wei so yes during that time after finding my mom he brought my father six months later and then my father died three months three months later after i saw him again and you said you had changed dramatically after you left north korea you stopped being a child very very rapidly right and you started to take care of your mother and to make the decisions and also when your father saw you once he came to china that he could hardly recognize you i oh it still affects me i think that at 13 i became i don't know what i became it it took so hard for me to fear something again like when i had my own son actually in 2018 when i met you right at the lecture that is the year when i for the first time first something and like i was so grateful that i was feeling things ever again and so at 13 i learned how not to fear ever and i don't know how it was possible even so my father came and then he died so i buried his ashes in the middle mountain and after that homework is like he blew all his money from gambling he couldn't even have you said when your father did come though you did revert to being a child from time to time that you would sit on his lap and that you would turn back into a younger child and then go back into whoever you had become when you went to china yeah i think there were many versions of me back then to survive whatever the virgin that was feeding me to survive i think i became that person it just it was so complex i don't even know like who was am i which person was am i like i became so many persons i still think i just don't even know how that was possible so because you know my father before he died like he was keep telling me about his childhood and and i i think he just really missed me being a child i think something they brought that out of me so yeah so my father is very hard thing for me to deal with but so he died and then hungary couldn't afford to have us he couldn't even able to buy us even food in china that's really bad he couldn't even able to feed us so he was saying okay i'm not gonna let you go and how do we go where do we go even though your mother at that point she was insisting that you sell her again if i remember correct yeah i did sell my mom because i couldn't feed her she was the only way for me to vet in china i was being sold again so i sold my own mom and then gave the money to homemade and he blossomed in a one-night game boy so three months later i brought my mom make her to run away from the farmer that i sold her and then we luckily found the north korean lady who operates in a chat room i don't know you know this they bring these girls so it was better than brother that's the thing i had the option of going to prostitution or going to a chat room and 14 and i thought it's much better than being touched by men physically than going a chat room well you said that with hong wei that you know that was your introduction to sex essentially and that it was catastrophic for you and so well and then you after after hung way could no longer afford to feed everyone that's when you entered the chat rooms and and you were in you were working in the chat rooms for how long maybe six over half a year maybe less than a year i think so like eight maybe eight months or nine month time and and the people that organize the chat rooms took the vast proportion of the money yes i think you got one dollar out of seven it was something like that something like but even that dollar you had to buy food and clothes and other things so but the thing is there was better there than going in the prostitution and in that chat room we met another north korean fellow defector and then she told me there was way out of all this which means going to south korea and then they say i told them what you mean south korea i thought south korea was colonized by america it's like the horrible horrible capitalistic country and she was like no south korea is free and that is i remember still the time i learned the word free that day i was asking her what do you mean i'm gonna be free in south korea and she of course did not know freedom meant freedom of speech none of that she literally told me oh in south korea you can wear jeans and you can watch some tv and no one's gonna be arresting you for that and that's how we conceive the freedom as north koreans like freedom meant wearing jeans so i asked her then how do i do that and she was saying oh then you gotta become christians there were christian like operations in china if we become christians they were going to help us and it was an irony for me or why because i couldn't believe like why do we have to keep believing something to survive in north korea to believe in kim's but now suddenly outside north korea we had to believe in god to survive but the thing is we are so desperate like literally if somebody took me a romeo like a rock they asked me to believe in raw i would have lived that is like how strong why humans were to survive and the christians the christians that that you became associated with in china were those chinese christians or were they missionaries from western countries both they were both some of them from south korea and some of them from china and they would have these houses that make us to study bible and if we prove our faith to them they then help us to go to south korea and that was a deal that we become christians and they were going to help us so at 15 i became a christian like i they made us to go fasting i mean like real like manage all our life but they said god can do more than that so they goes like fasting with a three years old child in our group a toddler we go fasting and make us memorize vibral verses and they come check us like if we memorize it or not how do you view that interaction with the christians in china in retrospect was there any of that that was useful or was it just another belief that you you had to adopt to survive so truly honestly dr peterson until i read your book uh traverse for life i was i would say this i was so so against religion because so right now now i'm gonna do christians at 15 studying bible and then they found out about what i did to survive in china and the chat rooms yes and they i remember the pastor was saying you're so dirty like it can never be washed and he literally like some corinthians some verse telling me that how some things can never be washed and how i was so dirty for doing what i did to survive and that was actually a lot harder and some in some ways to going through all that journey because when i was going through it i didn't think that was a bad thing i thought like something you have to do to survive because my father always told me life was gifts you have to fight for it no matter what how hard it is you should never give up on like life and and then i'm suddenly now with this missionary telling me what i did was wrong i should have died instead of doing something that dirty to survive so it was very tough to deal with like keep thinking for the rest of my life was it worth it well but also you you were at that point too you said that the reason that you didn't kill yourself was because you wanted to help your mother you had other people that were dependent on you it wasn't just you and you were still looking for your sister too you had no idea what had happened to her at that point yeah i didn't know so yeah and but the thing is now what i'm thinking of that no matter what he was he was better than those people talking about inclusion all of that because she risked his life through saving lives those pastors those missions to send prison for lifetime sentence in china no matter what people are saying like you gotta see their actions and these people actually cared about humanity that anybody that i met having all this flowery loving language they are using so that's the thing like it's so hard to understand humanity that even though it hurt me so long i'm like forever grateful for what he did for us and namelessly i'm like i made a name for myself if i'm lying people i don't know but he never did and he didn't even tell me his name we asked him like tell us your name so we can at least thank you afterwards again it's not louise for making a name i'm doing this because of love love for jesus that he loved us that's why i'm loving you guys so much so in a way that he was the only person who showed me with the actions that humans can love another that like unconditionally so it's just very complex so he it was his group that took you to you and your mother to mongolia they told us how to go to mongolia because in desert there's no way you can make it out it's like it's a random luck it's a pure look that's why i think maybe they were more religious they were waiting for god's sign to send us because it's not like guide taking us if you getting into the gobby desert most of chances like mostly you're never going to be found by any human being on earth so you decided that you would just go into the desert and take your chances yeah and that was you and your mom and then we have five other people in our group and one baby with us so it was a people group and then they told us go follow northwest direction with one compass and then if you cross eight wire fences hopefully that's gonna be mongolia for you there's a random chance of taking the luck and and so why was mongolia a reasonable target or were you just out of options because it didn't cost money if we wanted to go to other countries like thailand we had to pay the brokers but we didn't have money so mongolia was the by walking crossing the walks when you walk you don't pay anybody so now really nobody escaped through mongolia because it's too dangerous now most of the facts are escaping through thailand but we were the last people who ever crossed the desert to make it too successfully so what happened in mongolia you did run across authorities yes we did uh we after how long how long were you in the desert we were actually only there one day but it was uh 2009 in february minus 40 degrees minus 40. yes in desert in among it's below siberia so usually guys would think like nobody's crazy enough to cross desert right now in this temperature because you can die like even within a few minutes if you don't move in desert for even 10 seconds you're frozen there you are constantly moving every second and you said you had very you had almost no clothing at that point because they told you to pack light like my mom how come you didn't freeze i mean minus 40 is unbelievably cool yeah it's so that says miracle life is a miracle it's like some things you cannot explain in a human way it's just like uh people say it's a lot maybe you can say it's a lot i i don't know it was i remember like everything was frozen and we didn't even have gloves or scarves that's the thing and now i'm not complaining how cold the chicago is like no we we were wearing this bear no snow jackets none of that and we i all i remember was we reminding each other we gotta keep moving because when you are frozen it gets very sleepy and like you're losing a lot of senses and then maybe you wanna rest and then we will remind you to know we gotta keep going like dragging each other moving every second counts you gotta move and did all eight of you make it and the baby as well we made it because initially we have to drug the baby if the baby cries the girl is gonna hear us so we would give him the sleeping to him to make him sleep but sleeping in that frozen like weather is so dangerous thing so we have to constantly waking him up like passing around between people to keep him awake and he he made it too so you you were you were picked up by the authorities and you were put in a uh a holding camp essentially yeah it didn't seem compared to many of the other things that you had been through it it didn't seem as awful is that reasonable so tell us about that so the thing was in mongolia it wasn't something physical hardships we went through so much it doesn't matter but the thing is they were this is the thing later we learned like so mongolia they they wanted to send us to north korean side i mean to the chinese side and then sounds back north korea so we literally brought the lasers and like poisons to kill ourselves in front of them and we thought like they were sending us to china's side but later we learned that these soldiers had never intention but they loved looking at our reactions how do you react really yeah that's the thing she's so it's so unbelievable i know it's like literally i remember like trying to comment later tell my mom like we did everything we could to make it and we luckily they stopped us right before we cut our reserves but the team who came after us they went too far so she didn't swallow the poison and then they took her to the hospital and she became like mentally like lost a lot of her senses afterwards so it was a game for a lot of people like teaching us you know seeing someone like and i think that's like very hard at this point like tonight to make sense of like being a human like you know it's just so hard to know this is like the same life that i've been having it was like some dream or something so you were after that you were reasonably treated in mongolia but you were also subject to a lot of interrogation and why was that because uh one is they tried to scream the spies out because north korea sends a lot of spies disguising as defectors and send them so they can assassinate like like me someone who speaks out or get information who my relatives are and then send back to north korea so they can punish the family members of the defectors so a lot of the factors just like a spice can do but not only that south korea also had a very like heavy discrimination towards north koreans and the country is still very they blame the victims when it comes like the rape you know there's like because of you gary not a man so i remember like during my interrogation