Audiobook via the Hoopla app.
NOTE: The following quotes are transcriptions by the author of this blog from the above noted audiobook. Any mistakes in transcription are due to the blogger's error.
"The audience is silent. I begin to speak. I hear my voice trembling. I'm telling them about a girl who grew up believing her nation to be the greatest on earth, and who witnessed her first public execution at the age of seven. I'm telling them about the night she fled across the frozen river, and how she realized, too late, that she could never go home to her family. I describe the consequences of that night and the terrible events that followed years later. [...]
Among those of us who were born in North Korea, and who have escaped it, the story I am telling is not an uncommon one, but I can feel the impact it is having on the people in the audience at this conference. They are shocked. They are probably asking themselves why a country such as mine still exists in the world.
Perhaps it would be even harder for them to understand that I still love my country and miss it very much. I miss its snowy mountains in winter. The smell of kerosene and burning coal. I miss my childhood there, the safety of my father's embrace, and sleeping on the heated floor.
I should be comfortable with my new life, but I'm still the girl from Hyesan who longs to eat noodles with her family at their favorite restaurant. I miss my bicycle and the view across the river into China.
Leaving North Korea is not like leaving any other country. It is more like leaving another universe. I will never truly be free if it's gravity, no matter how far I journey.
Even for those who have suffered unimaginably there, and who have escaped hell, life in the free world can be so challenging that many struggle to come to terms with it and find happiness. A small number of them even give up and go back to live in that dark place, as I was tempted to do many times.
My reality however is that I cannot go back. I may dream about freedom in North Korea, but nearly 70 years after its creation, it remains as closed and as cruel as ever. By the time it might ever be safe for me to return, I will probably be a stranger in my own land."
Hyeon-seo Lee, The Girl With Seven Names: A North Korean Defector's Story, 2015, Introduction
"I have come to accept that, as a North Korean defector, I am an outsider in the world, an exile. Try as I may to fit into South Korean society, I do not feel that I will ever fully be accepted as a South Korean. More important, I don't think I myself will fully accept this as my identity. I went there too late, age 28. The simple solution for my problem of identity is to say I am 'Korean.' But there is no such nation, the single Korea does not exist.
I would like to shed my North Korean identity, erase the mark it has made on me, but I can't. I'm not sure why this is so, but I suspect it is because I had a happy childhood. As children we have a need, as our awareness of the larger world develops, to feel part of something bigger than family, to belong to a nation. The next step is to identify with humanity as a global citizen.
But in me this development got stuck. I grew up knowing almost nothing of the outside world, except as it was perceived through the lens of the regime. And when I left, I discovered only gradually that my country is a byword everywhere for 'evil.'
But I did not know this years ago when my identity was forming. I thought life in North Korea was normal. Its customs and rulers became strange only with time and distance. Thus I must say that North Korea is my country. I love it. But I want it to become good. My country in my family, and the many good people I knew there. So how could I not be a patriot?"
Hyeon-seo Lee, The Girl With Seven Names: A North Korean Defector's Story, 2015, Introduction
No comments:
Post a Comment