by Yeonmi Park
After twenty days in China, my mother came home discouraged. We could not find my sister, but we would not give up hope that she would find us someday. Meanwhile, my mother did not come back completely empty-handed. Before we left for the mission in Qingdao, we stored our belongings at a safe place in Shenyang. We didn’t want to be carrying anything that could identify us as North Koreans while we made our escape. This included a small packet of family photographs. Those pictures were all we had left of my father and Eunmi and the family we loved and had left behind. And now they were with us in South Korea.
Another good thing came from this trip. In the past, Myung Ok had refused to defect because she was terrified of getting arrested and sent back to be tortured and executed. But my mother told her about how great it was in South Korea and how the government helped us when we arrived. “Look at this!” she said to Myung Ok, waving her passport in her friend’s face. “You can get one of these when you go there, and then you can travel anywhere without fear! You’ll be free.”
Seeing that passport gave Myung Ok the courage to take the risk. My mother and I made some phone calls and arranged a route for her to escape through Thailand. She departed a few months later and finally made it to South Korea.
• • •
I didn’t stay at the Heavenly Dream School for very long. In fact, as soon as my mother returned from China, at the end of November, I dropped out and moved back into the apartment. I didn’t feel that I was getting enough of what I needed out of the school’s curriculum, and I didn’t like all the extra religious activities. I didn’t like having to pretend to believe more deeply than I did. And the preaching sometimes reminded me of how the pastor in Qingdao had made me feel so dirty and sinful.
Once I was home, all I did was read. I inhaled books like other people breathe oxygen. I didn’t just read for knowledge or pleasure; I read to live. I had only $30 a month to spend, and after expenses, I would use everything I had left to buy books. Some were new; some came from a secondhand store. Even if I was hungry, books were more important than food. I didn’t know there were public libraries until much later. It seems hard to believe now, but we had so little information about life in South Korea when we first arrived.
I started with Korean translations of children’s books, then moved on to picture books about the countries of the world. I bought books about Roman mythology and world history. I read biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Hillary Clinton. I was interested in America, and I particularly loved biographies because they were about people who had to overcome obstacles or prejudices to get ahead. They made me think I could make it when nobody else believed in me, when even I didn’t believe in myself.
I crammed twelve years of education into the next eighteen months of my life. I attended a few other special schools to help me get my general equivalency diplomas for middle school and high school. But even then, I studied best on my own. I vowed to myself to read one hundred books a year, and I did.
I read to fill my mind and to block out the bad memories. But I found that as I read more, my thoughts were getting deeper, my vision wider, and my emotions less shallow. The vocabulary in South Korea was so much richer than the one I had known, and when you have more words to describe the world, you increase your ability to think complex thoughts. In North Korea, the regime doesn’t want you to think, and they hate subtlety. Everything is either black or white, with no shades of gray. For instance, in North Korea, the only kind of “love” you can describe is for the Leader. We had heard the “love” word used in different ways in smuggled TV shows and movies, but there was no way to apply it in daily life in North Korea—not with your family, friends, husband, or wife. But in South Korea there were so many different ways of expressing love—for your parents, friends, nature, God, animals, and, of course, your lover.
When I was in the NIS center waiting to go to Hanawon, sometimes they brought people from the outside to ask us to fill out surveys and talk to us. One woman told us about love. She said that if you say “I love you” to plants, they grow more healthily. So it was very important to let someone you care about hear that word from you. She encouraged us to say that word to whoever was sitting beside us at the moment. It was a very weird exercise, but that’s when I knew there were ways to express love for friends, or even plants or animals. Everything, even basic human emotions, has to be taught.
I was starting to realize that you can’t really grow and learn unless you have a language to grow within. I could literally feel my brain coming to life, as if new pathways were firing up in places that had been dark and barren. Reading was teaching me what it meant to be alive, to be human.
I read literary classics like Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, and Tolstoy’s short stories. I fell in love with Shakespeare. But it was discovering George Orwell’s Animal Farm that marked a real turning point for me. It was like finding a diamond in a mountain of sand. I felt as if Orwell knew where I was from and what I had been through. The animal farm was really North Korea, and he was describing my life. I saw my family in the animals—my grandmother, mother, father, and me, too: I was like one of the “new pigs” with no ideas. Reducing the horror of North Korea into a simple allegory erased its power over me. It helped set me free.
• • •
When I was at Hanawon, defectors who had already made their way into South Korean society would sometimes visit us to share their experiences. One of them gave us a simple tip for how to make friends with South Koreans: learn about the hottest TV shows and most popular stars so you can talk about them. Even watching movies and TV became an education for me. I memorized the actors’ names and the storylines of their movies and shows. I wrote down all the music groups and listened to as many songs as I could so I could recognize the biggest hits of the seventies, eighties, and nineties.
I read articles about celebrities, learning their scandals and histories so that I could talk about them as if I had lived in South Korea all my life. I was amazed by all these celebrity weddings and designer gowns. I had no idea what a designer was, but now there was a room at school where I could access the Internet and look things up. The whole idea of a “celebrity” was very strange to me. Beautiful people in South Korea were adored like our Leader in the North. But the big difference was that in South Korea, people had a choice of whom to idolize.
Gradually, my northern accent vanished, and I started to sound like someone from Seoul. I learned how to dress, eat, and make conversation like a South Korean. If a person who didn’t know me asked where I was from, I just said “Asan,” and let them believe whatever they wanted. I did everything I could to distance myself from my past. I never contacted anyone who had known me in China. My mother stayed close to Sun Hi and Myung Ok after they settled in the South, but not me. I wanted nothing to do with that part of my life, and already it was beginning to seem unreal to me, like something from a half-remembered dream.
• • •
My mother told me it wasn’t healthy for me to stay home reading all the time. She urged me to go back to boarding school, so in the spring of 2010, I enrolled at another Christian academy for defectors to earn my middle school GED, then switched to the Seoul campus of the Heavenly Dream School to finish high school. I still avoided going to class and did most of my work on my own. But I was scoring well on my tests.
In April 2011, just two years after my mother and I landed in South Korea, I took my high school GED exam and passed. It was a sweet victory. I thought about all those people who had written me off: the pastor in Qingdao, the agent who interrogated me, the principal who dismissed me, and the many teachers who told me this day would never come. Being told that what I wanted to do was impossible had motivated me, and earning the GED showed me, for the first time, that there could be justice in my life. Hard work would be rewarded.
My mother couldn’t believe that the very slow child she raised in Hyesan had earn
ed her high school GED. But she reminded me that in North Korea we say, “You can’t tell how smart a child is until he grows up.” She was not the kind to say outright that she was proud of me, but I could tell that she was.
My mother went through her own trials, trying to adapt to life in South Korea. She worked very hard at a number of menial jobs that are typically held by newly arrived North Korean defectors. She cleaned and washed dishes in a coffee shop that served food, where she met a man who worked at a local sauna. They started dating, and he got her a job selling snacks at the spa where he worked. Unfortunately, he turned out to be a very violent man. I didn’t realize how bad it was until one night while I was at the Dream School in Seoul, I got a phone call from a hospital in Asan.
“It’s your mother,” said the nurse. “You need to come get her.”
I pulled on my clothes and ran to the subway, catching the first morning train to Asan at around five a.m. First, I stopped by our building. When I got there, the hallway was spattered with blood and there was a huge pool of blood in our apartment. Our neighbor told me there had been a terrible fight. My mother’s boyfriend had hit her on the head with a heavy metal pan and knocked her out, then run away, leaving her for dead. The neighbors had called the police, who had come and taken her to the hospital.
My poor mother was in sorry shape, all bandaged up and suffering from a bad concussion. When I went home to clean up the blood, she checked herself out of the hospital because we couldn’t afford the expense. There was no money for a cab, and a bus would have made her too nauseated, so she walked home by herself. It just broke my heart when she came through the door, so exhausted and dizzy. Even in the South, life was not easy for us.
She never pressed charges against the boyfriend. The police interrogated him and wanted to prosecute, but my kindhearted mother forgave him and asked them to let him go. I think that after her experiences with the North Korean police, she would not put anyone through that kind of torture, even someone who had tried to kill her. She didn’t know there was a difference in the way the police worked in South Korea.
After he attacked her, my mother tried to break up with this man, but he stalked her and came to the apartment at all hours to threaten her. After a couple of months, she gave up resisting and got back together with him again. But he was a violent man, and he continued to abuse her. Sometimes I would get a text from her saying, “If I die tonight, you know he did it.”
It drove me crazy to think that my mother had endured so much suffering to be free, and now that she was finally in South Korea, she had to live in fear. Once she had refused to press charges, it seemed like the police could do nothing more to protect her.
There had to be a better way. If they couldn’t protect her, I thought, then maybe I could. I could learn the law and become a police officer, or even a prosecutor. In North Korea, the police were the ones who took your money and hauled you away to prison. In China, I froze in fear anytime I saw a uniform, because the police there would arrest me on the spot. Police officers had never protected me from anything in my life. But in South Korea, protection was their job description. And so I chose to run toward the thing I feared the most and join their ranks.
I did some research and found that the best place in the country to get a degree in police administration was Dongguk University in Seoul. So that was where I decided to apply for college.
Twenty-two
Now on My Way to Meet You
Dongguk University is perched on a steep hill in central Seoul, with views on all sides overlooking the city and the wooded slopes of Namsan Park. The college was founded in 1906 by Buddhists and, although it accepts scholars of all faiths, its four principles reflect the school’s origins:
Steady one’s clean mind.
Behave truly and reliably.
Love people with benevolence.
Save mankind from agony.
These sounded like tenets I could stand behind, particularly the last one. I had used my first two years of freedom to work on myself, awakening my mind and opening it to the possibilities of the world. I was safe now, but I couldn’t stop thinking about my family and friends and all the others who were still suffering, and my sister, who was still missing. There had to be some reason why I had escaped and survived and found my freedom and they had not. But it was still just a notion that I couldn’t fully express.
My more immediate mission was to get accepted by this prestigious university. As a North Korean defector, I had half of my tuition paid for by the government while the school paid the other half—as long as I kept up my grades—so cost was not an obstacle. But I knew my unusual educational background would be an issue, to say the least. Like all defectors, I was allowed to bypass South Korea’s notorious eight-hour-long College Scholastic Ability Test, but I still had to pass rigorous tests to enter the university, including an oral exam. Everything rested on the interview I had scheduled with the admissions office in early summer 2011.
I was so nervous about it that I arrived on the campus at five a.m. I sat on a bench in the cool morning air, waiting for the time of the interview to arrive. There is a large statue of the Buddha at one end of the large central quad, and right before my appointment, I stood in front of it to pray.
Although I had embraced Christianity fully while I was among the missionaries in China, my beliefs were not confined to any one faith. I had been raised without any religion except the worship of dictators, and my spirit was still searching for a place to rest. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I believed in a benevolent power guiding the universe, a loving force that somehow nudged us in the direction of good instead of evil. I believed that Jesus was part of that force, along with the Buddha, and all the spiritual beings that we called on in our moments of despair and need. My father was there, too. And so as I stood before the Buddha, I placed my hands together in front of my heart and spoke to my father, asking him for guidance. I still felt a strong connection to him, that all I needed was to ask and he would come to me to give me strength. I felt him strongly that morning.
It was obvious that I was not prepared for college, and the small panel of professors in the interview room knew it. I had to convince them that I was worthy.
“Hello, my name is Yeonmi Park. I was born in Hyesan, North Korea. I came here a short time ago, with almost no education, and I have achieved a great deal in two years. I can guarantee you that if you put your trust in me, I won’t let you down.”
I shocked myself with my self-confidence. The professors looked surprised, too.
“You have done very well so far,” said one of them. “But you have so little formal education and you haven’t studied English, which you need to graduate.”
Another said, “We all know that a lot of North Koreans don’t graduate once they start college. How can you promise me that you will not be a failure, too?”
I looked up at them and said, “Yes, it’s true I don’t have the same skills as other applicants, but I can learn them. More important, while these students were in school, I was learning from life. And so I have something to offer that they do not. If you give me the chance, I can do this and make you proud of me.”
In August, I checked the online admissions notices and learned that I had been accepted at Dongguk University in the criminal justice department.
I put my face in my hands and wept. Finally someone believed in me.
• • •
The school year in South Korea begins in early March, so I had seven months before I started at Dongguk. Because I had not yet officially graduated from the Heavenly Dream School in Seoul, I lived in school housing and attended some classes while I prepared myself for college. I also worked part-time as a clerk in a two-dollar store as well as setting places and clearing plates in the wedding hall of a fancy hotel. I don’t think I would have been hired if I sounded or looked like a North Korean defector. So I let them think
I was from Seoul.
I was ready to forget my past and start fresh with a whole new identity as a South Korean college student. But then I got a call from the producer of a national cable TV show on EBS, the Educational Broadcasting System, toward the end of 2011. He wanted to interview a North Korean defector, and he had heard my name from someone connected with Hanawon. I agreed to meet with him, and I told him the story of my escape across the desert and my search for my sister who had disappeared into China. At the end of our conversation, he told me he was looking for an articulate and ambitious young defector to appear on a segment of his show. Would I be interested?
I felt a panic rising in me and I immediately answered, “No!”
“But it’s an important show, and it will be seen everywhere,” said the producer. He paused. “And maybe it will help you find your sister.”
I hadn’t thought of this possibility before. South Korean television was watched online all over China. If I were to tell Eunmi’s story on TV, then maybe she would see it and find a way to contact us so we could help her escape.
On the other hand, I would be taking a big risk going public. There were several women other than our friends now living in South Korea who knew me and what I had done to survive in China. My hopes for a career in law or criminal justice might be destroyed if they came forward to expose me.
I discussed the offer with my mother, and we decided that it was worth taking the chance if it meant finding Eunmi.
I spent a couple of days taping the segment. Mostly they filmed me walking around beaches and amusement parks with an older defector while we talked about the generation gap between North Koreans my age, who had access to foreign DVDs, and his generation, who had a different mind-set. At one point, they brought us to an accordion academy run by a couple of North Korean defectors, and they taped me while I listened to them playing accordions and singing songs from the old country. An enormous wave of grief rolled over me, and I couldn’t stop myself from crying in front of the camera. I told them how Eunmi used to play the accordion when we were children in Hyesan. And that I hadn’t seen her in five years and missed her so much.