Dying with your eyes open and the chance at a second life
On North Korea, freedom, and the natural state of humankind
Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to listen to a lecture given by Yeonmi Park. She is one of about 200 North Korean refugees who have ever made it to the United States. Her story of persecution in North Korea is unfortunately common for her fellow countrymen, but being able to hear it in the flesh from someone who escaped is a rare opportunity. She jokingly called herself a “unicorn” before her speech.
Even after hearing parts of her story before and reading literature about North Korea, some of the stories she told were still jarring. One never gets accustomed to hearing about what life is like in the world's most isolated, totalitarian state.
For instance, in North Korea the government made copies of the Bible and simply replaced references to God with references to the country's first supreme leader, Kim Il-sung. Growing up I attended a play called "The Gospel Accordin' to Texas", a playful cowboy and western-themed telling of the life of Jesus Christ. The gospel according to North Korea includes tales of Kim Il-sung so loving the world that he gave the North Korean people his only son, Kim Jong-il. It sounds ridiculous, but consider how little the people there know about the outside world and how easy it would be to fool them into thinking it were true.
Park told a story about needing an appendectomy after experiencing severe stomach pain. In a North Korean hospital that shared one needle for all its patients, they operated on her without anesthesia only to find out she didn't have appendicitis, but was suffering from hunger.
She described legitimately not understanding how much food she was capable of eating before experiencing the sensation of having a full stomach. In America, we can envision what a portion or plate should look like that will suffice. Park had no such awareness; she simply ate what little she had and never had enough to eat in order to feel full.
After her father was sentenced to hard labor for the crime of engaging in private commerce, Park and her remaining family fled to China. There, her mother was raped by human traffickers and Park was sold into sex slavery. She later learned this was partly a result of China's one-child policy, which left 30 million Chinese men unmarried and looking for partners. So they preyed on North Korean refugees coming across the border into China. Park told us that North Korea wouldn’t last a day without the Chinese Communist Party propping it up.
Eventually, Park and her family made it to Mongolia then flew to South Korea where she experienced freedom for the first time in her life. Park now lives in the United States where she's learned about the world as it exists outside of the tyrannical hell she was born into.
Park said it was not uncommon to see dead bodies on the streets of North Korea. Many of them died with their eyes open, apparently a symptom related to the hunger and other poor health conditions experienced by many there. In their final moments, they were not even able to close their eyes and imagine a better world. They had no idea one existed.
In North Korea, the natural state for humankind is poverty, hunger, abuse, and tyranny. In the United States, we might take for granted the health and prosperity we enjoy, but for almost all of human history this was not our natural state either. My grandfather and his siblings grew up poor and often hungry during the Great Depression. His dad sailed to America on a boat from Norway in search of a better life. In the grand scheme of things, a few generations is not so long ago.
Think about what life was like for the average person in 1850 or even before compared to today. We have air conditioning, can travel thousands of miles in mere hours, have access to all the knowledge in the world at the press of a button, and can have any food delivered to our doorstep in 30 minutes among a litany of other luxuries we take for granted daily. Our ancestors were largely born into poverty without knowledge of the world around them and died premature deaths before medicine and treatments for common ailments we experience today were made available.
None of us will ever be able to fully appreciate the perspective Park shared with attendees at her lecture. The prosperity you and I enjoy is not the historically natural state of mankind, it is not guaranteed, and it can be taken away at any time if we're not willing to fight for it.
Park escaped North Korea before they could kill her. I don't think anybody truly dies a natural death in North Korea; all deaths are premature in some form or fashion due to hunger, treatable disease, cruel and unusual punishment, etc. Her life is now dedicated to seeing the end of the regime in North Korea that continues to isolate and brutalize her friends and family back home.
In a moment of spiritual reflection, Park told the audience that her time in America felt like a second life. She was lucky to survive and live to experience the prosperity of a free society. At the end of her lecture, she was asked what she would say to North Koreans if she could still communicate with them.
"Life could be this way (as it is in America). Life could be beautiful for North Koreans."