[0:00]I never thought in America, I had to be worrying about brainwashing and propaganda. We have a brainwashing going on in this country. My name is Yeommi Park and this is my story. I was born in North Korea, and I escaped when I was 13 years old. I did have one older sister, and I had two loving parents. But in North Korea, there's no word for love. So my parents never told me that they loved me. The first thing my mom told me as young girl was, "Don't even whisper because the birds and mice could hear you." We never knew who was a spy, how they were watching. When I was eight or nine, my father was arrested by the regime. Accused him that he was engaging in a trading. He initially sold rice, dried fish, sugar, clocks, and then later he sold the metal. Because of that, he got punished and he was sentenced to more than 10 years.
[1:01]Growing up as a child, seeing dead bodies on the streets, that was my daily routine in life. You know, we go to river, we don't have the running water, we have to go to river to bathe, drink the water, you know, wash our clothes. But then, like dead bodies are flowing by, it doesn't bother you. It's something you have seen every day, and you drink the river water. North Korean people, if we eat breakfast, we don't think about, oh, what am I going to do, how am I going to improve my life? If you find lunch, you're like, okay, how am I going to find dinner? All we are thinking every single second is, I'm hungry. I'm hungry. How do I eat? My grandmother died from malnutrition. My uncle died from starvation. So they were purposely letting us die.
[1:49]You do not own yourself in North Korea. You are owned by the state. Regime decides what we read, what we watch, what we listen to, how we even dance. They control how you even move your body. You do not have freedom for your haircut even. You do not get to decide what you wear. So if you wear your jeans, you go to prison because it's like jeans are the symbol of capitalism. Literally, people get executed like by reading a Bible. And that's how like real life is for North Koreans.
[2:26]The only reason I escaped was luckily I was living in the border town of North Korea. You know, literally, North Korea is the darkest place on Earth. We do not have electricity. So I was able to see some electricity coming from China and that's when I thought, maybe if I go where the lights were, I might be able to find a bowl of rice. But like there's the guards with the machine guns. They put the highly electrified wire fences, seal the entire border. So entire country became a concentration camp. But luckily, my sister who escaped left me a note saying, go find this lady. She's going to help you to escape. So I found the lady and she bribed the guards on the border. I took my mother with me. I told her to come with me to China. So I crossed the river with one young man and my mother and myself. Three of us crossed that frozen river into China. We met the Chinese broker and then she said that I want to have sex with her, like me. I did not even know what sex was, like there was no sex education in school. So, obviously, I don't even know what rape was. And, of course, my mom is, she's a child. And then she offered herself. So he raped her, my mom in front of me. It's just unbelievably horrible and that was my introduction to sex. And then they invited another human trafficker to buy us. I was confused, like, how do you sell human? Like, I thought, like, we only sell puppies. How about Jimmy? You sell me, I'm a human being. They sold my mom for less than $100 and then they sold me separately because I was a virgin. So they sold me less than $300. So right now, in China, due to One Child Policy, there are 40 million Chinese men cannot find women to marry them. Sometimes in this rural village, they are so poor. Entire town of men buy one girl and then they rape them constantly. Until she dies, and they buy another girl and then do the same thing. That's how they treat you. You're not even human beings to them. In this age of time, when we are talking about slavery that happened hundreds of years ago, there are people right now being sold the same way. I was sold to another human trafficker who was a Han Chinese and I was going to kill myself. I couldn't take it. I lost everybody I knew. I don't even speak the language. He told me that if I become his mistress, he was going to help me to find my family. So I was letting him rape me. And then we met another North Korean defector woman and she says, "Oh, you know what? There are missionaries, it's going to help us to escape if we become Christians." And I'm like, what the heck is missionaries? I never even knew the word religion. Right? Kim is our religion. And then she's like, oh, there's like people who believe in God and Jesus. They're going to help us. And in that missionary shelter I proved that my faith to them and that's how I became free.
[5:36]When I got to South Korea, they told me, oh, everything you believed was a lie. Kim's are not gods, he cannot read your minds. They copy the Bible. They are dictators. And when I read George Orwell's Animal Farm, that's when everything made sense to me. And that's also I understood for the first time the price of silence. And North Korea didn't become that way in one day. Because the people who are in there in the system were scared and they did not speak up. That's how eventually it came to me where I did not even know that I was a slave. I did not even know that I was Asian. I never even knew what Africa or different continents, none of that. I knew nothing about the rest of the world. There's no word for oppression, there's no word for liberty, there's no even word for gay. And, of course, there's no word for compassion. Why do regime get rid of these words? It's because who controls the language controls the thoughts. So if they get rid of these words in our dictionary, that means we don't know the concept of human rights, we don't know the concept of freedom, and that's how they can control our thinking.
[6:51]You know, America was like our sworn enemy that I had to kill them if I see them, and they told us that Americans are cold-blooded and monsters. I was so scared to come to America thinking, like, I'm going to this enemy's land. They're going to eat me alive, right? And then, as I landed in Houston airport, these people just like holding their children, eating chips, hamburgers, and smiling. Like, this is only American thing when you go take the picture, Americans put the biggest smile in the world. When you see that, like, you don't even need a textbook to tell you that Americans are not bad. When I came to this country and, like, stepped on the land, I just felt a spirit of justice. This is the only country that I did not face racism. This is the only country that I'm accepted as who I am. So in 2018, I gave birth to my son. And there was a birth certificate came out two days later or something. Like literally, mother was North Korean, father was American. In freedom, only North Korean American can have a baby together. I was so grateful that I give the best thing that I could have given to him is that American citizenship. So, I went to Columbia University, lived in New York, and most of them are like left. Every single class in Columbia, the conclusion was, America was founded upon an idea of racism and bigotry and slavery. The only way we can fix is tearing down the Constitution and tearing down this country and rebuild the socialist paradise on top of that. And this is what being fed to American minds every single day. There's no room for debate and that was a propaganda and brainwashing machine. And when I hear about them supporting socialism, of course, my reaction is, have you not learn anything from history? If something failed like three times, by that time we should be learning something and, like, okay, let's move on. This thing is really not going to work. But no, it's somehow with the left, they think it's it didn't implemented correctly. So why don't we do it again here? Every single one of them said the same thing, like, we are going to build a paradise, and they did not. They say, oh, the capitalism is so evil, it's so greedy. I'm like, do you know without capitalism, how do you even have internet? How do you even have electricity with that capitalism? Do you know, like, your clothes that you're wearing because of the free market that we have all of this? South Korea was the poorest country. When they adopted the US democratic system, they copied it literally, they became the Asian Tiger. The GDP difference between North Korea and South Korea is a 40 times difference. One is the 11th largest economy in the world. And the other country do not even have electricity in this 21st century. Same potential, same history, same people. Under the two different system, one is communism, one is capitalism. What happened? They say we don't have electricity because of American bastards. We don't have rights because of American bastards. We die because of American bastards. Every single problem comes down to blaming somebody else. Blaming the system, blaming history, blaming the Constitution because of white men, there was a slavery. Because of white men that women are like being treated unequally. Because of white men that we have climate change. I mean, like, it's not about something about you that you want to fix. And this is exactly North Korea does. I am also fighting for my freedom of speech. I get censored on YouTube and Twitter because I talk about China. Never in my life I thought, in America I had to fight for freedom of speech. Even in America, the freedom is not guaranteed, and it's slipping away every single day. I just hope it's not too late to fight back.
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