Aug. 3, 2021 - The Joe Rogan Experience
03:13:23
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! | |
| The Joe Rogan Experience Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day! | ||
| Well, very nice to meet you, first of all. | ||
| Thanks for coming here. | ||
| Is this your first time in Texas? | ||
| No, I've been here before. | ||
| You've been to Austin before? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So for people who don't know your story, I'm just going to give them a primer just to sort of establish your history. | ||
| You were born in North Korea and you escaped North Korea when you were 13. Is that how old you were? | ||
| I think we should start off with what it was like living in North Korea I saw your interview with Jordan Peterson and it was it was incredibly moving and it was incredibly disturbing and eye-opening and It's hard to believe for people that don't know what life is like in North Korea the reality of you growing up in North Korea, | ||
| but I Yeah. | ||
| This was the reality of your existence as a child that there was no protein. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What when you now that you live here in America and you can kind of eat whatever you want when you look back on that what does it seem like to you. | ||
| Does it seem like reality? | ||
| Does it seem like a dream? | ||
| What does your childhood seem like? | ||
| Sometimes this feels like a dream. | ||
| This feels like a dream? | ||
| Yeah, so I pinched myself a lot in the beginning. | ||
| Because they say if it's not dream, it hurts, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| When you pinch yourself. | ||
| So a lot of times I pinch myself. | ||
| Because sometimes I'm really horrified if I wake up from this that I'm going to wake up in my living room in North Korea. | ||
| So sometimes that line is very blurry to me. | ||
| And because the one common thing that North Koreans all have is actually in our dreams when we sleep, it's back in North Korea. | ||
| So in our dreams, we somehow never able to escape it. | ||
| So every day my mom wakes up. | ||
| She tells me about a story how she was back in North Korea. | ||
| And I have the exact same thing. | ||
| No matter what, how many years we left afterwards, in our dreams we are still in that country. | ||
| So that's the nightmare. | ||
| The nightmare is that you're still trapped in North Korea. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| When you lived there, you didn't know that there was another way to live. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's like here right now, we cannot imagine a life in some different planet in the universe, right? | ||
| We just don't know what that life looks like. | ||
| Exactly the same thing. | ||
| I never knew the life in a different planet could be like. | ||
| And where you lived in North Korea, there was no internet. | ||
| There's very little electricity, right? | ||
| And how much education did you get? | ||
| I never even seen the map of the world. | ||
| So as an Asian, I did not even know that I was Asian. | ||
| So the regime told me I was a Kim Il-sung race. | ||
| Kim Il-Song race. | ||
| Yeah, and then the North Korean calendar begins when Kim Il-Song was born. | ||
| That's like to say one that our history begins. | ||
| So I don't even know what Jesus Christ is. | ||
| And I don't know anything before Kim. | ||
| So there was everything before Kim Do history was re-raised for us. | ||
| But the thing is that we are hungry, we're starving. | ||
| If you eat breakfast, you worry about lunch. | ||
| If you make it to dinner, you are not sure if you're going to make it to tomorrow. | ||
| So in that scenario, who thinks about history? | ||
| Nobody thinks about anything other than surviving and that is why precisely Kim Jong-un keeping us starving mode even though the UN, the international organizations begging to give food and formula to North Korean people but Kim Jong-un is saying no to this food aid because he doesn't want us to be fed. | ||
| So he's purposely starving the people to keep them weak so that all they think about is surviving so they don't think about revolution. | ||
| It's a Hunger Games. | ||
| It's like when I was reading this book, Hunger Games, I literally like, oh my God, this person copied North Korea. | ||
| There's a capital. | ||
| You divide into 13 different districts. | ||
| Capital, people have everything they need. | ||
| And on other provinces, their own purpose, they're being starved. | ||
| So the only thing you can think of is your survivor. | ||
| If you are full in your stomach, right, you're going to start thinking about the meaning of life, art, what's out there in the universe. | ||
| You can do all of that higher thinking when you are full in your stomach. | ||
| But when you're hungry, the only thing that matters is your hunger. | ||
| When did North Korea become what it is now? | ||
| When did it shift to this totalitarian regime that's starving its people and puts people in these classifications? | ||
| For one example, one of the classifications is if your grandfather or great-grandfather committed some sort of a sin, you are perpetually punished for that. | ||
| Everyone in your generation, your next generation, all of them are guilty. | ||
| Yeah, forever. | ||
| There's no redemption. | ||
| If the one person commits a crime in that family clan, three to eight generations gotta be purged. | ||
| How many generations? | ||
| Three to eight generations. | ||
| Three to eight? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Mostly commonly three, but the people like who challenge the regime or challenge the leader, then eight generations get purged. | ||
| Eight generations. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then after the eighth generation, are they absolved? | ||
| No, they're all gone. | ||
| They're all gone. | ||
| By eight generations, you even kill in-laws of somebody in-law. | ||
| So not even the blood you get purged. | ||
| If your cousin, somebody marrying the in-law of somebody, so there was one official who escaped, 35,000 people were purged. | ||
| A lot of them, 80% of them, did not even know that they were related to this person. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, cousins of cousins, somebody, somebody, that's how they find, they get rid of the root of entire this clan. | ||
| When did this all start? | ||
| When Kim Il-sung came into power, so he was a big Marxist and Leninist, and he was a communist. | ||
| So before the Korean War in 1948, that's when he began this, in the name of equality, right? | ||
| Let's take everything back from the capitalist. | ||
| Let's nationalize the land, get rid of private property. | ||
| But he made North Korea into very unequal society, dividing people into 50 different classes. | ||
| 50? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the way the classes worked, you couldn't marry up. | ||
| Say, like, if you were a higher class and a man wanted to marry you, if he was lower class, you would then become a lower class as well. | ||
| That's how they prevent the mixing with the class. | ||
| So there's no marrying up. | ||
| You only go down. | ||
| So no matter what happens, if you are at a lower class, you stay there forever. | ||
| Forever. | ||
| No chance of moving out of that zone. | ||
| And it's not based on merit, it's not based on your performance, it's not based on anything other than the way you were born. | ||
| No. | ||
| This is when I was confused when I went to South Korea. | ||
| People say, if you work hard in South Korea, you are going to get rewarded. | ||
| And that's when I thought, wow, that is justice. | ||
| Because in North Korea, it doesn't matter what you do, what you want to do, what your dreams are. | ||
| It's already determined by what your ancestors did. | ||
| But the thing is, how do you choose your ancestor? | ||
| You can never choose your parents. | ||
| And you had no idea that there was any other way to live when you're growing up like this? | ||
| Because I've never seen the map of the world. | ||
| I didn't even know, like, the Americans, how they looked alike. | ||
| Because we don't have internet, first of all. | ||
| We have only one channel that government, you know, controls every single content. | ||
| We don't even have any, we don't even have a cookbook. | ||
| That's the thing, as a Korean, I don't even know what cookbook is. | ||
| I mean, first of all, we don't have ingredients. | ||
| Like, how do you find half pounds of pork, scallion, blah, blah, right? | ||
| So cookbook is, like, pointless. | ||
| And not only that, there's no fashion, because, I mean, we don't have freedom to what we wear. | ||
| So even when I heard the job called modeling, I was like, what is that? | ||
| So everything that I learned here is, like, a new concept to me as a North Korean. | ||
| So when you would eat, where would you get your food from? | ||
| So, the land is government, right? | ||
| There's no private property. | ||
| But those farmers working in the collective farm, they smoke it out and stay in the black market secretly. | ||
| So those food, if we have money, we go to black market, buy corn, starch, those things. | ||
| But mostly we just go to mountains to pick up plants, flowers, and grasshoppers is the biggest protein source for North Koreans. | ||
| But the government doesn't provide any food for the people? | ||
| I heard they did in the 60s, 70s. | ||
| But I was born in 1993 in October. | ||
| And that is right after Soviet Union collapsed. | ||
| So until then, Soviet Union was subsidizing North Korea's economy heavily. | ||
| And China did the same. | ||
| But when they collapsed, they stopped helping North Korean regime. | ||
| So the regime policy was, if we as long as keep the 10% alive who are in the capital, Our rule is successful. | ||
| So they were not going to do anything until 90% of the population dies. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| Still, they are the same rule they have. | ||
| Until the 90% dies out, as long as we keep the 10% alive, we are not going to do anything, intervene the starvation. | ||
| So there's no effort whatsoever to get food to the people? | ||
| It's not like effort. | ||
| They're actually actively preventing people to get resources. | ||
| Right now, even last time, Biden was calling Kim Jong-un, can we give you a vaccine? | ||
| And Kim Jong-un said, no. | ||
| South Korea was calling. | ||
| North Korea last year, there was a big flood. | ||
| Can we give you at least some medicine? | ||
| And Kim Jong-un said, no, we don't want any medicine. | ||
| Because they don't want any aid from the West? | ||
| Even South Korea. | ||
| They want to keep people as weak as possible. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Today I was on the way here thinking getting up in North Korea as a child was challenging because every day you get dizzy from the starvation. | ||
| You get like hear noise every single morning when you wake up it takes like 30 minutes to gather your thoughts to able to walk straight because everybody's in that mode of starvation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So as you can see me, I'm like very small. | ||
| I eat a lot. | ||
| I'm like still 80 pounds. | ||
| But when I was escaping, I don't even know how rich I was. | ||
| And North Korean men, about four, ten feet high, they have to go to military. | ||
| Women is mandatory. | ||
| Men have to serve in the military 13 years, mandatory. | ||
| And women is 10 years. | ||
| And most men are very small because of malnutrition? | ||
| Yeah, 4'10 feet. | ||
| 4'10. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And so they just allow people to forage for themselves. | ||
| That's the idea. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Like, find your own food. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Are you allowed to have a garden? | ||
| Can you grow vegetables? | ||
| Can you have animals? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| One of the executions that my mom saw was a young man was eating beef, a cow, because he killed a collected farm cow, and he got executed for that. | ||
| Everything is owned by the state. | ||
| In North Korea, you don't even own yourself, right? | ||
| So I remember going to South Korea. | ||
| I got a gift one day, and it was a planner. | ||
| So what you do, what you're trying to do is a notebook. | ||
| And in North Korea, you don't plan your day. | ||
| You don't get to plan what you do with your life. | ||
| Like a week before or a day before, there's an announcement from the government. | ||
| How are you going to spend your day? | ||
| What to eat? | ||
| Where to go to work? | ||
| What to do? | ||
| When to go to sleep? | ||
| Everything is determined by your own state. | ||
| So this guy was executed because he killed one of the state's cows. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And you're not allowed to have your own animals. | ||
| You can't have like chickens or something along those lines. | ||
| They might hide it, but last year Kim Jong-un confiscated entire dog from the population. | ||
| All the dogs? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was because of COVID-19, right? | ||
| No. | ||
| Because he said it was a corrupt Western sentiment where we have pets. | ||
| So he ordered to kill the entire dogs for the meat. | ||
| To get rid of dogs. | ||
| Because he just didn't like that it looks like Western having a dog. | ||
| Having a friendly relationship with animals. | ||
| So everyone's dog in all of North Korea was confiscated and killed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And what did they do with the dogs? | ||
| I don't know what the regime leaders did. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So do they provide you with any food? | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| So you have to find food on your own and most of the food is wild food? | ||
| Like grasshoppers and flowers that are edible? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So this is why the most bizarre thing is that regime initially said, oh, give us your land, give us your freedom. | ||
| We are going to provide free health insurance, right? | ||
| For education, free housing, free of everything. | ||
| You don't have to worry about anything. | ||
| The state is going to be taking care of everything. | ||
| But after Soviet Union collapsed, North Korea came idea like this idea is called self-reliance. | ||
| So you relying on yourself. | ||
| But you can't farm. | ||
| No, you don't have land. | ||
| How do you farm? | ||
| You don't have freedom. | ||
| There's no free market. | ||
| My father was sent to prison camp because he sold metals. | ||
| Initially he sold rice, dried fish, clocks. | ||
| And trading is illegal. | ||
| It's not like he was selling weapons or drugs. | ||
| Trading is illegal. | ||
| So how do you be self-reliant? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So the whole idea is just to keep everybody weak. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It is so strange to someone who has been in America their whole life, like me, to even imagine that the same time I'm living here, one of the big problems in America is that people eat too much. | ||
| I heard that. | ||
| Isn't that crazy? | ||
| I was shocked. | ||
| I never understood having too much can be a problem because I just never knew that it could be a possibility of a problem. | ||
| It's the number one problem here. | ||
| Exactly how having too much is a problem. | ||
| I don't get it. | ||
| I think the... | ||
| What is the percentage, Jamie? | ||
| What is the percentage of people in America that are obese? | ||
| I think it's large. | ||
| I think it's more than 50%. | ||
| I think it's... | ||
| And it's a huge factor with diseases and... | ||
| I mean, 78% of the people that are in the ICU for COVID are obese. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| 43%. | ||
| So almost half of the people in the country are obese. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Meaning they eat far too much food. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And for you, that concept must be insane. | ||
| You're in the upside-down world. | ||
| Right? | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| It's like a different planet. | ||
| The common law that I knew in North Korea doesn't apply here anymore. | ||
| And it is just so confusing to me how hard it is not to eat. | ||
| It's hard when you don't have food, when you cannot find it. | ||
| And to me, I don't know why that is so challenging. | ||
| Can you do me a favor and just push the microphone forward? | ||
| Yeah, like this. | ||
| Yeah, so it's right in front of you. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| So, yeah, it must be like another planet, the idea of having too much food. | ||
| Yeah, and that's the source of, I mean, they're complaining about it. | ||
| So I'm like, even that is a reason for a complaint. | ||
| That's something unbelievable. | ||
| I just don't get it. | ||
| It's so easy. | ||
| If you have too much, you don't eat it. | ||
| You just don't put it in your mouth, right? | ||
| No one is forcing you to eat a lot. | ||
| Yeah, but food is addictive. | ||
| And people like to comfort themselves with food when it's everywhere. | ||
| And it's also, it's a strange problem, right? | ||
| The problem of excess. | ||
| It's a strange problem. | ||
| Like, you have too much. | ||
| But this is, I mean, humanity, all our humanity, we've been starving. | ||
| It's the very first time humanity having this much access, and I have some compassion for that, but, you know, a lot of problems, like, I met American friends in New York. | ||
| I went to school there, and, like, my friend's complaints, I couldn't sympathize in the beginning. | ||
| I literally, because their problem is, like, some guy, they went on a date, they don't call them back. | ||
| And they call me and complain, like, you know, like, there's people with actual problems like life and death. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| This is not a problem, but... | ||
| Well, it's an issue of perspective, right? | ||
| Like, your life, you've seen horrific things, whereas so many people, the worst thing that's ever happened to them is someone broke up with them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When you were talking about going to the doctor when you were a child, and that... | ||
| This is a very disturbing story, but I want you to try to explain it to people, how... | ||
| People were dying in these hospitals, and rats would eat the eyeballs of the people who were dying, and children who were starving would eat the rats. | ||
| And then the children would die, and the rats would eat the children. | ||
| Explain what this was like. | ||
| How did you see this? | ||
| Well, I mean, seeing that the bodies on the streets is like an everyday thing. | ||
| It was numb. | ||
| Where were the bodies? | ||
| Like just laying around on the streets? | ||
| So they are floating in the rivers. | ||
| And then they also, train stations somehow had a lot of dead bodies because North Korea is very cold. | ||
| And there's a train waiting area. | ||
| And North Korea has one train go to one distance like once a month. | ||
| And like here it would take like one hour to go the other place. | ||
| In North Korea it would take a month at least to go because there's no electricity. | ||
| And sometimes people have to push the train. | ||
| They have to push the train. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Traveling in North Korea is an unbelievably difficult thing within North Korea. | ||
| So, I mean, anyway, so in train stations, that's when people die mostly. | ||
| And in North Korea, the hardest thing as a child for me is that when my mom goes away to find food, like we don't have a call, like we don't have phones, we don't have letters. | ||
| If I say goodbye to her, I don't know when I'm going to see her again or if I'm ever going to see her again, because she could have cared and like raped and starved. | ||
| You should never know how to find people. | ||
| So in the morning when you go walking the train station, they just put the piles of dead bodies and they all become rigid, right? | ||
| They're almost like wood. | ||
| Piled down and taken away. | ||
| But the thing is, for me, I didn't even know the word compassion. | ||
| Nobody told me, you have to feel bad for it. | ||
| Because for me, fish in the water don't notice the water, right? | ||
| That was something every day I saw as a child. | ||
| So you never went days where you didn't see? | ||
| This is a normal thing to see dead bodies. | ||
| It was everyday as normal as breathing the air right now. | ||
| And one thing that I still remember is, my sister and I was walking by the well. | ||
| Like in North Korea, we don't have a sewage. | ||
| We don't have running water, obviously. | ||
| We have to go to well or river to bring the drinking water. | ||
| And there's a young teenage boy, I think, lying down, and his intestines coming out of his back. | ||
| When you're really malnourished, that thing all opens up. | ||
| You got zero, zero fat. | ||
| Every hole all opens. | ||
| And you see dogs looking at his organs coming out. | ||
| And he was just somehow conscious begging for food at the time. | ||
| He was begging for food while his organs were hanging out of his body. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I don't know why he was like pants were off. | ||
| And I feel nothing. | ||
| That still haunts me to really say, like, I don't know how I feel nothing at that point. | ||
| And that just looked horrible. | ||
| And because of the fact that he's alive and so many flies flying by on his organs, and how he's somehow consciously begging for food. | ||
| And I didn't feel anything. | ||
| You have felt no compassion? | ||
| No. | ||
| It was just normal? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, so that was like daily life thing. | ||
| And then in the hospital when I was 13 years old, my parents took me to hospital because I was a bad stomach ache. | ||
| And then we don't have like x-ray machines. | ||
| We don't have MRI, none of that. | ||
| Dr. Robson Belli, and then he said, oh, we need to operate on her. | ||
| I think her appendix was bursting or something. | ||
| So that afternoon, they cut me open without any anesthesia. | ||
| But it's a normal thing. | ||
| People in North Korea operation without anesthesia. | ||
| But the chances of you going through surgery is a lot higher for you getting infected because we don't have penicillin. | ||
| The nurse is using a one meter to inject every single patient. | ||
| So who do you know what the other person has? | ||
| You get from actually most sick by being in the hospital. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And this is where we don't, of course, have indoor bathroom for the patient. | ||
| We have to go outside. | ||
| And in between there, there's piles of dead human bodies. | ||
| And that's when I was seeing somehow rats eating human eyes first for some reason. | ||
| Because they're probably soft and doesn't eat. | ||
| And these women, I don't know, my age probably, short hair, wearing these flower pants. | ||
| And when they're dead, their mouth is somehow open. | ||
| And their eyes are hollow. | ||
| And you see children looking at the rats and laughing and chasing them. | ||
| And adults telling them, don't eat those, you're going to get sick from it. | ||
| But of course kids don't care. | ||
| Even finding a rat is delicacy. | ||
| Because even finding a snake is a big prize. | ||
| You don't find those often. | ||
| So they were finding the rats and then just trying to eat them? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Were they eating them raw? | ||
| Sometimes if you find the skin, you do, but they do find some fire and roast them. | ||
| So they were excited to find a rat to eat. | ||
| So they were catching them with their hands. | ||
| Yeah, of course they were catching them with their hands. | ||
| And these pirates of human bodies, she was on top. | ||
| That's why I was able to see her wearing these flowers and pants. | ||
| And then her eyes were so hollow. | ||
| It's like, when you look at the human body, nothing is left. | ||
| I think that's what... | ||
| It's not like just death. | ||
| It's just like how it becomes nothing. | ||
| So empty inside. | ||
| She does not know the shame or pain. | ||
| She was lying there like that. | ||
| And you see children just chasing them and laughing and try to catch the rats. | ||
| And the children didn't feel anything being around the dead bodies? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's our daily normal thing. | ||
| Seeing death is like our daily life. | ||
| And they would eat the rats and then they would get sick and some of them would die. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A lot of them die. | ||
| And then the rats would eat them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So the cycle we talk about. | ||
| It's like that's a spring is for North Carolina season of death. | ||
| And so the diseases that they would get from the rats, they were willing to risk those diseases just because of hunger. | ||
| Because there's a North Korean proverb. | ||
| There's no wish for the person who died after their stomach is full. | ||
| So even in the middle of the earthquake, the North Koreans not try to run. | ||
| So my mom was talking about the tale when she was in the university. | ||
| There's an earthquake happening. | ||
| And do you know what these students are doing? | ||
| They're not running out of the building and trying to survive. | ||
| They go to the kitchen. | ||
| So before they die, they eat at least. | ||
| So they can die. | ||
| So if you have the promise of eating one meal, they're gonna risk everything for that. | ||
| So it's just an entire country in a perpetual state of starvation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I remember playing with this game with my sister. | ||
| As a young girl, I never ate till I felt full. | ||
| So I would compare myself. | ||
| I tell her, like, I can eat 100 bread. | ||
| And she's like, I can eat mountains of bread. | ||
| I can eat, like, 10,000 more than what you just said. | ||
| Because I don't know the limits of my stomach. | ||
| I never tasted it. | ||
| So you always were hungry. | ||
| Always hungry. | ||
| Never felt full. | ||
| So you escaped. | ||
| So your father was arrested for trading in metals, right? | ||
| And he was just trying to find resources, trying to get money for the black market for food and things like that. | ||
| Is that what it was? | ||
| To get us alive. | ||
| Because regime does not provide food for the people. | ||
| So they had to break the law, which is trading, to survive. | ||
| Without trading, how do we even survive? | ||
| So he was trading these matters. | ||
| And he got caught, and that's how he's in the prison camp. | ||
| And how long was he in prison for? | ||
| Several years, but he was sentenced to more than 10 years. | ||
| So I think he was totally imprisoned 34 years. | ||
| But he got out for sick leave, which is had to go back once he got better. | ||
| But of course, in North Korea, that's like, who cares if you die? | ||
| He was a very smart guy. | ||
| So he tricked the guard saying, if you get me out for the sick leave, I'm gonna get you money. | ||
| Because North Korea is the most corrupt country that you can find right now in today's world. | ||
| So corrupt. | ||
| So he tricked the guard, told him that he'd get him some money, and so he was in, for how many years? | ||
| You said four years? | ||
| Three, four years, yeah. | ||
| And what was it like when he got out? | ||
| I didn't recognize him when he came back to me. | ||
| I did not know that was my father. | ||
| Even his voice changed. | ||
| When I call North Korea, even till this day, I do have people underground. | ||
| I get information. | ||
| Their voice is different. | ||
| It's like their voice is so oppressed. | ||
| You can tell this is North Korean speaking. | ||
| You can tell just by their voice? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| When some Chinese, like, we have the brokers try to trick us, by voice we can tell. | ||
| If you're Chinese, like, Korean ethnic Chinese living in China trying to trick us, or actually North Korean is speaking to us. | ||
| So you can actually hear the oppression in their voice? | ||
| Yeah, you can. | ||
| What does it sound like? | ||
| It's a complete fear. | ||
| Like... | ||
| I'm terrified to the point they don't even know they're terrified. | ||
| They're like, I don't think even a bug would be that scared. | ||
| Like he was calling me on me in his voice. | ||
| I didn't see my father and he was so scared and I could see he was so scared. | ||
| I was like only nine something, ten. | ||
| I don't even know. | ||
| I was like young and I could say, why is he so afraid? | ||
| And so he does get out and they never put him back in jail again? | ||
| Because I rescued him after I went to China. | ||
| I got him out, so he had to go back. | ||
| He had to go back to jail, but he died in China. | ||
| So you were 13 when you and your family, was it you and your mother that escaped? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How did you get out? | ||
| So that hospital, initially my sister and I was going to escape. | ||
| But when North Koreans say when you are escaping, of course we don't have phones, we don't have a map, we don't know what the outside world looks like. | ||
| Luckily I was living in this border town of North Korea by then. | ||
| So at night, if you see the satellite photo of North Korea, it is literally the darkest place on earth. | ||
| We don't have electricity. | ||
| So I was seeing these lights coming from China. | ||
| So I thought if I go with the lights, we would be finding some bottle of rice. | ||
| So at 16, my sister left with her friend, and she left me a note while I was in the hospital and got my, removing my appendix. | ||
| And then as soon as I got out of the hospital, I found a note. | ||
| And initially, my mom and I went to look for a sister where she went. | ||
| But when we found the lady, she told me that she could help me to go to China that day. | ||
| And so this was you and your mother, and you were 13 years old. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So how did you get across, and what was that experience like? | ||
| So I told my mom, like, come with me to China. | ||
| And my mom was like, you know, my father was home. | ||
| He was waiting. | ||
| But the thing is, the tragic thing for North Carolina, we cannot even say goodbye to our loved ones. | ||
| So if we got caught on the journey, and if my father knew that we were escaping... | ||
| He's going to be punished so much. | ||
| It's better off that he does not know that we are escaping for his own safety. | ||
| Because they're going to torture you to the point that you're going to say anything. | ||
| Because they do this all subconscious torture that they make you not sleep in a single room that has no air, much air. | ||
| If you put there for 40 days alone, you go crazy. | ||
| You say whatever they ask you. | ||
| So if he actually knew that we were escaping, it wasn't good for him. | ||
| He would be dead. | ||
| So I told him, I'm like, you cannot tell father that we are escaping. | ||
| So that day we climbed up several mountains and then we went to the riverside. | ||
| But she had a connection with the guards. | ||
| Why did you not bring him with you? | ||
| Because he's a man and he was sick. | ||
| And somehow she said only women can go. | ||
| Only women can go. | ||
| I did not know what she meant by that. | ||
| She said you should just go with your mom. | ||
| And don't even tell those people that's your mom. | ||
| She said you are like 18 or something. | ||
| And my mom was something 30. So she told me that our age was different. | ||
| So this would somehow or another help you when you were going across? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How would that help you? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Or she told me, well, this is going to be helpful. | ||
| Well, part of the issue is in China, there's a disproportionate number of men in comparison to women. | ||
| And so they want as many women to come across that are of legal age, like women that can be married. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Is that the idea behind it? | ||
| It's a smuggling. | ||
| So you got it right. | ||
| Because of one child policy, a lot of girls got aborted in China. | ||
| So they kept boys. | ||
| So there's many, many men that have no chance of ever finding a woman because there are no women. | ||
| Yeah, over 30 million men in the rural areas cannot find wives. | ||
| 30 million? | ||
| Over 30 million. | ||
| And this number is going to keep going up right now. | ||
| So that's a big problem for the Chinese regime. | ||
| But the thing is, even that, they don't allow North Korean women to stay there. | ||
| They catch us. | ||
| And they send us back to North Korea. | ||
| Last month, China repatriated 50 North Korean defectors back to North Korea. | ||
| It's sending them our suits. | ||
| Literally, they are sending them to death camp. | ||
| But the Chinese regime still do catch us and send us back because they think we are posing a threat to the regime. | ||
| And they don't want the regime to collapse. | ||
| So they are catching all the defectors. | ||
| But the human traffickers seized the opportunity here because we are so vulnerable, right? | ||
| We are running away from Chinese authority. | ||
| So even they rape us and kill us. | ||
| The last place that we are gonna go is going to police and then report on them. | ||
| Why did they think that women coming over from North Korea are gonna somehow or another collapse the empire? | ||
| Because that's what Kim Jong-un believes. | ||
| He thinks they're going to collapse through the defection, through the defectors. | ||
| So after Kim Jong-un came into power, he literally, the country cannot afford electricity, electrify the fence, the entire border. | ||
| Not only that, putting the machine guns through the guards, have a shoot to kill whoever crosses, they don't even bother to ask you to stop. | ||
| They just shoot you right there. | ||
| And not only that, he buried the land mines. | ||
| On top of that. | ||
| So there's an electric fence, and then there's guards shooting to kill, and then past that there's landmines. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Entire country became a concentration camp. | ||
| Entire country. | ||
| When did they start putting the landmines in? | ||
| A few years ago. | ||
| So this is after you had already escaped. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now you don't see North Korean de facto escaping from North Korea anymore. | ||
| It's impossible to escape at this point. | ||
| One of the more horrific things that Jordan and you discussed was you seeing your mother raped and that your mother sacrificed herself because they wanted you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And this is the first time you had ever even seen what sex was? | ||
| So I didn't even know that was sex. | ||
| I did not know even that was rape because we didn't have the vocabulary in North Korea. | ||
| So in North Korea, there's no word for stress. | ||
| There's no word for stress. | ||
| Because how can you be stressed in the socialist paradise? | ||
| So there's no world trauma. | ||
| There's no world depression because you cannot be simply depressed in socialist paradise. | ||
| There's no world for liberty. | ||
| There's no world for human rights. | ||
| There's no world for rape or even sex. | ||
| So I just thought something I was seeing was horrible. | ||
| But later they told me that was rape. | ||
| I did not know that was rape. | ||
| But you also said that you never heard the word love. | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| There's no word for love in North Korea. | ||
| So your mother never told you she loved you. | ||
| You never told your father you love him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| None of that. | ||
| So in North Korea, there's even no word for I. So they don't want people to be individualistic, right? | ||
| That's the worst thing you can be. | ||
| It's all a collective vision. | ||
| So when North Koreans say, I like water, I say we love water. | ||
| We love kimchi. | ||
| So that's how when I'm in South Korea, they will keep saying in South Korea, there's difference between we and I. So when you say I like this, say I and then, of course, all the North Koreans keep saying we love this country. | ||
| And South Koreans get so frustrated that we are keep misusing I and we. | ||
| And that's how regime controls your minds through language. | ||
| It is George Orwell's 1984. They create double-speak, while language is so important, because it controls your thoughts. | ||
| So that's how I got rid of the romantic love. | ||
| We don't even know possibly another human can love another human. | ||
| Only love that neurosurgeons know is like, we transform love that when we describe our feelings towards the leader. | ||
| And we don't know that word can be used to describing our feelings to another human. | ||
| When Kim Jong Il died and people were crying in the streets and people were sent to prison for not crying enough, it was the strangest thing for us to watch as Americans because it was performative, where people were performing. | ||
| They were not really crying. | ||
| They were wailing in this very theatrical way to let everyone know that they were complying. | ||
| Your life is on the line. | ||
| People watching you. | ||
| If you don't mourn enough, that's the thing. | ||
| If you don't mourn in the most extreme high, they're going to send you to prison camp and execute you. | ||
| So we are doing it to survive. | ||
| Did you see anyone who didn't mourn enough? | ||
| No, I mean, it's impossible. | ||
| How do you not mourn enough? | ||
| How do you not possibly? | ||
| Your life generation is depending on you when you mourn. | ||
| So everyone knows this. | ||
| Of course we all know. | ||
| And everyone knows it's a threat. | ||
| Even babies know. | ||
| Even babies know. | ||
| When you born in North Korea, you know what it is. | ||
| You don't, like, start questioning. | ||
| It's, I mean, the first thing my mom told him as a young girl was not even be careful of strangers, be careful of, you know, call, like, none of that. | ||
| She would say, be careful of your tongue, because that is the most dangerous weapon you got in your body. | ||
| Don't even whisper, because the birds and mice couldn't hear you. | ||
| So that's the first thing you hear from your parents, how dangerous what you say is going to be. | ||
| Did you personally see people that you knew get imprisoned because of things that they said? | ||
| They just disappear. | ||
| Like one of my sister's classmates, her mom, when they executed. | ||
| And then because they're accusing her to receiving money from the foreign CIA or the South Korean intelligence. | ||
| But a month later, they said, oh, it was not a problem. | ||
| She was not a spy. | ||
| So they brought the family members back out of the concentration camp. | ||
| So they killed her for nothing? | ||
| And they don't even say sorry to that. | ||
| It's like we don't even know that's a concept. | ||
| The government can be sorry or they can ever make a mistake. | ||
| So how did they find out that she wasn't really a spy? | ||
| We just don't know. | ||
| Just one day that classmate came out and my sister, classmate came out and then she, they said like her mom was not a spy. | ||
| So they got out of the prison camp. | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| There's nothing, nothing we were, none of that. | ||
| And so this was a common thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And you just lived in constant fear. | ||
| This is the thing. | ||
| We are three people sitting here, right? | ||
| I'm watching you. | ||
| And Jamie's watching me. | ||
| And you're watching somebody else. | ||
| So even though I'm being a nice person, I'm not going to report on you. | ||
| I know Jamie's been watching me. | ||
| He's not going to report on me. | ||
| But even if you try to be nice, but he knows he's being watched by somebody too. | ||
| So you're being spied on and you're spying on somebody. | ||
| So no escape. | ||
| And everybody has to report anything that they find. | ||
| Like if you said something negative about the government, I would have to tell on you, otherwise I would get in trouble. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the other person don't report on you, that person get in trouble. | ||
| There's no way out of it. | ||
| That's how they create distrust. | ||
| Like one thing that shocked me when I came to the West, like how trust exists. | ||
| In North Korea, there's a saying like, don't even trust your own back. | ||
| Because you don't know who is a spy. | ||
| You don't know who is listening, who is watching. | ||
| And people just disappear. | ||
| Yeah, just disappear. | ||
| And public executions happens in a stadium next to market where most people go. | ||
| And in our school, there's no concept of minor, right? | ||
| There's no concept like minors cannot do labor. | ||
| Like that's another thing. | ||
| As a child is seven years old, you go to school, you work. | ||
| You go to work in a dam, construction, in the farm. | ||
| And you are a minor, so therefore when there's public execution happens, you are on the front line because you are the shortest. | ||
| They line up five, six years old in the beginning, and then in the age going, it's mandatory to attend. | ||
| So it's mandatory to attend public executions? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And how do they kill the people? | ||
| After Kim Jong-un got in power, he became more brutal how he kills people. | ||
| He used the air missiles that shoot down the airplane, that kind of powerful weapon. | ||
| So when he kills people, they blow up into pieces. | ||
| Like they literally become just red pieces and fireworks. | ||
| That's how it, that's what I hear from nowadays executions. | ||
| But my time was more the guard standing and shoot you here, here, and three times, nine shots. | ||
| And then the body becomes like rolled, rolled, rolled. | ||
| And then like they just put in luggage and take it out. | ||
| But nowadays I heard they are using way more. | ||
| They are starting hanging too. | ||
| Before my time was just execution. | ||
| But Kim Jong-un said even the bullets, we don't want to waste on this like trash. | ||
| They call us trash and so just hang them and like or like stone to death. | ||
| So bring the people around the town and hit them with the rocks until they die. | ||
| So the people in the town would contribute to the execution. | ||
| They would be the ones throwing the rocks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Otherwise you get punished, you have to. | ||
| And what are the crimes that you could be sentenced to death for? | ||
| It's as little as... | ||
| So in North Korea, every room has to have a portrait of Kim's. | ||
| And the inspector comes out of nowhere in the middle of the night and then touch the portraits if they see any dust. | ||
| They say your royalty is not high enough. | ||
| And then you can get executed and send to prison camp three generations of your family. | ||
| So if the picture is dusty, you get executed. | ||
| Yeah, and if your house gets on fire, the first thing is not you run with your family or your children or parents. | ||
| You have to protect the portraits of your life. | ||
| Otherwise, the three generation gets punished for that. | ||
| Even murderers, rapists in North Korea don't exist. | ||
| We don't even know what rape is. | ||
| I mean, they have pleasure squad, right? | ||
| Every year they go around the country, pick up the virgin girls, bring them back to Pyongyang, make them call the satisfactory groups, train them to become sex machines. | ||
| Every year they do that. | ||
| So these officials, now the guy who's in the second power in North Korea, his name is Chae Ryong-hae, He has his own pleasure squad, and he takes entire teeth out of these girls. | ||
| So when they kiss him down there, he has more pleasure. | ||
| So these things are not a crime in North Korea. | ||
| Literally, when women walk down, if the guys stand you and rape you, you cannot go to police. | ||
| You got raped. | ||
| It's your fault. | ||
| So this country, I mean, every wife gets beaten by husband in North Korea. | ||
| This is not a crime. | ||
| But if there's a newspaper, there's a portrait of Kim Jong-un, right? | ||
| Or Kim Jong-il. | ||
| You didn't see the front page. | ||
| In the back page, you ripped it by mistake. | ||
| That's how you get executed. | ||
| That is what we call crime in North Korea. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Wow. | ||
| you Having escaped that and looking back on it now and knowing that it exists right now, what can be done? | ||
| What could the rest of the world do? | ||
| I mean, North Korea has nuclear weapons. | ||
| They have a powerful military. | ||
| What can the rest of the world do to stop this from happening? | ||
| Because it seems like this is horrific. | ||
| It's a form of genocide, and it's happening right now. | ||
| It's a holocaust. | ||
| In 2014, UN conducted this investigation for a year, and the conclusion was the only resemblance that we find in our history what is happening to North Korean people is a holocaust. | ||
| So Holocaust is happening again. | ||
| And of course, we're denying it again. | ||
| When Holocaust was happening, a lot of people said, how is that possible? | ||
| It's so hard to believe that. | ||
| And North Korea, using this concentration camp, these people do the biology test. | ||
| They put them in the gas chambers. | ||
| Right now, they do that. | ||
| A biology test? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| What's the biology test? | ||
| They test a lot of the weapons, biology weapons. | ||
| North Korea spends entire their GDP on developing nukes and weaponaries. | ||
| They are the biggest provider to the Middle East. | ||
| When there's war, they buy missiles from North Koreans. | ||
| North Korea makes money by selling the crystal meth and opium. | ||
| That's how Kim Jong-un makes money in hacking, right? | ||
| He steals a lot of Bitcoin and ghetto banks, ATM machines. | ||
| That's how he makes money. | ||
| Because they don't export anything other than drugs and weapons and hacking and human trafficking. | ||
| So they experiment on their own people to find out if these biological weapons work? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And also, they need a lot of concentration, like prisoners, because they have to clean the nuclear debris. | ||
| Because they do a lot of tests. | ||
| Since 2017, North Korea conducted almost 30 missile tests. | ||
| The one test missile cost to feed 25 million the entire year. | ||
| So if we chose to do four less tests, nobody had to die in North Korea from starvation. | ||
| And right now, Kim Jong-un recently admits that 11 million North Koreans are severely malnourished, and he's proud to say that. | ||
| And he's not even bothering to hide in the past. | ||
| Yeah, they are starving. | ||
| And he's fat. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| That's his problem, being too fat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| They're forced to clean up nuclear waste from these test sites. | ||
| And of course they die from radiation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| They don't last three months. | ||
| Normal life expectancy when you go to a concentration camp is three months. | ||
| Three months. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So they need a lot of those people. | ||
| And they just use those people for fodder. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How many people, do they know how many people are in these concentration camps? | ||
| Nobody knows exactly, but several hundred thousand of them. | ||
| But there's also prison camps, concentration camps, prison camps, and labor camps. | ||
| And some people are born into these camps. | ||
| Yeah, those are people in the concentration camps. | ||
| And they don't even get to know the name of Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-un. | ||
| They are too below the level. | ||
| They don't even bother to tell them who the leader of the country is. | ||
| And what did someone in their family do that would allow them, that would make them get put into these concentration camps? | ||
| So they find out later their great-great-grandfather was working with the Japanese for like a week when the Japan was colonizing or the Korean was starting, they were talking to American soldiers. | ||
| Or they were, they're like cousins of nephews of like some in-law was a Christian. | ||
| Because North Korea is the number one Christian persecution country, because they copied the Bible, right? | ||
| They said, oh, Kim Il-sung loves us so much. | ||
| He's a god. | ||
| He gave us his son, Kim Jong-il. | ||
| And he dies, but he speaks with us all the time. | ||
| That's why they can read my thoughts. | ||
| He knows how much hair I have, and that's how... | ||
| So when you become a god, you need to explain. | ||
| You don't need to make sense. | ||
| So they essentially use the story of the Bible for Kim Jong-il and... | ||
| Kim Il-sung. | ||
| Yeah, they copy the Bible. | ||
| Exactly copy the Bible. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's why, like, I believe that Kim was reading my mind. | ||
| And if the people believe in the Hebrew, like, Jesus knows what you're thinking, why do you think it's surprising that North Koreans believe that? | ||
| So someone's great grandfather speaking to the Japanese would be the reason why they would be raised in a concentration camp and never even be told the name of the leaders. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's happening right now. | ||
| It's been happening for the last almost 80 years. | ||
| Yeah, this has been going on and as users ask what can be done. | ||
| Kim Jong Un cannot last even one week without Chinese regime support. | ||
| The only reason the regime exists is because of Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| How do you test missiles without oil? | ||
| Kim Jong-un cannot even drive his bench in Pyongyang. | ||
| China refused to not help the regime. | ||
| They keep helping Kim Jong-un. | ||
| Keep sending the oil. | ||
| Even last year, the New York Times covered it. | ||
| The ship is full of gas oil going to North Korea. | ||
| So Kim Jong-un could test missiles, even amid the pandemic. | ||
| Why does China support North Korea? | ||
| I really, really, I think one is they don't want that democracy come to next door, right? | ||
| That South Korea, Japan, America is all right next to North Korea geographically. | ||
| And North Korea is like this almost like a buffer zone for them, for this Western movement coming into their country. | ||
| And also they think of North Korea more like Tibet or Xinjiang. | ||
| If they let North Korea go, then Xinjiang people are going to want to go. | ||
| Tibet is going to be independent. | ||
| Hong Kong is going to be independent. | ||
| So they cannot give up any one of them. | ||
| So because of the stability and symbolic thing for the Chinese people within the country wants to be independent. | ||
| So they all want to maintain North Korea forever. | ||
| And Mao said that relationship between China and North Korea is that the relationship between your lips and the teeth. | ||
| Without lips, you cannot really close your mouth and eat. | ||
| Without your teeth, you cannot chew. | ||
| So you need each other to survive. | ||
| And that's how Mao's son died in Korea, by defending the Communist Party in the North. | ||
| That's how Mao lost his son. | ||
| That's how he believed that they need North Korea. | ||
| And so the Chinese Communist Party today shares a sentiment and they're using it strategically. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They run the dictatorship in North Korea. | ||
| They run the whole thing. | ||
| And that's the thing. | ||
| We have not been serving North Korea because we just never named accountability. | ||
| Who is responsible for this crisis? | ||
| That is China. | ||
| And, of course, in American mainstream. | ||
| They do not want to call out North Korea and China committing, you know, genocide. | ||
| That's why I've been having so many attacks from Marxists, communists, and Maoists, and Leninists, all these people. | ||
| And North Korea is almost this last country that holds ideological socialism. | ||
| So it's a very symbolic country. | ||
| So a lot of empathizers of communism and anti-Western civilization people, they defend North Korea like hell. | ||
| But do they, when they speak of it, like the Chinese Communist Party, when they speak of North Korea, do they have a distorted image that they project of what it's like in North Korea? | ||
| Do they change the narrative? | ||
| Do they have a story of North Korea that's false, that makes it seem like North Korea is a nice place? | ||
| No, they know exactly what's going on. | ||
| They know? | ||
| Even Chinese people know. | ||
| So there's no defending it? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| Even Chinese people see it. | ||
| Like when North Koreans get captured, Chinese is still better nice than North Korean guards. | ||
| They like handcuff off, sort of eye blinds us. | ||
| But North Koreans come and put the wire in between here, in between your bones. | ||
| So connecting all the prisoners together so they cannot run. | ||
| Like cows. | ||
| They put a wire through their collarbone? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So they prevent us to escape. | ||
| So while we're in China, that's when the outsiders are watching. | ||
| But imagine what they're going to do inside the country when there's no camera. | ||
| So this is what China does to North Koreans? | ||
| China catches us and gives us to North Korean guards, and they watch it. | ||
| And they watch them do that? | ||
| And then they even horrify, but of course they don't do anything about it. | ||
| You don't have to go that far, but of course North Koreans do not accept defection, right? | ||
| That's why we are defectors, we are not refugees. | ||
| When we escape, we defy the ideology. | ||
| That's why North Koreans are not just refugees, they are political prisoners. | ||
| They are political refugees. | ||
| They should be covered by Geneva Convention and international law. | ||
| So China catching a sentence back, that is a crime against humanity. | ||
| They're breaking the international law. | ||
| But no one will punish them for that. | ||
| And nobody gonna talk about it even here in the West. | ||
| Why? | ||
| I mean, there's a Michelle Obama, right? | ||
| Nobel Peace Prize giving the girls like captured by ISIS or like Taliban, like Malala. | ||
| Michelle Obama stands up for the girls who were captured by, you know, ISIS and Boko Haram. | ||
| Who is standing up for North Korean girls being captured and raped in China right now? | ||
| There are 300,000 North Koreans right now when we are speaking in China and are sexual slaves. | ||
| 300,000? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And most of them are women and girls. | ||
| China has incredible power. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And when you see the power that China has and that they're supporting North Korea and that there's no pushback from America, what does that feel like to you when you see this, knowing what you went through? | ||
| And not only knowing what you went through, but the fact that you talk about this openly, you talked about it in your book that came out in 2015. Yeah. | ||
| And you speak about it as often as possible, but yet there's not a lot of support, especially from political leaders. | ||
| No one is stepping up to say your story. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's total hypocrisy. | ||
| I mean, all these people in America talk about how slavery is wrong. | ||
| I agree slavery is the worst thing that we can do to another human being. | ||
| But why some slavery matters over some other slavery? | ||
| I mean, all these corporations talking about how they do not support the bigotry and racism and slavery. | ||
| It's happening right now in China and they have business with China. | ||
| And they don't say anything about it. | ||
| No, this is the thing. | ||
| When Hulu made a movie about assassins, about Kim Jong-nam's assassination three years ago in Malaysia. | ||
| Remember Kim Jong-un's half-brother, God? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So they made a movie Hulu was supporting to make that movie. | ||
| He killed his half brother and someone else too, right? | ||
| And his uncle. | ||
| His uncle. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So his brother is more shocking because he got killed in the international territory. | ||
| In a like VX nerve that the poison and they made a movie. | ||
| But when the Hulu was bought by Disney, Disney wants Hulu to drop that movie. | ||
| So that movie couldn't be shown in Hulu. | ||
| So because it would offend China. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Why there is not even one single movie coming out of Hollywood about North Korean people suffering? | ||
| They made about Congo genocide. | ||
| They made all about genocide, not about North Korea. | ||
| That is a strange hypocrisy, isn't it? | ||
| Of course it is. | ||
| And it's about money, right? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| It's all about money. | ||
| All these people talking about justice, what they care about. | ||
| I mean, none of them do when it's real life. | ||
| And this is not, these are not secret stories. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| I mean, so this is the thing. | ||
| Oh, don't make it up. | ||
| And Kim Jong-un kills his uncle. | ||
| Right? | ||
| That was on the national newspaper. | ||
| He kills his half-brother. | ||
| And look, do you remember the older one year, the American 21-year-old student? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| He was accused of stealing the banner. | ||
| He was brain dead. | ||
| By the time he got to America, he was beaten to death, right? | ||
| Yeah, and he was sentenced for 15 years in the labor camp for trying to steal the banner. | ||
| But this is a country that did to white American mayor, to the most powerful country citizen. | ||
| Imagine what they're going to do to their own citizen. | ||
| You can't even imagine what they do to their own citizens. | ||
| So North Korea, this nationalism is to the highest. | ||
| So when North Koreans go to China, get raped, and we get pregnant, when we go back to North Korea, the guards kick our belly until baby dies. | ||
| They don't let the baby leave. | ||
| It's just unbelievable. | ||
| This is happening in the 21st century, and still, we somehow don't talk about it. | ||
| Not just don't talk about it, but it keeps going generation after generation. | ||
| I mean, if it's been happening like this for more than 80 years, what's going to stop it from happening for another 80 years? | ||
| And if people are quiet, nothing. | ||
| It's going to keep going. | ||
| And this is what is to me as an activist, right? | ||
| I'm a dissent. | ||
| I'm fighting against this regime. | ||
| We know when Jamal Khashoggi get killed in Saudi consulate, there's no accountability for the dictator, right? | ||
| Saudi prince, he didn't get anything. | ||
| When Kim Jong-un killed his hot brother in Malaysia, nothing they were like, there's no accountability that we are asking of these people. | ||
| So standing up fighting, It doesn't incentivize people anymore, right? | ||
| So you don't see justice being served. | ||
| And I think that is why it is so hard to fight now. | ||
| Because people think justice is there, but I don't think it is that it's something I don't see in real life. | ||
| When you actually fight against injustice, it's most likely you're going to be just like get killed and nobody cares and just keep moving on. | ||
| What can be done? | ||
| I mean, if the United States and the relationship the United States has with China, they're unwilling to do anything or even speak out about it. | ||
| When they talk about the problems of the world, North Korea is rarely discussed. | ||
| And the horrific crimes of the North Korean regime against their own people, rarely discussed by politicians. | ||
| They'll talk about Afghanistan. | ||
| They'll talk about Iraq. | ||
| They'll talk about all the problems we have with Iran. | ||
| They don't talk about what's going on right now. | ||
| What you're describing in North Korea with these concentration camps and these people, they don't talk about these things. | ||
| What can be done? | ||
| I think this is the beauty of living in democracy. | ||
| When I go to Whole Foods, coming from North Korea, I'm shocked by how many hand washing is all about environment-friendly products. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And that means a lot of people want to support this cause. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| That they want, I mean, look at how many vegan restaurants are popping up in New York. | ||
| So a lot of people demand that now. | ||
| So if individuals are being educated... | ||
| On what is happening and who is actually responsible for supporting North Korean regime and how hard it is for the people who are being oppressed. | ||
| If they start demanding the politicians and the world leaders and companies to be conscious and act, I think that is at this point my only hope is individuals. | ||
| I have stopped trying to talk to UN. I don't even give talks anymore at the UN. Did you give talks in the past? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| What was the response? | ||
| They, in Geneva, in September, the Human Rights General Assembly meeting, how dumb of them. | ||
| They literally put me alone to right next to North Korean delegation team because geographically we are somehow close. | ||
| So these five guys from North Korean delegation team are sweating at me. | ||
| And the UN, that's what they do. | ||
| That's how dumb they are. | ||
| They sat them next to you. | ||
| Yeah, they put me right next to North Korean delegation team. | ||
| And no protection? | ||
| No. | ||
| I was so scared of going to a hotel room that night because I don't have anybody protecting me. | ||
| So I have tried, of course, but at the UN, who decides the human rights violators? | ||
| Chinese and Putin and Saudis do. | ||
| They decide who actually violates human rights. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I have to go ask Chinese who actually committing this crime and complain, of course, they're not going to listen to me. | ||
| So what is the even point of the UN for this? | ||
| And of course, I met Nancy Pelosi. | ||
| I met a lot of politicians. | ||
| And on the surface, like, oh, that's really horrible. | ||
| Let me think about what can I do. | ||
| But of course, this is not what they care. | ||
| They care about the systemic oppression that is happening in America more. | ||
| They care about what's going to get them votes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And what's popular, what's on people's minds right now. | ||
| And whatever the narrative is that they're currently pushing. | ||
| It's going to allow them to get elected again. | ||
| Yeah, it's all about their own interests. | ||
| So when you spoke at the UN, what was the reception like? | ||
| Oh, they are saying like this is the West propaganda trying to interfere other people's autonomy. | ||
| North Korea is a state of their own. | ||
| You should not interfere the other people's affairs. | ||
| That's like still to this day Chinese narrative, right? | ||
| They don't ask us what we are doing to Xinjiang Uyghurs or Falun Gong or like organ trafficking, all of that. | ||
| It's our own business. | ||
| Organ trafficking. | ||
| So when North Koreans go to China, we're ending up like several different sources. | ||
| Worst case is they take us and they take our organs out and suddenly we die. | ||
| Like which organs? | ||
| Everybody, your eyes, heart, lungs, kidney, liver, all of it. | ||
| They sell them? | ||
| Of course, in China, you order the organ, it gets to you within three hours. | ||
| How is it possible? | ||
| How somebody dies miraculously in three hours for you? | ||
| Do you know how many hospitals are being built for organ transfer in China? | ||
| How many? | ||
| This is the biggest revenue right now being built in China. | ||
| So do people from other countries go to China for organ replacements? | ||
| A lot of the Middle East and those countries go to China to get the organs. | ||
| So they just turn a blind eye to it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They don't think about the origin of the actual organs themselves? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They just go, oh I need a lung replacement and China says well if you go here we can get it for you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And they go and then they kill someone and take their lungs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It became a biggest now like a new industry that is rising in China. | ||
| And those people are generally North Koreans? | ||
| Those are, a lot of them were Falun Gong practitioners in China. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Uyghurs? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now the Uyghurs. | ||
| But Falun Gong is different, like a peaceful religion they were wanted. | ||
| Falun Gong, Uyghurs, and not as much Tibetans, but more like Xinjiang now with the Falun Gong and North Koreans. | ||
| And so they have them in some prisons somewhere. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they feed them and just wait for someone to come along that needs their organs and they kill them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| This is proven? | ||
| A lot of other things are proven because when these people die, how do we ask them, how did you die? | ||
| They are dead. | ||
| A lot of Falun Gong survivors do testimony. | ||
| They have told about this. | ||
| It's very well known. | ||
| The UN even condemned China for that. | ||
| Even they couldn't turn the eyes blind on. | ||
| It was too evidence. | ||
| And another thing North Korean school is prostitution, brothers, right? | ||
| And these girls resist. | ||
| So what they do? | ||
| They give them drugs. | ||
| So they make them become drug addicts. | ||
| So now all they want is drug. | ||
| So that's how they go to brothers. | ||
| And then these men I said in these villages cannot afford women in these little towns. | ||
| So they buy one girl and they rotate the entire men in that town. | ||
| And then like me, some of them just being sold, like my mom was sold for just like mentally retarded family, the farmer's family. | ||
| And we go became a free labor for them and being a sex slave for them. | ||
| And then... | ||
| Being a sex slave for a mentally retarded family? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, because if they're normal and they can't find wives. | ||
| The older, like, mentally retarded and not functioning people, those people cannot find wives. | ||
| So that's why we're ending up in the most horrible places. | ||
| We don't just go and fall in love and meet some normal person. | ||
| So when you were 13, you escaped. | ||
| Tell us what it was like. | ||
| First of all, where did you escape to? | ||
| You escaped to China? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And how did you get across? | ||
| It was a frozen river in March, end of March in 2007. So you travel on the frozen river? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And we luckily didn't get shot by the guards. | ||
| And when we got into the other side of the riverbank of China, that's when mom got raped. | ||
| And then they took us in a house. | ||
| And they were like turning me around, like a slave market, right? | ||
| They check my teeth and my body structure. | ||
| And somehow being virgin is very precious in China. | ||
| So they sold my mom for around $65. | ||
| And it's 21st century. | ||
| And they sold me less than $300. | ||
| And they sold us separately. | ||
| But the... | ||
| Thing is, they didn't even try to force us. | ||
| They were asking, if you don't want to be sold, you can go back to North Korea, right? | ||
| And even the North Korean regime doesn't punish me, I couldn't find food to eat. | ||
| I was going to die anyway. | ||
| Even if the regime doesn't kill me, the starvation was going to kill me. | ||
| And for the first time, I remember that night in the traffickers' house, I saw a trash can. | ||
| And I did not know what it was. | ||
| So I asked this lady, like, what is that? | ||
| And then I heard one thing. | ||
| I said, oh, that's trash. | ||
| Like, what is trash? | ||
| I said, oh, the things that you don't need to throw there. | ||
| Like, you can throw a bin away. | ||
| And I said, what do you mean you have things to throw away? | ||
| Because we never needed a trash bin in North Korea. | ||
| We had nothing to throw. | ||
| Even these hairs, it comes down. | ||
| We don't have heating like that. | ||
| We have to start a fire. | ||
| And starting fire takes the paper. | ||
| It's very precious. | ||
| So we burn hair there to try to start a fire. | ||
| Literally nothing was thrown away. | ||
| Even human poop, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's the thing. | ||
| The regime cannot have a fertilizer. | ||
| They don't even have the technology to have a fertilizer. | ||
| So they demand us to bring the poop. | ||
| And as a kid you go to school, the teachers beat you and then go home and look for poop. | ||
| So I would go on the streets and looking if anywhere like a dog pooped or something. | ||
| Of course like all those dogs or poops gone. | ||
| So finding a poop and you don't eat much. | ||
| You don't poop like in North Korea like few times a month. | ||
| It's a very precious thing. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| A few times a month. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it becomes very precious and you have to give it over to the regime. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that's nothing. | ||
| It's being wasted. | ||
| So do they have toilets or do you go to the bathroom in outhouses? | ||
| Oh, we have all outhouses. | ||
| But we have to lock it because some people come and steal it. | ||
| They come to steal the poop? | ||
| Yeah, it's a government quota. | ||
| You get punished if you don't bring poop. | ||
| Everything is punishment in that country. | ||
| So how much, what is the quota? | ||
| Like how much poop do you have to give them? | ||
| So sometimes per family they say one ton. | ||
| How do you find that? | ||
| A ton? | ||
| 2,000 pounds? | ||
| I do the kilograms, so like a thousand kilograms, right? | ||
| It's like a ton, one ton. | ||
| Yeah, it's about right. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So per family or they give you the color. | ||
| So that's per year? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then we have to bring them in usually January. | ||
| So because the farming starts around March, So they have to, you know, in like January, they collect them and pile them up, and then they started burying it, and then the dough happens, and they started farming process in the spring. | ||
| And even then, you don't get any of the food that they're growing? | ||
| No, it's a collective farm. | ||
| So they take the 98% of the food to the regime, and then that 2% is spread among the elites who's running the farm. | ||
| So you work an entire year in the collective farm. | ||
| You get nothing from it. | ||
| There's also cannibalism. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How does that happen? | ||
| It's really like people say, oh, don't dehumanize people of North Korea because they say, oh, just tell us nice things, right? | ||
| That's just too much for us to handle. | ||
| This is the thing. | ||
| People go to black market, you sell meat. | ||
| People don't ask what meat it is. | ||
| We don't ask. | ||
| It's like pork or like it's just a rabbit. | ||
| We don't. | ||
| And we just sometimes we go find a very, very cheap meat and we don't ask. | ||
| And luckily I was poor to afford the meat. | ||
| I didn't get to eat them. | ||
| A lot of children just disappear. | ||
| But the thing is, there's no evidence. | ||
| Usually everybody dies in some corner, get drowned. | ||
| So we go to river to bathe. | ||
| We only bathe a few times a year. | ||
| In wintertime we don't even bathe. | ||
| And during the winter, we have to go to wash our clothes. | ||
| So we make a small hole in the river. | ||
| And sometimes you fall and slip through and you die like that. | ||
| So it's just so easy to... | ||
| Murder is not a thing. | ||
| So it's so many causes killing you. | ||
| So some people, you lose your children. | ||
| We just don't even know what killed it. | ||
| And nobody bothered to go out and, like, find it for you. | ||
| So, so many people die. | ||
| So that's why it's easy to sell the human meat. | ||
| So either they're killing the children or they'll find them dead and then just cook their meat and sell it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is common. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So when you escaped to China, what is the process like when you're in China before... | ||
| How did you eventually go to South Korea? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How long were you in China for? | ||
| Almost two years. | ||
| And what was that like? | ||
| What was the process like? | ||
| Well, living in two years of China, I feel like I lived a thousand years on this earth. | ||
| I feel like very old. | ||
| Yeah, I remember after there for six months, one day, I was walking alone and then it's like, I literally felt like I lived a thousand years, right? | ||
| Like making it one day was such a struggle. | ||
| Whenever you let one day live, you think like, oh my God, I made one more day on earth. | ||
| In China? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it was that hard in China. | ||
| What was so hard about it? | ||
| Because one, you don't know when you're going to be arrested. | ||
| So you always put your shoes on tight, shoe races, and whenever you get into some indoor, you look for a place to run. | ||
| If you are invited to somebody's house, you see all the checked doors. | ||
| Where can I run? | ||
| Which route do I run? | ||
| When you even sleep, you know how to run. | ||
| You get ready to run from the police. | ||
| And that is a constant threat. | ||
| And, of course, you're raped every single day by these human traffickers. | ||
| And they even can't follow you to the bathroom. | ||
| There's no human dignity in it. | ||
| They beat you, and they, I mean, you're not your own person. | ||
| And the common things that they tell us, tell us that our lives are even not valuable like pigs. | ||
| Because even if they kill us, they know that we cannot go to police. | ||
| How did you escape from all that? | ||
| This is, so the man who bought me, he was very impressed because by then I went through two human traffickers prior to me. | ||
| So by the third human trafficker, nobody's virgin, they all got raped. | ||
| So he was Han Chinese and couldn't believe that I made it to him as a virgin. | ||
| Because the first trafficker my mom covered. | ||
| Second trafficker I felt like a hell. | ||
| I would literally lose my mind. | ||
| And thankfully he had his mistress in the next room. | ||
| So I didn't get raped. | ||
| He tried so hard. | ||
| I didn't. | ||
| So by the third time, Han Chinese, I always tried to kill myself. | ||
| And then he said, oh, if you become my mistress, I'm gonna help you to get your family to you. | ||
| But before that, he showed me the phone he had. | ||
| Because I've never seen a phone in my life as a North Korean. | ||
| And he showed me, oh, this phone can take pictures and look at these pictures I took. | ||
| And one picture I saw was my mom in it. | ||
| And I started telling him, that's like, my mom, my mom. | ||
| And that's how he knew that I had that the woman that he sold was my mom. | ||
| And obviously he raped her too. | ||
| So he said, if I become his mistress, he's gonna help me with my family. | ||
| So he took my virgin, he raped me, and thankfully he did help me. | ||
| He brought my mom back from a farmer that he sold, and he brought my sick father from North Korea. | ||
| That's how I brought my parents back to me. | ||
| How did you escape from him? | ||
| After almost two years, he became a gambling addict. | ||
| He was a big gambler. | ||
| He's spending all his money. | ||
| And somehow, this evil man was letting me go because he couldn't even afford to give me food at that point. | ||
| He was so broke. | ||
| So he said, like, I'm letting you go. | ||
| And in some ways, in his most evil way, he loved me. | ||
| So after two years, I was let go. | ||
| And then I went to this chat room. | ||
| So this is another thing. | ||
| A lot of North Korean girls are capturing these chat rooms where we do body cams. | ||
| Clients are South Koreans. | ||
| So we chat and then we show our body. | ||
| But North Korean women, we choose that route because it's better than being touched by men in person. | ||
| Right? | ||
| You're not raped in person. | ||
| So this is all on the internet with web cameras? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's the number one thing that North Korean women do in China. | ||
| All this nightlife. | ||
| So in that room, I heard about something called South Korea for the person because the clients are South Koreans. | ||
| You didn't know what South Korea was? | ||
| I knew the different name, like different name, but I knew that country was colonized by Americans. | ||
| I heard that in South Korea, the South Korea was very corrupt capitalist and raped by American soldiers every day. | ||
| And they are like, kids cannot go to school and they all want to come to North Korea. | ||
| That's what you learned from North Korea? | ||
| Oh yeah, that's what I thought. | ||
| Wow, they all want to go to North Korea. | ||
| Yeah, they all want to come to North Korea. | ||
| The entire humanity wants to be like North Korea. | ||
| So we are so fortunate. | ||
| They tell us that we have nothing to envy in this world. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So you find out about South Korea from these chat rooms and you start to get a different idea of what South Korea must be like. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And we met this defector lady in that chat room. | ||
| She told me she knows some missionaries. | ||
| And if we become Christians, they're gonna help us to go to South Korea and be free. | ||
| And that's when I heard like free for the first time. | ||
| I asked like, what do you mean free? | ||
| And she said, oh, you can watch TV and you can wear jeans and nobody gonna arrest you for that in South Korea. | ||
| So that's what I thought about freedom. | ||
| Watching TV and wearing jeans. | ||
| That's what you thought of freedom. | ||
| It was never like freedom of speech or none of that. | ||
| I was like, that's cool. | ||
| I can wear jeans. | ||
| But I was a teenage girl. | ||
| I wanted jeans and North Korea, you get sent to prison camp for that. | ||
| You get sent to prison camp for wearing jeans. | ||
| Yeah, it's just a joke for Westerners that North Koreans even haircut is like ordered by the regime. | ||
| Like the only thing that North Koreans allowed to do that in that country fully, freely is breathing. | ||
| Everything else is controlled. | ||
| What we wear, what we watch, what we listen to, how we dance, what haircut that we get, every single thing is controlled by the regime. | ||
| So you're working in these chat rooms and you meet this woman and she says you just have to become a Christian? | ||
| No, we have to go to the shelter that Christians had. | ||
| So we have to go in their study, Bible, and we have to prove our faith to them. | ||
| Then they're gonna rescue us. | ||
| That was a condition to be rescued by Christians. | ||
| So it's a Christian missionary from South Korea. | ||
| So did you have to go to South Korea in order to prove yourself to them? | ||
| Or did they do this all through online? | ||
| No, we couldn't go to South Korea, obviously. | ||
| So they had a shelter in China, in some house hidden. | ||
| So we went to their shelter and then we joined them as a group and studied the Bible every day. | ||
| So we would go fasting. | ||
| I mean, we've been starving all our lives, but they say, you know, God provides, so you go fast, you study Bible, you memorize verses, they come test you. | ||
| And we pray together, and then once they think we are actually Christians, then they tell you how to go to South Korea. | ||
| How long did that take? | ||
| Several months. | ||
| But when you're so desperate, I'm going to believe in rocks if somebody asks me to believe. | ||
| You believe in anything, literally. | ||
| And it was so easy. | ||
| North Korea's regime was Bible. | ||
| I was like, what the heck is this thing called Jesus and God? | ||
| And North Koreans are like, don't worry, baby. | ||
| Just plug God to Kim Il-sung and Jesus to Kim Jong-il. | ||
| And it perfectly makes sense. | ||
| God loves us so much. | ||
| Gave us his son. | ||
| He's there to protect us. | ||
| We gotta suffer and go to paradise with him later in life. | ||
| So I did become a Christian. | ||
| So it made the same sense to you because it was so similar to the story that they taught you in North Korea. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| The logic was so similar. | ||
| So you became a Christian. | ||
| Yeah, I did. | ||
| And several months of studying the Bible. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then they eventually got you to South Korea. | ||
| They told us how to go. | ||
| How'd you do that? | ||
| Which was literally walking across the Gobi Desert into Mongolia from China. | ||
| You walked? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So they gave us one compass. | ||
| We had even toddler in our group. | ||
| We had one father and his father and the seven ladies and few teenagers. | ||
| They told us... | ||
| You went by compass? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did they give you a map? | ||
| I mean, you cannot look at the map in the desert. | ||
| You don't have GPS. How do you know? | ||
| Nothing tells you if you're going circle or straight or backwards. | ||
| That was the horrifying thing about desert is that it looks all the same. | ||
| Nothing tells you what you're doing. | ||
| You can just keep going circle all night. | ||
| And then so they told us go follow the west and the north between in that direction. | ||
| And if you cross the eight wire fences, hopefully that's going to be Mongolia. | ||
| Hopefully. | ||
| And then you find the Mongolian soldiers and tell them that you want to go to South Korea, not North Korea. | ||
| So that means it's so dangerous. | ||
| The chances of you making in the desert is not even like 2-3%, right? | ||
| Like 90-80% of time you're going to fail. | ||
| So they cannot lead us there. | ||
| It's random luck. | ||
| That's why they believe that God is going to show us miracles. | ||
| How long did it take you to walk from the Gobi Desert? | ||
| It was just only one day. | ||
| One day. | ||
| But we chose that in February 2009, after Beijing Olympic. | ||
| And in the frozen Gobi Desert, it's like minus 40 degrees. | ||
| So the soldiers is thinking, nobody's crazy enough to cross right now in this freezing time. | ||
| So that's how you can do it? | ||
| That security is lower. | ||
| Other times they're gonna shoot you because in that desert nobody knows if you got killed or not. | ||
| So who would be shooting you? | ||
| Chinese or the Mongolians. | ||
| Both of them can just shoot you. | ||
| They would just shoot anybody walking through the desert? | ||
| It's called a shoot to order. | ||
| It's like a shoot to kill order. | ||
| So they don't like bother ask who you are just gonna shoot them right there and kill them. | ||
| So we don't even have ID, none of that. | ||
| So we chose a time it was frozen and cold, and even guards don't want to come out and look around. | ||
| So we were walking from the Chinese side, but they took us to the border of China, Inner Mongolia, which was still China. | ||
| From that border, we started walking towards Mongolia. | ||
| And the entire day of walking, we got there. | ||
| Somehow, miraculously, we didn't die from the cold. | ||
| Did you bring food? | ||
| Did you bring water? | ||
| What did you bring with you when you were walking? | ||
| Like in minus 40 degrees, you cannot even stand still for 3 seconds. | ||
| Like if you stand still for 10 seconds, you're going to die right there. | ||
| You're going to get a heart attack, frozen to death. | ||
| So you don't even need to eat. | ||
| You just have to. | ||
| Only thing I remember was moving, moving, moving. | ||
| Keep going. | ||
| Keep moving. | ||
| Whatever I was doing, I had to keep moving. | ||
| Otherwise, you don't get enough oxygen, so very hazy and not clear. | ||
| You get very sleepy. | ||
| That's the thing, dying from cold wasn't bad as I thought. | ||
| You become very numb, and you don't really desensitize, and you become very, very sleepy. | ||
| And that's when you know you're dying in the cold. | ||
| How many people were with you? | ||
| We had one baby and seven people. | ||
| And the toughest thing is when we were going across China, we had to give him sleeping pills because he would cry and he doesn't speak Chinese. | ||
| But in the desert, he had to wake up because he's going to die frozen to death in the desert. | ||
| So this baby keeps falling asleep. | ||
| So we had to keep shaking our passing around between us. | ||
| And he made it eventually. | ||
| So he has to stay awake because if he falls asleep, the cold will kill him? | ||
| Oh yeah, of course. | ||
| But he's not walking, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're carrying him? | |
| Oh yeah, he's a toddler. | ||
| He cannot walk. | ||
| But he still needs to be awake. | ||
| So we had to keep shaking him and massage his feet and hands and shake him up and down so he could be conscious. | ||
| Because he would keep falling asleep. | ||
| What kind of clothes are you guys wearing? | ||
| We didn't have gloves. | ||
| You didn't have gloves? | ||
| Four degrees below zero? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So my mom didn't have shoes at that point. | ||
| So she eventually borrowed the shoes from a guy and robbed it so big. | ||
| And I was like, you just wear a thin coat. | ||
| And somehow, that's why I guess we needed a miracle. | ||
| That's why we had to pray. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's a very low chance making it. | ||
| So nobody is not escaping through Mongolia anymore. | ||
| So you walk through Mongolia, it takes you 24 hours? | ||
| Just roughly one day, I think. | ||
| And then what happens when you get to the other side? | ||
| We didn't get to another side. | ||
| One just suddenly in the morning, the guards with the guns coming at you and asking to put your hands up. | ||
| So we were like lifting our hands up, right? | ||
| And then they were like saying, they're going to send us to China and then back to North Korea to get killed. | ||
| So North Korea is going to bring the laser and poisons with us to kill ourselves. | ||
| Because I mean, going to North Korea to get killed is way worse than killing ourselves right there. | ||
| So we So you brought poison with you to kill yourself? | ||
| And a laser, yeah. | ||
| And a laser? | ||
| What kind of laser? | ||
| Very, very thin laser. | ||
| That's like China and North Korea said it. | ||
| Like very, very thin laser. | ||
| A razor? | ||
| Like blade, yeah. | ||
| Blade, metal. | ||
| Yeah, metal thing. | ||
| Very thin one. | ||
| Yeah, right, right. | ||
| It's razor. | ||
| Oh, razor. | ||
| Yeah, we hide in the belts like everywhere. | ||
| So to cut your veins. | ||
| Yeah, like right here, right here. | ||
| It's very easy to cut. | ||
| So we were, this is like what still shocks me is that these Mongolian soldiers didn't have to send us to China, but they want to see how we react. | ||
| So that's what they were playing with us, right? | ||
| For us it's like life and death. | ||
| For them it's like a joke. | ||
| And thankfully they would not let us kill ourselves. | ||
| Like very last minute they stopped us and turned the car back around to the Mongolian side. | ||
| But the next team that crossed the border got all arrested and sent back to North Korea. | ||
| But the following team, they were doing that and Mongolian soldiers went too far. | ||
| So one of my friends, she swallowed the entire sleeping pills to kill herself. | ||
| And then they took her to ER and they revived her, but forever her brain got damaged. | ||
| So this was a joke to them. | ||
| So they thought it was funny to scare the refugees? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's funny to see how we fight for our lives. | ||
| Yeah, but thankfully nobody's cheating their heart anymore. | ||
| So when they capture you and they threaten to send you to China and then back to North Korea, how did you get out of it? | ||
| I remember telling my mom that we did everything to survive. | ||
| It was like, because in China, in the prisons, they even get rid of the buttons. | ||
| Everything is all like, you cannot swallow to kill yourself, right? | ||
| They don't even give you a spoon. | ||
| So that's how prevent a suicide because all North Koreans kill themselves before they go because they know the fate. | ||
| So I know like if I missed the opportunity to kill myself in the car on the way to China, we are never going to get the chance back. | ||
| So we were ready to cut and then swallow the thing and that's when it stopped. | ||
| And sometimes they just go too far with it. | ||
| So it's always a joke to them? | ||
| Yeah, we did not know. | ||
| But later, when we were leaving Mongolia, that's when they told us, actually we didn't mean to send you guys to China. | ||
| We just do that every time when you arrive here. | ||
| And some people wind up killing themselves anyway. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So eventually they let you go? | ||
| Yeah, they did reach out to South Korean embassy and then South Korean embassy comes, right? | ||
| They interrogate you to make sure that you're actually North Korean. | ||
| So several months in Mongolia, we do different detention centers. | ||
| They move us around and interrogate us. | ||
| And when they confirm that we are North Koreans, that's when they gave us a fake passport. | ||
| And from Ulaanbaatar to South Korea, we flew there. | ||
| And so when they determine that you're North Korean, what are they trying to find out? | ||
| They're trying to find out if you're actually a refugee, if you're a spy, like what are they trying to find out? | ||
| So they're in China, there's a Korean ethnic Chinese. | ||
| Who were Koreans back then, but they became Chinese, the ethnic Koreans. | ||
| So, you know, China has 56 different ethnicities. | ||
| It's a very diverse country, right? | ||
| So one of them are Korean ethnic Chinese. | ||
| Those people tried to go to South Korea. | ||
| So they rule out those people and also spy. | ||
| So everybody's defectors when you escape, you become defector right away. | ||
| So they rule out the spies and also rule out if you are actually North Korean or ethnic Chinese, ethnic Korean Chinese. | ||
| That's what they try to investigate you. | ||
| And so you finally eventually get to South Korea and then what happens? | ||
| And then what happens? | ||
| I hear about this thing called freedom. | ||
| And then hear about this country is obsessed with competition and hard work and studying. | ||
| The vigorous academia that these kids study English when they're in their mother's tummy. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And they study like crazy people. | ||
| And then I'm like, almost like, you know, high schooler. | ||
| And they did a placement test on me and I'm like, I need to go study with seven years old. | ||
| I don't even know what continents are, right? | ||
| I don't even know what Africa is. | ||
| I don't even know what different races. | ||
| I don't even know the map. | ||
| So, I'm like blank paste, like adult baby. | ||
| Adult baby. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| How old are you? | ||
| I was Korean age. | ||
| I was 17. You were 17, but you're really about 10 years behind. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| At least. | ||
| At least. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| And so, what kind of education did they give you in South Korea? | ||
| They told us that South Korea was a free country, that Americans are not bastards. | ||
| Because they told Americans were cold-blooded snakes in North Korea. | ||
| So I remember one of my friends I took to South Korea, she was a white lady. | ||
| My mom got drunk with Soju and touching her, right? | ||
| And then, like, I just want to make sure that you are, like, actually warm-blooded. | ||
| Because that's what they... | ||
| And in school, we have posters of Americans. | ||
| Posters? | ||
| Because we don't have actual pictures of them. | ||
| So our enemy is Americans, right? | ||
| They are, like, our sore enemy. | ||
| So we got to know how they look like. | ||
| So they are cold-blooded, huge nose and blue eyes, green eyes, monsters. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So where did they educate you in South Korea? | ||
| There's a re-education center. | ||
| Oh, so they have a place where they take in people from North Korea? | ||
| Yeah, for three months. | ||
| So they take you to ATM machine. | ||
| So we never had a bank in North Korea, right? | ||
| In the past, I heard there was a bank, but the regime asked you to put the money and they don't give the money back to you. | ||
| So nobody uses bank in North Korea. | ||
| So I literally thought ATM machine, there's somebody inside the machine handing the money out to you through the window. | ||
| Because I don't know automation. | ||
| And they teach you how to take a bus, how to even go to movie theater, order a ticket, because we never seen the digital devices. | ||
| How to take the elevator, what is escalator, you know what I mean? | ||
| So you're just landing in a completely different planet. | ||
| What is that like? | ||
| Overwhelming. | ||
| It's very... | ||
| having that choice, like when you go shopping and you have 10 different pants, right? | ||
| And it's up to you to choose what you wear. | ||
| And North Korea was chosen by the regime. | ||
| Freedom was difficult. | ||
| I was literally saying, if I had enough frozen potato, had at least minimum food to eat, I would go back to North Korea. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because I was not used to thinking. | ||
| Thinking was hard. | ||
| Thinking was not something I'm used to. | ||
| I never had to think. | ||
| But not only that, you have to think for yourself. | ||
| What do you want to do in your life? | ||
| And I was like, do I have to know? | ||
| Can't you just not tell me what I need to do? | ||
| Because I'm so good at following the orders. | ||
| But they go, like in South Korea, they were asking me, so what do you want to do? | ||
| And what do you think? | ||
| And what I thought never mattered. | ||
| I couldn't believe what I think matters to you. | ||
| So really thinking for yourself was very difficult. | ||
| I would have been so tired after thinking for five minutes. | ||
| I would get exhausted all day. | ||
| I literally get like, working out with thinking is so hard. | ||
| I would get so exhausted. | ||
| How do people keep thinking here all day long? | ||
| They say the same thing happens to people when they get out of prison. | ||
| That when they get out of prison, they call it being institutionalized. | ||
| When they get out of prison, they want to go back to prison. | ||
| And oftentimes they'll commit crimes just so they can get arrested and go back to prison. | ||
| Because in prison, they're told what to do. | ||
| And they become accustomed to it. | ||
| That's what it felt like for you. | ||
| For me, when I was born, that was my lifestyle. | ||
| Thinking was not a natural thing. | ||
| A lot of North Koreans do have a hard time to adjust to freedom. | ||
| When you first went to South Korea and you were able to eat whatever you wanted, what did you eat? | ||
| Eggs. | ||
| Bored eggs. | ||
| That's what you wanted? | ||
| Yeah, because even beef was too fenced. | ||
| I did not know what a cow was, right? | ||
| You didn't know what a cow was? | ||
| I never knew the milk came out of cow because I never had milk in my life. | ||
| So all North Koreans, we know it's like chicken and eggs. | ||
| So in North Korea, egg is the most fenced thing you can imagine. | ||
| So I literally thought I could eat a bucket of eggs. | ||
| Egg is the most fancy thing that you can imagine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So at North Carolina we boiled eggs and we like, let me see actually how many I can eat, right? | ||
| But after five, you cannot eat more than five boiled eggs. | ||
| So that's when I realized, I mean, not that much it take for me to fall. | ||
| How I wasn't able to do that in that country. | ||
| So that was, do you remember the first time you ate until you were full? | ||
| Yeah, in China. | ||
| But the thing is, you think you're going to eat everything. | ||
| It's that in China, our stomach is not used to seasoning, like oil or fat. | ||
| So I was getting nauseous a lot. | ||
| I couldn't eat the normal food that the Chinese, even South Koreans eat. | ||
| Because, I mean, our system was eating without seasoning. | ||
| Just all the wild, like, you know, plants and flowers and, like, not much going on. | ||
| So going to China eating for the first time that was seasoned food was very hard on my stomach. | ||
| And so it was actually not that great. | ||
| Like, you would think, like, oh, my God, it's a paradise. | ||
| Your system doesn't take a while for you to adjust to the new kind of food. | ||
| How long did it take in South Korea before you felt comfortable? | ||
| Eating a hamburger, I think? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| At least like two, three years. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| It's two, three years. | ||
| Even getting used to Coca-Cola, I literally thought some fire was happening when I never had a bubble in my life. | ||
| So learning about not champagne is like... | ||
| In the beginning, I couldn't... | ||
| What is going on in my mouth? | ||
| They're popping everywhere. | ||
| You had never had anything carbonated. | ||
| No, so it was shocking. | ||
| It hurts me in the beginning. | ||
| It took a while. | ||
| Now I drink a few sips of Coca-Cola, but I couldn't do it for a long time. | ||
| I still don't drink sparkling water. | ||
| I don't know why anybody does that, to torture themselves. | ||
| It's very painful. | ||
| Really? | ||
| In your throat, yeah. | ||
| They're pounding you with something. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Wow, that's crazy. | ||
| What about alcohol? | ||
| People make alcohol illegally from corn. | ||
| In North Korea? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But they are like very... | ||
| Moonshine? | ||
| Like very strong. | ||
| Very strong. | ||
| Nasty. | ||
| And like very thick and not diluted at all. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| You get like the worst hangover from it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That kind of alcohol they drink. | ||
| I never knew what wine was. | ||
| So I went to Napa with my mom last year. | ||
| And they will keep telling us what do you smell like. | ||
| How do I know? | ||
| Oh, they're so crazy with all that wine tasting stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| It's like, I just heard about wine. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Oh, they're saying hints of nutmeg and oak. | ||
| Exactly, oak, yeah. | ||
| And they're smelling, yeah, it's the strangest thing in the world. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For someone who's coming from North Korea to go to, that might be the polar opposite of North Korea, is a Napa wine testing. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I was like, and a lot of people tried to get me Burning Man. | ||
| They wanted to take you to Burning Man. | ||
| I saw some pictures. | ||
| I was like, I don't think I'm ready for this. | ||
| I might go crazy there. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| Burning Man. | ||
| That might be the opposite. | ||
| Well, there's probably like multiple polar opposites of North Korea, but Burning Man is probably one of them. | ||
| But the fancy people of Napa. | ||
| That's gotta be up there. | ||
| So, somebody was treating me to this restaurant called Single Thread. | ||
| Single, like the French laundry, same restaurant in Napa. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| And then they did a tour at their, like, front yard farm. | ||
| They grow on their tomatoes and peppers. | ||
| And, like, my mom was like, we've been eating this every day in North Korea organic. | ||
| We did not know we were having like $500 a meal, you know? | ||
| Because here people keep telling us it's organic. | ||
| It's like everything was organic in our country. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Like what I want is a big portion. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But here people really obsessed like a North Korean lifestyle. | ||
| So yeah, my mom would never do this to me ever again. | ||
| She's like, you're told you don't ever do this to me. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| So your experience in South Korea, they're educating you. | ||
| Are you working? | ||
| Do you start working? | ||
| You're 17 years old, right? | ||
| So what did you do while you were there? | ||
| So I started, I learned, I mean, I remember this interrogation man was asking me, so what are you going to do in South Korea? | ||
| I was like, I don't know, maybe study? | ||
| Because I'm still young. | ||
| And he's like, why do you think you can study? | ||
| Because he thought I was a hooker in China. | ||
| Because all North Korean women are them. | ||
| And a lot of North Korean women ending up doing the same thing in South Korea because they don't even know how to turn on the computer. | ||
| They don't know even what Gmail is. | ||
| Creating an account online is an impossibility for them, who never grew out of it. | ||
| So they cannot get nice office jobs, right? | ||
| So the only job they can take is washing dishes. | ||
| They cannot become even the waitress because we have an accent. | ||
| And South Korea is very racist. | ||
| They discriminate people who have an accent. | ||
| So they hear the North Korean accent? | ||
| What is the difference? | ||
| What does it sound like? | ||
| Like, in South Korea, we say, 안녕하세요 is a hi, by North Korea, very formal. | ||
| More like, we call our friends, there's no friends in North Korea, comrade. | ||
| Comrade. | ||
| Only comrades exist. | ||
| So they know by the way you talk? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But is it an accent? | ||
| Are you saying the same words? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Are you saying them in a different way, or are you using different words? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Both of them different. | ||
| It's bigger difference than British and American English is that in North Korea, as I said, there's no bank. | ||
| So for me to understand credit card, what the heck, you build your credit. | ||
| They give you money, you pay back and debit card. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like saving. | ||
| I mean, for me to understand hedge fund... | ||
| It took 10 years. | ||
| I still don't get a lot of parts. | ||
| But that's the thing, like, we don't have the vocabulary. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, learning from South Korean to English is a lot easier. | ||
| Because I know what credit cards, you know, South Korean means and America means. | ||
| But, like, gay. | ||
| What is gay? | ||
| You didn't know what gay was? | ||
| Of course there's no dictionaries. | ||
| I remember in San Francisco a few years ago when I came to America after my speech somebody came and hugged me and I get really stiffened because some guy hugging me and he said okay don't worry baby I'm gay like what the heck is gay? | ||
| You didn't know what gay was? | ||
| How old were you when this was happening? | ||
| I was like 20, 20. Wow so there was no gay people in North Korea? | ||
| We don't know the word. | ||
| So now tell me about the sexual, non-binary, or like, whatever, how many pronouns that I found later. | ||
| I was like, this is a different planet. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| We don't know the concept. | ||
| And we don't know the concept of romance or love. | ||
| How do you expect us to know what gay is? | ||
| How do people find their husbands and wives and relationships in North Korea? | ||
| Usually government assigns a marriage or the family, like families, the parents to the assigned marriages. | ||
| So the South Koreans are racist against the North Koreans, even though you look very similar. | ||
| Can you tell a difference by looking at someone? | ||
| Height difference. | ||
| Height difference. | ||
| So we are... | ||
| Because of malnutrition. | ||
| Yeah, on average, three to five inch shorter, on average. | ||
| But the younger generation in North Korea gets shorter. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| Our grandpa was the tallest, and my father and me. | ||
| He keeps getting smaller and smaller. | ||
| South Korea is the opposite, keep going up. | ||
| And North Korea keeps getting smaller and smaller. | ||
| So in South Korea because of nutrition. | ||
| And so when you are learning, where do they have you stay? | ||
| I had to find this like thing called a one-feet room where like very cheap in Seoul. | ||
| So I was working at this like one dollar store in Korea. | ||
| So I was a teenager. | ||
| American age was 15 years old. | ||
| South Korea is a different way of counting age. | ||
| So you're going to be confused. | ||
| So in South Korea, North Korea, when you're born, the day you are born, you are one. | ||
| You're one when you're born? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And then January 1st, you're two. | ||
| So if somebody was born December 31st, they're one. | ||
| Tomorrow, January 1st, they become two. | ||
| Even when they're a baby? | ||
| Yeah, they're two days old and they're two years old. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah, so they count age like that. | ||
| So when you're born, you're one, and you gain age not on your birthday, January 1st, you gain one year. | ||
| This is only North Korea? | ||
| And South Korea both. | ||
| South Korea too? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So if you're born in December, You're one years old, and then in January, you're two, even though you're only a month old. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So I was born in October. | ||
| So I was born, I was one. | ||
| And then December, two months later, I became two years old. | ||
| So you were two years old when you were two months old. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So even though you were 17, you were really 15. Yeah, so America, that's why there was some confusion when I was giving interviews in the beginning. | ||
| When I escaped from North Korea, North Korean age, I was 15. So in South Korean press, I had to tell them Korean age. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Then it translates to English article. | ||
| So why was I 15 and 13? | ||
| Because the age counting is different. | ||
| So I arrived there at the American age I was 15, but South Korean age I was 17 years old. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So you're really 15 years old, American age. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you are working in a dollar store. | ||
| Yeah, the dollar store. | ||
| And so you're supporting yourself? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And learning? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I taught myself. | ||
| I took GED. So I crashed from one year to elementary, middle school, high school, everything within a year. | ||
| So that's how I went to university when I was 17 years old, American age. | ||
| Which is amazing, because a lot of people here don't even go to university when they're 17, and they're studying their whole life under normal circumstances. | ||
| But you were obsessed, right? | ||
| Yeah, I was obsessed. | ||
| You were obsessed. | ||
| You had gotten to the point where you were malnourished because you weren't eating, because all you were doing was studying. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| I ended up in the ER, somebody called, and they were like, you're malnourished. | ||
| So I'm still like 79, 80 pounds, but way smaller than this. | ||
| So right now you're 80 pounds. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But back then you were like... | ||
| I didn't have the scare. | ||
| I was too poor enough for the scare. | ||
| But you weren't even thinking about food. | ||
| You were just trying to learn. | ||
| And there was food that was expensive. | ||
| So it was, you know, in South Korea as a student working in the dollar store and studying, everything was expensive. | ||
| So it was, you know, I couldn't really afford three meals a day, obviously. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And so what were you studying and how were you doing it? | ||
| I was doing all the school requirement projects for GED, right? | ||
| Biology, physics, math, English, history, all this writing, everything. | ||
| But on top of that, I was reading books. | ||
| I read, like last I read like a few hundred books, but in South Korea, I was reading at least 100 books outside of the school curriculum books that you required to read. | ||
| So because I was, I mean, I did not know what Shakespeare is. | ||
| How embarrassing is that? | ||
| People talk about Romy and Juliet. | ||
| I'm like, who the heck is Romy and Juliet? | ||
| I remember I got to South Korea. | ||
| This guy, somebody called Michael Jackson died, right? | ||
| It's on TV and there's some funerals. | ||
| Like, who the heck is Michael Jackson? | ||
| And then sometime later, this guy called like Apple Steve Jobs died. | ||
| I'm like, is that a big deal that Steve Jobs died? | ||
| Steve Jobs. | ||
| Steve Jobs, oh. | ||
| So I don't know what Steve Jobs is. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So like, that's amusing why these people are so upset. | ||
| And like, obviously, there's like, some days later, Nelson Mandela dies. | ||
| Who's Nelson Mandela, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's gotta be so strange to be 15 years old and learning about the whole world, not knowing anything that's happening in other countries, other continents, not knowing anything about pop stars and world leaders. | ||
| No. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| When I came to America, I did not even know what Arab is or Hispanic is. | ||
| I have no preconception of race. | ||
| So that was great. | ||
| I don't know the difference. | ||
| For me, you guys are all strangers. | ||
| So I remember I had a talk in Charleston, South Carolina, or North Carolina, I don't know, Charleston, in a room. | ||
| For the first time I was there, and then like a thousand people, all white people, and they looked all the same. | ||
| I just couldn't believe they all looked the same to me. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| So one of the things that struck me is that you were so obsessed with learning that even when you went to sleep, you would play TED speeches. | ||
| And I listened to a lot of your podcast. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did you? | |
| I'm sorry. | ||
| No, it was wonderful. | ||
| I mean, even to this day, English, I learned even when I was 21, like, five years ago. | ||
| So it's still, like, a struggle for me. | ||
| So you were listening to podcasts, you were listening to NPR, you were listening to TED Talks, and what was it like for you to try to absorb all of this information at such a frantic pace? | ||
| It's amazing, first of all, that you read whatever you want. | ||
| The one point that changed me as a child was reading George Orwell's Animal Farm. | ||
| That was random. | ||
| I literally went up and picked up the book, the thinnest book. | ||
| And I thought, okay, it takes the least time for me to finish it. | ||
| And reading that book made everything sense to me because after North Korea, of course, I mean, learning what subways is challenging, right? | ||
| Learning what hamburger is is like a learning experience. | ||
| But learning how to trust again, I think that was the hardest thing. | ||
| Like, obviously, I don't trust guys. | ||
| I didn't, right? | ||
| And not only that, like they say, everything that you believed in North Korea was a lie. | ||
| They are dictators. | ||
| They are not gods. | ||
| They didn't love you. | ||
| They are dictators. | ||
| You've been lied to entire life. | ||
| And I was thinking, so how do I know what you're telling me is not a lie then? | ||
| Right. | ||
| That was so scary. | ||
| How do I trust ever again? | ||
| So only reading George Orwell's 1984 and the animal farm, that's when I understood what happened to my people. | ||
| Then you understood doublespeak and propaganda. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And then the price of silence. | ||
| The Price of Silence. | ||
| Until that point, I was blaming the dictator. | ||
| Why did you do that to us? | ||
| But I started thinking, what all those people, like my grandma, she knew life before Kim's. | ||
| She knew the alternative life. | ||
| Like in that animals, you see the revolution generation, then next, and the new ones don't even know what the world could be like. | ||
| So that's the thing, like when people say, why there's no revolution in North Korea? | ||
| I'm like, I mean, how do you fight to be when you don't know you're a slave? | ||
| It's impossible. | ||
| In America, everybody talks about how they're oppressed systemically. | ||
| You know people in North Korea don't even know they're oppressed. | ||
| If you know you're oppressed, you are not oppressed. | ||
| Not knowing is a true definition of oppression. | ||
| Unfortunately in this country they've made oppression a valuable thing. | ||
| Like if you can say that you're oppressed and people look for oppression that sometimes doesn't exist. | ||
| For sure there is oppression in this country and for sure there is racism in this country. | ||
| But it's become a commodity and it's become a commodity that you can claim and you can use it to bolster and fortify your personality and your personal status. | ||
| It's a real problem. | ||
| After all of that, I ended up at Columbia University in New York. | ||
| As you can see, I love learning. | ||
| I'm a very curious person. | ||
| I go there. | ||
| Truth doesn't matter. | ||
| It all matters to your feelings, how you feel. | ||
| Well you caught Columbia University at a terrible time, right? | ||
| Like what year was this? | ||
| 2016 I joined after Trump became president. | ||
| The worst time you could ever join, right? | ||
| Because this is like political correctness at the peak of its frenzy and also they feel justified because they feel they have this despot in the White House. | ||
| This terrible person who's going to destroy people of color and gay people and he's a this and a that and a homophobe and a racist and a sexist. | ||
| And so everything that you can possibly do to stop a person like that must be justified, including distorting truth. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It was unbelievable. | ||
| I couldn't believe it. | ||
| I came out, after four years later, scared more than ever. | ||
| What'd I say? | ||
| I was seeing myself censoring every day again. | ||
| And it was like I never thought America had to go censor myself. | ||
| What was it like, the contrast between learning in South Korea and then learning at Columbia? | ||
| So South Korea is like I was too little I knew about the world. | ||
| So everything they told me was truth. | ||
| Like everybody who I met was a teacher. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| In South Korea, my knowledge was so little. | ||
| I was like one year old, right? | ||
| Everybody told me, do you know Africa? | ||
| I mean, that's new. | ||
| What's Africa? | ||
| Do you know I've been to Australia? | ||
| What is Australia? | ||
| That's new. | ||
| Like, so everybody was my teacher in South Korea. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I never, like, questioned anybody. | ||
| Just everybody was my teacher. | ||
| Everything was new. | ||
| Yeah, everything was new. | ||
| And everybody taught me something new, for sure. | ||
| And coming to America, it was a bit different because by then I read, like, a lot of books. | ||
| And I was a bit advanced than when I was in South Korea. | ||
| So now going to Colombia, I mean, as soon as I tell them my view, they say, oh, you're brainwashed. | ||
| You're brainwashed. | ||
| They said you were brainwashed because of what? | ||
| What was your perspective? | ||
| So, my professor was arguing that, she was asking, so how to, the sensitivity training, why you gotta be sensitive to all findings, hidden oppression. | ||
| And what do you think about men holding a door for you? | ||
| And I was thinking, okay, that's a sign of decency. | ||
| Like, I hold a door for other people. | ||
| And she, no, that's a sign of toxic masculinity. | ||
| That's like how to show you the overpowering you. | ||
| Holding a door open is overpowering? | ||
| Yeah, it's a man when men does that. | ||
| What kind of class was this? | ||
| What was the subject? | ||
| I took a junior or something. | ||
| It was humanity class, of course. | ||
| And then she was like, I told her, no, I think that's sign of distancing. | ||
| That's over, like, you're brainwashed. | ||
| You're brainwashed? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How rude is that? | ||
| For me, a safe place meant where you can express your views. | ||
| Especially in the universe, you can be dumb to search for truth. | ||
| But here, in the name of safe space, no other than the mainstream view, you cannot have them. | ||
| But it's just so sad to me that there's such a lack of nuance because for sure some men will hold open a door for you because they want to pretend that they're stronger than you or they want to show you that they're better than you or they want to pretend they're being nice because they're trying to manipulate you. | ||
| Yeah, because there are people like that. | ||
| But also, some people will open the door to be polite because they're nice. | ||
| And to deny that is to deny reality and to deny nuance. | ||
| And that's what's really scary, is the sacrificing of nuance to promote a narrative that fits your needs. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I think if things are so complex, why humans do what is very complex. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And they lose entire complexity. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And also seeing that how this thing called white guilt or privilege was so new to me. | ||
| It's like, how are you guilty for what your ancestors did? | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's exactly what North Koreans did to us. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And I was like, why? | ||
| You didn't choose to be born as white. | ||
| I don't choose my birthplace. | ||
| It's again the same thing. | ||
| It's the commodity of accusations of finding people that are guilty for no reason of their own and may be guilty and they don't even know it. | ||
| Or maybe they have some hidden bias that they're not even aware of and they're going to search it out. | ||
| And so you have these paranoid people who are like, oh my god, am I secretly a bigot? | ||
| Am I secretly a racist? | ||
| And they'll reaffirm it with you. | ||
| And then in order for you to get points, you have to say, I will do better. | ||
| And then I'm going to be not just not racist, I'm going to be anti-racist. | ||
| And then they'll say, well, now you're a good ally. | ||
| And it's this really strange way of communicating. | ||
| And When we were complaining about it years ago, people would say, why are you complaining about this? | ||
| It's just a few random fringe people in universities. | ||
| And the people that I knew that were professors that were secretly terrified of this, they would talk about it. | ||
| This is like before Jordan Peterson started talking about this openly. | ||
| When they would talk about this, they would get chastised by the people in the university. | ||
| Because these people had a vested interest in continuing this type of thinking and behaving. | ||
| They had gold in this. | ||
| There was profit in this. | ||
| There were some social brownie points in this. | ||
| And they were going to continue to mine this vein of gold. | ||
| And when everybody was stepping in and talking about the dangers of this, people were saying, no, no, no. | ||
| This is the future. | ||
| This is progressive. | ||
| This is all about love and trust and anti-racism and all these things. | ||
| And then the people that were scared of it, they were sort of silenced in the universities until it started trickling over into corporations. | ||
| And then when it started trickling into corporations, people started getting genuinely scared. | ||
| And now we're at a point where I think the dam is broken and I don't know how they're ever going to put the genie back in the bottle. | ||
| I think that's the thing. | ||
| Initially I was thinking maybe only the academia is just crazy, right? | ||
| But then last year I spoke at TED and then these people who run social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, all these people come. | ||
| And I told them I had an engagement in Texas. | ||
| And they were saying, why do you go to Texas? | ||
| I was like, well, because America is America? | ||
| And I said, that's a Trump country. | ||
| I decided not to set a foot below a certain line of states that supports Trump. | ||
| And these are the people who run biggest media companies in the world. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| Especially ridiculous in a place like Austin, which is a progressive city. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then last year during the looting in Chicago, I was robbed by these three black women. | ||
| And robbing is okay. | ||
| Anybody can become a murderer. | ||
| Anybody can be a thief. | ||
| But just they happen to be a black woman. | ||
| And I have a nanny who is Muslim in the nation with a hijab carrying my stroller behind me. | ||
| And then I was trying to catch and call the police and these people on the street, the bystanders, white people, calling me I'm a racist, telling me that the color of skin doesn't make them a thief. | ||
| And I became... | ||
| Wait a minute, wait a minute. | ||
| So you got robbed by these three black women? | ||
| And I got punched. | ||
| You got punched and robbed? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so you called the police. | ||
| I tried to call them and they prevented me from not calling the police. | ||
| Who was trying to tell you not to call the police? | ||
| All the people on the street, on the Michigan Avenue. | ||
| People that saw the crime? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They said you're racist for calling the police? | ||
| Yeah, and accusing these girls of being robbers, right? | ||
| How does that make you a racist by accusing them of being... | ||
| Because I'm not black and they are black. | ||
| So calling a black person a thief is a racist, even though when they are a thief. | ||
| So, of course, I got punched. | ||
| I couldn't call the police. | ||
| And later I called. | ||
| Thankfully, these girls took my car to spend the money on the Saks. | ||
| And then police got the footage of them. | ||
| Saks Fifth Avenue? | ||
| Yeah, in Michigan Avenue in Chicago. | ||
| And then, of course, they are not going to prosecute these girls. | ||
| There's so much crime in Chicago. | ||
| They are not going to prosecute somebody who drops. | ||
| And that's when I was thinking, this country lost it. | ||
| Like, even in North Korea, if you see somebody, one small girl, being robbed and being punched by three big girls, they're gonna have the victim. | ||
| They're not gonna just out of nowhere scream that you're a racist. | ||
| So they were screaming you were racist because of the phone call that you were making? | ||
| No, because I heard their arm. | ||
| I told them, I'm not accusing you of anything. | ||
| I'm just going to call the police. | ||
| Can you wait here until the police comes? | ||
| You were holding whose arm? | ||
| The girl who robbed my wallet. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| So the girl who robbed your wallet, you were trying to hold on to her? | ||
| Yeah, because she was trying to run. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So I was trying to call the police, and then she was like, you're a racist. | ||
| A skin of color person doesn't make me a thief. | ||
| And then she was punching me here. | ||
| And this is after she already robbed you? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And then the people gathers. | ||
| And I remember there's a bus station. | ||
| There's one white mom with teenagers. | ||
| And I became the lifetime example for her to show her children how racism exists in America. | ||
| Like, me became a bigot and calling this black girl a thief. | ||
| So she didn't look at that kind of racist. | ||
| That's the problem that we have. | ||
| How many people were around you? | ||
| It's like, I don't know, some 20 people. | ||
| And they were like... | ||
| 20 people. | ||
| They're circling me around so I cannot call the police. | ||
| Circling you and calling you a racist even though this girl just stole from you. | ||
| These girls still ran away. | ||
| And they let the girls run away. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just go, go run, right? | ||
| They told the girls to run. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So that's when I started speaking out and now I became the enemy of the woke. | ||
| I got the North Koreans going on. | ||
| I became the Kim Jong-un's killing list few years ago. | ||
| And South Korean intelligence like you are on the kids killing list right? | ||
| And I'm like cool I expected that and now I'm Chinese like enemy Chinese regimes and now in America I got so many enemies. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's when you realize that this stuff spills over into real life, right? | ||
| That's when I knew that my son is American. | ||
| I have a son in America. | ||
| And on his birth certificate in Chicago, my father's birthplace is America, USA, and mom is North Korea. | ||
| Right? | ||
| On birth certificate, mom is North Korean. | ||
| And to me, giving him that American citizenship was bigger than winning the lottery. | ||
| I thought I did everything I could to give him a better life, making him American. | ||
| And seeing that last year in America, I was like, this is not a safe country. | ||
| Because he got half Asian who wants to work hard and we believe in meritocracy. | ||
| And he got half wife who's supposedly oppressive because of their... | ||
| So he's so screwed! | ||
| His cast is so low right now. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| It's sad. | ||
| It's truly sad. | ||
| Unfortunately, in some circles, it's true. | ||
| I think there's a lot of people that are waking up to this problem. | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| There are. | ||
| And a lot of it is because of people like you speaking up from a place of true oppression like North Korea in comparison to what's going on here where these privileged weirdos are attempting to distort reality for their own personal gain because that's what it is. | ||
| What do they gain from me? | ||
| I don't get it. | ||
| They gain social status. | ||
| If there's a narrative that's being pushed and they go along with it, people say, oh, you're on the right side. | ||
| You're doing the right thing. | ||
| You're saying the right words. | ||
| If you go against it, they'll chase you down and yell at you. | ||
| You will be on the outside. | ||
| You'll be an outcast. | ||
| People are cowards. | ||
| They're terrified. | ||
| Even if they know something is true, they're terrified of saying it because they don't want the blowback for it. | ||
| So you see a lot of that going on in this country. | ||
| And you see a lot of people Unfortunately, over this last year and a half because of the pandemic, you see a lot of people that are more than willing to sacrifice personal freedoms in order for a little bit of safety and a little bit of security. | ||
| And they'll give up those freedoms to the government, which will never give them back to you. | ||
| When the pandemic is gone and you've given them vaccine passports and allowed them to track your whereabouts and allowed them to contact trace you, that's not going to go away. | ||
| They're going to use it for other reasons. | ||
| They're going to find other reasons to control you and keep you scared and keep you compliant so they can suck resources out of gigantic corporations that are funding their campaigns. | ||
| That's what they're doing. | ||
| And they're going to continue to do that if we let them. | ||
| And we're going to slide further and further away from freedom and democracy, freedom and the ability to express yourself openly. | ||
| And all of these things, people are willing to give up. | ||
| If it supports their side. | ||
| And that's what's so terrifying. | ||
| They don't understand. | ||
| If you give the government vaccine passports and if you let them censor social media posts that you don't agree with, the problem is, then what happens if someone who's far worse than Trump gets into office? | ||
| Because that's probably going to happen, unfortunately. | ||
| We're going to have this teeter-totter back. | ||
| We've divided this country so thoroughly that there's going to be someone that's a far left person that makes people so angry that they're then willing to vote for a far right person. | ||
| And when that far right person comes into office, they will have access to all of those powers that you so willingly gave up. | ||
| Because you wanted to stop this idea that you didn't agree with. | ||
| And they've done this in this horribly short-sighted way. | ||
| And they've done it in the name of the woke. | ||
| They've done it in the name of progressivism and wokeism and all this stupid shit that is this social contagion that's running through this country right now. | ||
| It's like, to me, I've never been to American public school system, like, until universities, that, like, nothing has been more dangerous than government to individuals, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Think of us, I mean, molecular 60 million Chinese people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Stalin, Hitler, they drive us to go to the war. | ||
| And our biggest threat is governments. | ||
| I mean, big governments. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And it's so unbelievable how people just keep wanting for someone to take care of things for them. | ||
| People are scared and they get delusional. | ||
| They have this bizarre idea that someone's going to come along that has power that's a benevolent dictator. | ||
| It's going to take care of things in the right way. | ||
| And you just give them the power. | ||
| Give them the power to shut these people up. | ||
| Freedom of speech is not the end-all be-all. | ||
| Maybe it's more important to just say what I want you to say. | ||
| It's just strange. | ||
| The short-sightedness is so strange because you hear people on CNN. It's supposed to be the news. | ||
| And they're espousing these ideas. | ||
| And they don't recognize that if you give that power up to the people that are in charge currently, the next people are going to have it too. | ||
| This was the thing about the Patriot Act that people were so terrified of in this country that were aware of the consequences. | ||
| They were saying, well, Obama's never going to do this. | ||
| Obama's not going to be in office forever. | ||
| He's going to be in office for eight years. | ||
| You love Obama and you trust Obama. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| Look what came after Obama. | ||
| Trump. | ||
| And now you have a dead man. | ||
| Now you have Joe Biden who doesn't know what the fuck is going on. | ||
| Well, what are you gonna have after that? | ||
| Well, you're probably gonna have someone on the right, and it's gonna be someone that is a reaction to what you have on the left. | ||
| I mean, this is what we do in this country. | ||
| We go left, right, left, right. | ||
| And we pretend, well, this guy has our interest in mind. | ||
| Ah, he fucked it up too. | ||
| Let's go with someone who's polar opposite. | ||
| Ah, he fucked it up. | ||
| And you give him eight years each side, or four years each side. | ||
| And it just keeps getting worse. | ||
| And for whatever reason, people are constantly willing to give up powers. | ||
| They're constantly willing to ignore the core principles that this country was founded on, which is freedom and liberty. | ||
| And you need those things. | ||
| You need to be able to express ideas and debate them in full view of the world so that we get to see whose ideas are correct and whose ideas are incorrect. | ||
| But in this society and today, You have people on the left, which are supposed to be the progressive people, the open-minded and intelligent people, supposedly, the people that are educated, supposedly, and they're the ones who are willing to censor people. | ||
| It's bizarre. | ||
| It's very, very strange. | ||
| Very strange. | ||
| I'm not a Christian, but one day I was like, Asking if there's God, right? | ||
| He says everything has a sort of reason. | ||
| Why does North Korea exist? | ||
| Makes no sense. | ||
| Why does it exist? | ||
| Why does China exist? | ||
| Or why does the Communist Party, I should say, exist? | ||
| Why do they have the power to run the country that way? | ||
| It's because of that delusion, ignorance in the people, to not learn from history. | ||
| I don't know, do you think, do we have hope in this country? | ||
| Or how do we get out of even this? | ||
| I'm worried. | ||
| I'm worried because it just seems to be sliding further and further in this direction of totalitarianism. | ||
| And these people are willingly giving up these rights because they believe that that's going to support their side. | ||
| And they think they're on the right side of history, they're on the right side of the truth, they're on the right side of Facts and kindness and anti-racism, whatever concepts that they are willing to subscribe to that they think that giving up these rights will promote. | ||
| It's strange. | ||
| It's very strange because it's an anti-racism. | ||
| It's an anti-objective perspective. | ||
| They're not looking at all of the – and we're so polarized with the right and the left in this country. | ||
| We're so polarized with Republicans versus Democrats in this country that there's no middle ground anymore. | ||
| The center is this weird place where no one wants to exist because they don't want to be attacked by people on either side, particularly people on the left. | ||
| It was funny the other day when I was after Jordan Peterson interview about he out of nowhere like randomly asked how did you like Colombia and it's like it was terrible and then that wasn't we never discussed that we were going to talk about that and then Fox asked to ask me to have an interview about it so I did but then all my friends in the like liberal Why did you have to go on propaganda channel Fox to talk about the work culture in America? | ||
| And I was like, I'm still waiting a call from New York Times. | ||
| If they call me about workism in this country and danger of it, I'm going to talk to them. | ||
| Wait a minute, the New York Times has never called you? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I mean, they only called me when I was criticizing Trump about meeting Kim Jong-un without preconceptions. | ||
| They never wanted to talk to you about your experience in North Korea? | ||
| No. | ||
| Only when I was talking about Trump, they wanted me. | ||
| Who has tried to talk to you about this? | ||
| Some British newspapers still do, like Daily Telegraph. | ||
| They still do want me to talk about China, but whenever in American media, it's whenever I talk about against Trump, that's when I meet their narrative. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's the only time they want to talk to you? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that's the thing. | ||
| But the thing is, you know, Fox never accused me, why did you get on New York Times and criticizing Trump? | ||
| Therefore, we don't want you. | ||
| But the people in the liberal mainstream media, why did you get on Fox? | ||
| So I'm like, there are people too. | ||
| They're both newspapers. | ||
| So it is unbelievable. | ||
| I just... | ||
| There's a big thing that's happening now where liberal people who are saying things that are outside of the narrative that you hear from CNN or MSNBC, they're going on like the Tucker Carlson show. | ||
| And people are furious at them. | ||
| But they're saying all the same things that they would say on MSNBC or CNN. They're not saying right wing talking points. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| They're saying things that they believe in, whether it's Glenn Greenwald or Brett Weinstein or whoever these people are that go on these shows and talk. | ||
| These are progressive people, but they're being chastised and they're being attacked. | ||
| It's very strange. | ||
| It's really dark. | ||
| I'm happy to talk to anybody. | ||
| I want to go on CNN and talk about this, but they just don't give me a platform to talk about it. | ||
| They don't just call me. | ||
| Well, it's in support of this narrative that's occurring now where it's okay to, air quotes, de-platform people. | ||
| This is the idea. | ||
| You're de-platforming people off social media that say things that you don't agree with, like Alex Berenson, who used to work for the New York Times. | ||
| He's critical of the way the government and the FDA and everyone is handling COVID, right? | ||
| Or the CDC or the World Health Organization. | ||
| And so he's got a lot of stuff that he talks that's critical about the COVID response in this country, critical about the vaccine effectiveness, critical about all sorts of different things in the healthcare system. | ||
| And they removed him from Twitter for a week. | ||
| And he's not I mean, he removed him from Twitter recently for discussing this. | ||
| The actual CDC's reports on the effectiveness and ineffectiveness or whatever on on covid vaccines. | ||
| It's very strange, you know, and you can't mean maybe they think he speaks in a way that's inflammatory or in a way that's causing people to distrust certain institutions. | ||
| But then then oppose him, oppose him, debate him with the way to answer speech that you don't agree with. | ||
| Is to counter it with what you think is a more sound argument. | ||
| It's not remove someone from social media. | ||
| But everyone's like, yes, he should be deplatformed. | ||
| You see people from the left just calling out, willingly calling out for censorship. | ||
| It's a disturbing trend. | ||
| And I don't think they understand that it's going to come for them. | ||
| Because censorship is a monster that is never full. | ||
| And it's gonna come for you. | ||
| It's gonna find, it's gonna, it'll keep pushing the boundaries and go further and further left until you can't be woke enough. | ||
| And then it's gonna come for you. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I think that's the thing. | ||
| In North Korea, right, even though one top janitor in the meeting few years ago, he was falling asleep. | ||
| And that afternoon he get executed. | ||
| And this guy was working for this system entire his life to supporting the system. | ||
| But he was tired. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And his uncle, right? | ||
| He did everything to make Kim Jong-un to succeed a line and be secure. | ||
| He got executed. | ||
| Was the uncle, did they think that the uncle was planning to overthrow Kim Jong-un? | ||
| No, that was an accusation. | ||
| It was just an accusation. | ||
| Was it true? | ||
| No, it wasn't. | ||
| So it was every time when they do it, like that thing, they get killed. | ||
| What was the thing that happened recently where Kim Jong-un was missing and they said that they thought he was sick? | ||
| Was that a trap? | ||
| No, it was CNN got some source from CIA saying Kim Jong-un was having some surgery and he was gone away for like a long time, disappeared, and didn't show up in the very important meetings. | ||
| And Kim Jong-un does have health issues at this point. | ||
| What kind of health issues? | ||
| I mean, he's over 330 pounds and he's like 5'7". | ||
| And he gained weight very rapidly. | ||
| And he drinks like 13 bottles of wine like a night. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And he has insane parties every single day. | ||
| So he's not healthy. | ||
| He does not know how to control himself. | ||
| So recently Kim Jong-un lost weight dramatically in one month. | ||
| But people say that's like, oh, is he becoming healthy? | ||
| No, he just became very, very ill. | ||
| So they are preparing who's going to succeed him afterwards now already. | ||
| How old is he? | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's 36. In Korean years or American years? | |
| American years, I believe. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| But it doesn't seem like there's any hope for North Korea to get out of their current situation. | ||
| As long as China, the CCP is there, it's not going to be out. | ||
| Whoever gets in next, China maintained exactly the same thing. | ||
| So without changing the Chinese Communist Party, we never get to change North Korea. | ||
| But what's crazy is that Chinese Communist Party recognized that they had a flaw in their own system and they allowed free market to run through China and it's only made China stronger. | ||
| But that's the thing also. | ||
| We thought economic freedom is going to bring the political freedom. | ||
| But that's the unique thing about freedom. | ||
| Unless you fight for it, you don't get it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| They don't have political freedom. | ||
| Like right now, the censorship, the social credit system. | ||
| If you don't have the highest credit, you cannot even buy a bus ticket to see your mom in the countryside. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You cannot even get on an airplane and bus and public transportation. | ||
| Well, that's what comes next after vaccine passports. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like what you say on social media. | ||
| They're going to read your text like what China does already and give you the social credit and people rate you and you are forever controlled. | ||
| I think to me is that this is the last time that humanity ever tried to be free as individuals. | ||
| Being an individual is such a unique thing to me, that I can be different than you. | ||
| It's the people talking about comparing, the biggest difference that people have between individuals. | ||
| The difference you and I have is unthinkable. | ||
| And the difference that I have with my mom is unthinkable. | ||
| That's the beauty of America, that you can be different. | ||
| You can be an individual. | ||
| But now you cannot be an individual. | ||
| That's what North Korea did. | ||
| So when the North Korean regime criticized me, they said she was, as a young girl, very individualistic and ambitious. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| That was the worst thing that came up with. | ||
| Because in North Korea, that's the worst criticism to give somebody. | ||
| So they did not know that thing was embraced here. | ||
| So North Korea propaganda channel on YouTube, you can see they say... | ||
| And this is another amazing thing about YouTube is that... | ||
| I talk about women getting sold in China. | ||
| And those old videos get demonetized. | ||
| Because, I mean, some others meet the YouTube guideline. | ||
| And they're letting North Korean regime to have their propaganda channel on YouTube. | ||
| So they give a platform to dictatorship. | ||
| But they do not want to give a platform to the people who is fighting this human rights justice fight. | ||
| And this is a thing, like one video I made about the Second Amendment. | ||
| It was like my thoughts on the second, I thought like if every Hong Konger had a gun in their hands, Chinese would not take them over like that. | ||
| 75% of the population went on the street demanding they want to be independent. | ||
| Right? | ||
| One country, two systems, they wanted that. | ||
| But China took it over because these people did not have any self-defense. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Imagine North Korea, even if 20% of population had guns, We would assassinate them. | ||
| We would not let our children die like that. | ||
| So to me, you can't have crimes with the guns. | ||
| Accidents happen. | ||
| But it's very important when people have the ability to defend themselves from the governments when they become corrupt. | ||
| And of course, sharing this is just one perspective. | ||
| You get blocked. | ||
| So this is a country that I am in now. | ||
| I have to fight for freedom of speech in America. | ||
| And I thought my journey to be freedom ended. | ||
| The Second Amendment is a very contentious thing in this country and one of the interesting things about it is that people always want to cite mass shootings. | ||
| But what they don't want to talk about with mass shootings is pharmaceutical companies. | ||
| They don't want to talk about the fact that most, I mean most, of the people that are committing mass shootings are on some kind of psychotropic drugs. | ||
| Most of them. | ||
| And they want to conveniently ignore that. | ||
| Whether they're disassociatives or SSRIs or anti-anxiety medication or anti-psychotic medication. | ||
| And it doesn't mean that that medication is causing them to do that, but they don't even want to address it. | ||
| It never even gets discussed. | ||
| The only thing that gets discussed is the actual weapon itself. | ||
| The ability to do that is so beyond most people. | ||
| the ability to kill random strangers just in horrific acts of violence most people are not capable of doing that but most people want the ability to defend their family if someone's trying to break in their home and kill them or steal from them or you know or kidnap a child or whatever it is when you see what's going on right now in Australia Australia confiscated all their guns in the 1990s | ||
| And I'm not saying that they should raise up against the government, but there's some crazy shit going on right now where the army is trying to keep people inside in Australia. | ||
| And one of the things that I read was that as they're doing this, only nine people have died from COVID over the last... | ||
| See if that's true. | ||
| How many people have died recently from COVID in Australia? | ||
| Because they have full-on government lockdowns where the government is flying helicopters over the streets and go back indoors. | ||
| You're not allowed to be outside, which is crazy. | ||
| It's like this disease doesn't even transmit well outside. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| Being outside and getting vitamin D from the sun is probably one of the best things you can do. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I mean like babies that born last year and during the pandemic, like my son is like three over three. | ||
| They didn't go outside the house for a year and a half. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I told their mom, your baby might die from not getting a son once even in their life than getting a COVID and die. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's not a dangerous thing for children. | ||
| But the thing is like not going outside for a year and a half is actually very dangerous. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Zero deaths. | ||
| Zero deaths. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| Okay, so in July there's a couple. | ||
| So you have zero deaths from literally from October 20th. | ||
| October 20th you have zero deaths until July 11. Yeah, July 11, you have one death, and you got a little spike there. | ||
| What's that spike? | ||
| How many people is that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
One or two, actually. | |
| Oh, that's crazy. | ||
| So I think it's nine deaths total since September, and they have a full-on government lockdown where the military is locking down the streets. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Testing has gone up, but... | |
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| But the deaths have gone down. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| It's like, folks, people die from heart attacks in staggering numbers every year. | ||
| You're not... | ||
| Making the government force people to exercise and put down cheeseburgers. | ||
| I mean, we have to decide. | ||
| They say, oh, well, the heart disease is not infectious. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But the actual cause of death is pretty staggering. | ||
| The numbers of people that are dying from heart attacks and cancer from preventable decisions that people make that actively wind up costing the public untold numbers of I mean, what's the amount of money that's the burden, the financial burden on the healthcare system because of people that are obese, because of heart disease, because of cancer? | ||
| It's crazy! | ||
| And a lot of it is lifestyle choices, and the government does nothing to stop those deaths. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| Did you read that, like, on Guardian, that talking about fitness is a sign of white supremacy now? | ||
| Fitness? | ||
| Fitness. | ||
| Fitness. | ||
| Sign of white supremacy? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I know a lot of black people that are really fit. | ||
| They need to talk to David Goggins. | ||
| He's a white supremacist. | ||
| He doesn't even know it. | ||
| Well, that's just people looking for things to be upset about and to call things racist or sexist or homophobic or whatever or bigoted. | ||
| They're just looking for things to target. | ||
| But this is in North Korea. | ||
| In North Korea, when they said, this is our sworn enemy, death Americans, doesn't mean much. | ||
| There are so many words that doesn't mean anything. | ||
| And now in America, it's the same thing. | ||
| Everybody's Hitler. | ||
| Everyone's a Nazi. | ||
| Everyone's a racist. | ||
| And I'm a racist. | ||
| I'm a bigot. | ||
| I'm a Nazi now, too. | ||
| But I didn't even know what the Nazi was. | ||
| The problem is they're just trying to shut people down by using those words and those words are horrible. | ||
| If someone is an actual racist and you call them a racist and everybody else sees that they're a racist, it's a horrible accusation. | ||
| So they're using that so freely that they're distorting the meaning of it and it doesn't work anymore. | ||
| It's like crying wolf. | ||
| The old expression of the boy who cried wolf, the story. | ||
| That's literally what's happening right now in this country. | ||
| It's very strange. | ||
| I know. | ||
| This is what people told me. | ||
| This is new to them, too. | ||
| Because I came here in 2016, January. | ||
| And I thought this was always what America was like. | ||
| And I go, what was the country that I dreamed of far away? | ||
| It's still here. | ||
| The ideals that built this country are still here with a lot of people. | ||
| A lot of people that support freedom and the freedom of expression and the ability to speak freely and to debate thoughts openly. | ||
| All that stuff still exists with a lot of people here, but there's a lot of people that... | ||
| Are willing to give that up. | ||
| They're willing to give that up if their side can win. | ||
| And it's very confusing. | ||
| Because it's a mixture of toxic tribalism and short-sightedness mixed with ideology. | ||
| And it's a disturbing moment in time. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| So how do you, what do you think, how can we oppose Chinese regime? | ||
| It's infiltrating everywhere. | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| You know, when you see John Cena from the WWE apologizing for calling Taiwan a country, and you're like, holy shit. | ||
| LeBron James. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This guy talking about justice all day long in America. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what do we do with China? | ||
| Well, they're corrupted by money. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| The problem is China. | ||
| Look, when that movie, The Fast and the Furious came out, I think the numbers, I'm roughly saying the numbers, but I think the numbers were, the box office weekend was $160 million. | ||
| $136 million of it was from China. | ||
| Yeah, it's terrifying. | ||
| So when he had to apologize and said, I'm so sorry, I made a mistake, I was really tired, all he did was call Taiwan a country. | ||
| I mean, it wasn't something where he said, you know, China's a terrible place, it sucks, I hate the Chinese people. | ||
| He didn't say anything like that. | ||
| He didn't say anything like that. | ||
| All he said was he called Taiwan a country. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It's crazy that people are willing to give a country like China that much power because of money. | ||
| But that's the reality of this world that we live in. | ||
| We don't manufacture anything in America anymore. | ||
| I mean, all these woke people tweeting on iPhones that are made at Foxconn in China where they have nets around the building to stop people from jumping off the roof because there's so many people that commit suicide that they have to have fucking nets. | ||
| And the fact that people don't make that connection, they don't understand how crazy that is, that you're literally supporting this company that is making people work so much for so little and they're so desperate and so sad that they're jumping off roofs in numbers so high they have to put nets on them. | ||
| No one even brings it up. | ||
| Convenient. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Strange. | ||
| It's a strange form of hypocrisy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think, I mean, I don't think capitalism is a problem. | ||
| Because then people say, oh, because of the capitalism makes people greedy, right? | ||
| Because people in capitalist countries are way better than people in communist countries that I've ever seen. | ||
| And way less corrupt. | ||
| I think they look at the worst examples of capitalism, and there are horrible examples of capitalism, and there are people that are willing to do anything for money. | ||
| I mean, you've seen that with people like John Cena apologizing for China, right? | ||
| I mean, that's the kind of thing where that is a form of capitalism that you're seeing apologizing to the Chinese Communist Party But it really is about capitalism. | ||
| It's about his ability to make money and the chance that he might lose money or that is His film might not be distributed over there anymore anymore. | ||
| It's like a real problem. | ||
| He had to apologize for you're seeing that with Like these subprime mortgages that caused the housing collapse You're seeing that when you see corruption in the stock market or when you see any kind of savings and loans corruption. | ||
| And there's financial corruption and stealing money and the corporate influence that they have on politicians and lobbyists and special interest groups. | ||
| That's all capitalism run amok, right? | ||
| But the bare bones of it The idea that there's many parts of this country that are still a meritocracy. | ||
| There's many parts of this country where you can work hard and do better for yourself and accomplish things and provide a service that people enjoy and they give you money and the harder you work and the better your product is, the more you profit from it. | ||
| And that gives people incentive to do well. | ||
| The foundation of that still exists. | ||
| We just have to be very careful that we don't give that up. | ||
| We have to be very careful that we don't give that up and give the power over to the government. | ||
| Because the government is ultimately, they're human beings. | ||
| And people, human beings, when they have unchecked power, it's very dangerous. | ||
| And it has been throughout history. | ||
| The default position, if you go throughout history and you look at all of the governments that existed until America really came along, it's dictators. | ||
| All of it. | ||
| It's always been the case. | ||
| It's always been one group that's in power. | ||
| The best way to be in power is to be ruthless and to attack anytime you're challenged and confronted and punish people in open air. | ||
| Execute them publicly. | ||
| Any dissent gets shut down instantaneously. | ||
| Censor any speech that doesn't go along with the speech that the government is projecting. | ||
| That's always been the standard. | ||
| That's been the standard throughout human history. | ||
| Every king, every emperor, they all did the same thing until the United States. | ||
| And there's people in the United States that are willing to give that up. | ||
| They're willing to give that up because they want their side to win. | ||
| And it's terrifying. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's terrifying. | ||
| Because once you give it up, you're never getting it back. | ||
| Unless we go to war again. | ||
| Unless we have a civil war in this country. | ||
| And then if we have a civil war in this country, get who's going to sneak in? | ||
| China. | ||
| China's going to sneak in and they're going to take over all sorts of corporations by buying them out. | ||
| They're going to take over all sorts of politicians by influencing their campaigns and changing the laws that they're willing to support and changing the amendments and the different ways that we govern the country. | ||
| They're going to change the way people vote. | ||
| They're going to change all kinds of things. | ||
| And this is just... | ||
| It's almost what the founding fathers somehow or another knew that this could happen. | ||
| When they put in place the Bill of Rights and all these amendments, when they were putting in the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, all these amendments, they were doing it because they understood human nature. | ||
| They understood what has happened in the past. | ||
| When people have organized, what has happened in the past when free speech has been stifled? | ||
| What has happened in the past when we allow someone to censor us and we allow someone to dictate what gets discussed and what doesn't get discussed? | ||
| It's very dangerous. | ||
| I mean, the only thing at Columbia entire four years that I hear is that the only way to solve the problem that we have is tearing down this foundation of this country. | ||
| Because the Constitution itself is a bigotry written by white supremacists. | ||
| So that is, I mean, I don't know, that's every conclusion of every class that I took. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| What's the alternative? | ||
| The alternative is socialism, and they always say that socialism hasn't been done correctly. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But the problem with socialism is what Jordan talks about all the time. | ||
| Jordan Peterson, he says, you cannot have an equality of outcome. | ||
| And it's true. | ||
| You can't. | ||
| It's very dangerous. | ||
| North Korea tried. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They tried, and one guy became a god. | ||
| And everybody don't even know they are slaves now. | ||
| And you can manipulate the truth to fit the narrative that allows you to stay in power and keep utilizing the tools that allowed you to get into power in the first place. | ||
| And then... | ||
| Make it no different than every other government that's ever controlled the people throughout human history. | ||
| We have a chance to not have it like that in this country. | ||
| That's why when people oppose universal restrictions, when people oppose widespread government powers to do things, like that was one of the big oppositions, one of the big things that people opposed about lockdowns one of the big things that people opposed about lockdowns was not that we shouldn't be careful with vulnerable people during a pandemic. | ||
| The problem is you're giving the government the ability to decide what is essential and what is not essential. | ||
| Who can work and who can't work? | ||
| What chances you can take and not take? | ||
| And they're not being honest about all sorts of aspects of the disease. | ||
| They weren't even willing to discuss whether or not this disease possibly was leaked from a lab until long after Trump was out of office. | ||
| And even to this day, liberals are terrified of bringing that up because they think that if you bring it up, somehow or another it can connect you to Trump or Fox News or you've said something that Fox News said. | ||
| What if Fox News was right? | ||
| Do you care about the truth or do you care about supporting your side? | ||
| Do you care about your tribe? | ||
| And more people are terrified of being rejected by their tribe than they are of the truth not getting out. | ||
| You should be terrified of lies. | ||
| You should be terrified of the truth not getting out. | ||
| You don't know what the landscape is unless you're allowed to assess and analyze all the aspects of life. | ||
| All of them. | ||
| And people are terrified of doing that today. | ||
| And a lot of it is because of social media. | ||
| Because there's so many people that just live on social media all day long. | ||
| And they're on there just constantly going to war in the worst way possible with text messages. | ||
| Get triggered by every single thing they see. | ||
| Didn't they talk to you about that in Colombia too? | ||
| They tell you about things that triggered you? | ||
| So before the class, they send you email and say, oh, in this material, we're going to talk about maybe racism or rape or any kind of oppression, whatever it is. | ||
| If it hurts, it triggers your feelings. | ||
| Do not even do the reading and don't even come to class. | ||
| And before the class, they announce, even at any point during this class, it triggers your feelings. | ||
| Leave the class and don't even tell me what you feel. | ||
| And the people are emotionally not stable, so they bring the comfort dogs in the classroom. | ||
| They bring dogs? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So dogs are licking around the people because they need the comfort from the animals, right? | ||
| They cannot even sit in the... | ||
| How many dogs? | ||
| Several dogs that are per class, right? | ||
| What if the dogs start fighting? | ||
| They bark and they lick and they chew. | ||
| And I asked one day, like, can I take my baby? | ||
| He was going to take a nap in the straw. | ||
| I said, no. | ||
| So they said no to the baby, but it's okay with the dogs. | ||
| No babies, but you can have a dog. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It's my emotional support baby. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| What if I said that? | ||
| I get triggered easily, so I get a baby. | ||
| I wonder. | ||
| Why can't you do that? | ||
| Why can't you say that? | ||
| But this is so madness. | ||
| The problem is your baby's half white, and so your baby might be racist. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| The baby might be a part of the patriarchy. | ||
| But what is self-loathing? | ||
| Why are they committing suicide by themselves as a civilization? | ||
| In North Korea, we have a gun next to our head. | ||
| But in this country, you have freedom to learn and read and think. | ||
| Why are they doing this? | ||
| Think about human nature. | ||
| We chose Hitler. | ||
| We voted him. | ||
| People did that. | ||
| You know, there's an expression that I've said on this podcast many times, but I'll say it again, is that hard times create hard men. | ||
| Hard men create soft times. | ||
| Soft times create soft men. | ||
| Soft men create hard times. | ||
| We are now around soft men and hard times. | ||
| We're in the time of toxic masculinity, right? | ||
| Where you could be toxically male. | ||
| And then if you're suppressing masculinity, you're going to bring on hard times. | ||
| Masculinity doesn't mean you're mean. | ||
| It doesn't mean you're angry. | ||
| It means strength. | ||
| It means... | ||
| Discipline. | ||
| It means the ability like you need a military and if you don't think you need a military, you need to go and pay attention to the rest of the world because there's militaries all over the world that are doing horrific things. | ||
| If you don't have a military in this country that can combat that, And at least act as a deterrent to them doing things, you're going to get taken over. | ||
| That's what's happened. | ||
| I mean, look what's happening to Hong Kong, right? | ||
| I mean, this is a city that essentially doesn't have a military, and they were a British colony for a long time, and they gave it back over to China, and they were kind of acting like they were independent until recently. | ||
| And during the pandemic, they've ramped it up, and it's gotten even worse. | ||
| It's exactly what we talked about. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| You can't be weak. | ||
| And in this country, being weak is thought of as a virtue. | ||
| Jordan Peterson has a really interesting way of looking at this and he said it to me once and it made a lot of sense. | ||
| He said, people think that you should be weak and you should be Docile. | ||
| And then you should be a pacifist. | ||
| He goes, no, you should be a monster. | ||
| He said you should be a monster. | ||
| You should be ruthlessly ambitious and then learn how to control it. | ||
| And it's that old expression. | ||
| It's better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war. | ||
| It's an old expression, but it makes sense because it doesn't mean that you can't be kind if you're strong. | ||
| But it does mean you can't be strong if you're weak. | ||
| If you're weak, you're fucked. | ||
| And there's a lot of weak people in this country right now that are trying to take control. | ||
| And they're gathering up all the other weak people and they say, yeah, let's all be weak together. | ||
| And they're willing to embrace all sorts of ideas that have been disproven. | ||
| Not just disproven, that have caused the deaths of untold millions of people. | ||
| And Maoist China, and Stalinist Russia, and It's crazy. | ||
| And they're short-sighted. | ||
| And they're short-sighted because in the short term, they want their tribe to win. | ||
| And there's so many weak people that'll join along with them. | ||
| There's so many simple-minded dullards that just want to promote their tribe. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, they encourage you to be triggered. | ||
| They encourage you to be weak, right? | ||
| When you go, they try not to expose you to any reality. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| Universities, they scare you, and you are never getting a real sense of the world. | ||
| I mean, the fact that they're triggered by hearing the word rape, what they're going to do when they get raped, they're never going to revive again afterwards. | ||
| Well, the disturbing thing is that when you're learning things, if you're going to learn, you're going to be exposed to some horrific truths. | ||
| Like, if you're going to learn about Stalin, you're going to... | ||
| I mean, I've talked to my friend Lex Friedman when he was talking to me about some of the experiences that his grandmother's people had when Stalin was running Russia. | ||
| And people were eating their own children. | ||
| I mean, that's... | ||
| It's the same sort of thing. | ||
| They were starving these people to death in order to keep control of them. | ||
| And the results were horrific. | ||
| If you don't hear that, if you don't hear that in all of its terrifying, brutal detail, Then you're not going to be aware. | ||
| And even then you're not going to really be aware. | ||
| Like you're aware. | ||
| You are absolutely aware of what can happen when things go horrifically wrong because you were born into a society that was horrifically wrong. | ||
| You were born into this terrifying dictatorship. | ||
| That exists right now. | ||
| While you and I are sitting here in Austin, Texas, talking, drinking coffee, having a good old time, there's people in concentration camps for no fault of their own in a country where you were born. | ||
| And if that doesn't get discussed, people don't understand. | ||
| If you say, oh, are you triggered by this? | ||
| Well, you don't have to hear it. | ||
| You're not going to learn. | ||
| We're not going to expose these things. | ||
| We're not going to learn. | ||
| And even then, just the abstract concepts, the way you're discussing it, It's resonating. | ||
| I understand what you're saying, but I don't know what the fuck you experienced. | ||
| I'd have to go there. | ||
| I would have to live your life. | ||
| You would have to physically experience it in person in order for it to really get into your head. | ||
| And we're not even allowing kids to read words that fuck with their heads. | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| It's almost you are so capable. | ||
| And by going to this school system, they make you almost a handicap. | ||
| They disable you. | ||
| They change your potential. | ||
| And as you say, we're born as warriors. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| But they make us incapable of anything. | ||
| And the biggest problem you have is somebody calls you wrong pronoun. | ||
| And this triggers them. | ||
| This makes them depressed. | ||
| And this is the thing they think is the biggest injustice they've ever seen. | ||
| Yeah, we've weaponized people being offended too. | ||
| When people are offended, they get a massive amount of extra attention. | ||
| All they have to do is yell about it and scream about it and talk about how horrible it is and everyone is like, oh my god, I hear your truth. | ||
| I feel you when you're saying this and it makes them special. | ||
| You're encouraging people to act up instead of encouraging people to change their perspective and to see things for what they are or to look at the way other people see things. | ||
| To look at it from someone else's viewpoint, from someone else's life, from someone else's learned experiences. | ||
| You know, it was really funny, like, while I was writing my book, my agent was telling me, my editor was telling me, like, Yeonmi, you're traumatized. | ||
| So you need to go see somebody called a therapist, right? | ||
| So I was like, what the heck is a therapist? | ||
| And then they're like, oh, you gave, like, pay her, like, she's normally $700 per hour, but she's going to give you a discount, so per hour, $20. | ||
| $700 an hour? | ||
|
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Really? | |
| That's what they get? | ||
| Yeah, in New York City, but then, like, she's going to give me a discount raise, so $200 per hour. | ||
| Basically, go talk to her how hard my life was. | ||
| And then I was like, the fact that I know what trauma is, what PTSD is, the fact that there are people like right now, 25 million of my people don't even know what trauma is. | ||
| Right. | ||
| This is ridiculous. | ||
| And I was like, I mean, what is the point of me then surviving all of that? | ||
| Now I'm just going to complain how hard it was. | ||
| What is the point of me surviving any of it? | ||
| So someone can tell you you're gonna be okay. | ||
| It's okay to have these feelings. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| It's okay to have these feelings. | ||
| Yeah, it's okay to hate men. | ||
| It's okay to be bitter, right? | ||
| It's okay to be complaining and blaming everything else. | ||
| Did you go to therapy? | ||
| Did you do it? | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| But I mean, 80% of my investment bank are consulting friends in your go-to-therapy. | ||
| And I suppose that they should. | ||
| They can afford it. | ||
| It's a thing. | ||
| But the fact that I couldn't fathom in the beginning that you need to go to therapy to survive in Manhattan. | ||
| I think people need to be able to talk to people about things to try to work through them. | ||
| And I think a lot of people feel like they can't find someone in their life that they trust enough with their true feelings and their real thoughts. | ||
| And that's a sad testament to the kind of relationships that a lot of people have. | ||
| A lot of friendships and romantic relationships that people have in their life. | ||
| That they can't talk openly about the real live experiences. | ||
| We have so much versions of ourselves inside us. | ||
| I can see why people become the guards of concentration camps. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| Humans are not initially good or bad. | ||
| It's all about how we shape them. | ||
| When you were talking about experiencing dead bodies in the street but feeling nothing or feeling that boy with his intestines hanging out his back and feeling nothing. | ||
| That's because of the way you grew up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's the thing, like, humans are most adaptive, suspicious. | ||
| We are so adaptable. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's also good and bad, is we can adapt. | ||
| We can adapt to the concentration camps, right? | ||
| We can be the guards and not feel guilty about it. | ||
| And I think not talking about that, not talking about the evil, or what we are capable of the darkness. | ||
| That's like everything in North Korean news is wonderful things. | ||
| Now in this country, because they say there's no room for hate speech, they want everything to be happy flowery words. | ||
| But the thing is, we have dark side. | ||
| No matter what you do, they're gonna be murderers, they're gonna be rapists. | ||
| Even we don't talk about rape. | ||
| Rape is gonna happen. | ||
| So getting rid of these people and deplatforming and canceling them, we don't get rid of actual problem. | ||
| So in a way, it's better for us to talk about our full nature, what we are actually capable of, right? | ||
| We can be so resilient, compassionate beings, or we can be completely like an asshole, like not caring about anything at all like Kim Jong-un. | ||
| And we have to learn why people think differently than us. | ||
| And the only way you can do that is by talking to them. | ||
|
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Exactly. | |
| And there's a lot of those people that think in a way that you find problematic. | ||
| They can be converted. | ||
| They can be talked to. | ||
| But not if you treat them like they're the enemy and cast them aside and block them from communicating. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| I would rather know if Hitler exists. | ||
| When we do the genocide, I wouldn't know about it. | ||
| Would you not want to know about it? | ||
| I wouldn't know if somebody's planning that. | ||
| There are people in the past where on Facebook they're posting, I'm going to commit a murder in some church. | ||
| They post on Facebook. | ||
| Isn't it much better for the FBI to know that than not giving them the platform so we don't know who's planning the mass murder right now? | ||
| Right. | ||
| When do you feel like, because you had this time in your life where you could see that boy with his intestines hanging out on his back and it didn't bother you, you didn't feel anything. | ||
| When do you think you started to feel things? | ||
| With my son. | ||
| Because the hardest thing wasn't like learning about the system or none of that. | ||
| Even China, like, I was always numb. | ||
| Like even when I was raped, I was like looking at myself, someone's roof, like someone's in the corners and like, Oh, that's not me. | ||
| How can it be happening to me? | ||
|
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Right? | |
| I was completely ignoring that. | ||
| In North Korea, you're so numb in your brain. | ||
| When I had my son in America in 2018, that's when I was feeling things. | ||
| And I was so grateful that I felt even sadness. | ||
| You were worried that you wouldn't feel it? | ||
| I was very worried. | ||
| Feeling something was very challenging. | ||
| And giving birth to my son brought a lot of new feelings to me. | ||
| And of course the compassion is one of them. | ||
| I want the world to be a beautiful place for him. | ||
| I actually care about the humans. | ||
| I don't know, this part is like this is edited the first time that I knew what love was and unconditional love was. | ||
| I saw that you had Rick Doblin here. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I had one of those experiences like unplanned. | ||
| Nobody knew. | ||
| MDMA? Is that what it was? | ||
| In California. | ||
| But until then, people told me, oh, I love you. | ||
| I was like, if you don't sleep with me, rape me, want something, why would you love me? | ||
| I never understood that unconditional love between humans. | ||
| Never felt safe. | ||
| You never felt love with friends? | ||
| No. | ||
| I learned love later in life, so I knew the word, but I did not actually ever felt it. | ||
| So when I was on that, for the first time, all I felt was love and zero, zero fear. | ||
| And that sounds like, I know that when these people say they love me, actually this is how they feel actually. | ||
| Is it possible to love somebody unconditionally? | ||
| And after that I became pregnant because I wasn't able to get pregnant. | ||
| From all my trauma I had, I had three IVF cycles at 22. And after that medicine, something relaxed in my body, I was able to conceive and I had my son. | ||
| I think a lot of people could benefit from one of those experiences. | ||
| I think it would change a lot about the way we look at life, the way we look at each other, and it would just eliminate a lot of the anger that people have. | ||
| A lot of the misplaced anger. | ||
| Unproductive, unhelpful, corrosive, dangerous anger for no reason. | ||
| There's so much of it. | ||
| It's so confusing. | ||
| And so much of it is based on our own insecurities and our fear that other people won't love us back. | ||
| And if you do one of those experiences with other people and you're all in it together, you realize, wow, so the world could be like this all the time? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| The world can be so different, isn't it? | ||
| Everything can be understood. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| In the center of everything, there is love. | ||
| And I did not know what love was the entire of my life. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| When people ask me, if you can be on North Korean television, what would you tell them? | ||
| I think I would tell them I love you. | ||
| Because they never heard that before. | ||
| They might not know even what I'm saying. | ||
| What the heck is she saying? | ||
| She loves me, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I think that's the thing. | ||
| I did not know what it was. | ||
| But everything that we do for love, we have children for love, right? | ||
| Why do we even live everything? | ||
| The point of life is like love. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I did not know that until I had a point. | ||
| So, I mean, that's why I cannot be bitter. | ||
| I love men. | ||
| Like, my son is a man. | ||
| My father was a man. | ||
| Like, even though a lot of experiences I had with a man was negative, that I was able to overcome it, right? | ||
| But I think a lot of people cannot overcome that trauma because they are just not able to make that connection. | ||
| It's one of the terrifying lessons of being a human being is that there can be wonderful, loving experiences at the same time where horrific things are happening somewhere else. | ||
| And you know better than anybody alive because of the country where you were born. | ||
| That's happening right now that there's a place where there is no love and everyone's afraid. | ||
| And there's just this horrific regime that's running this country and keeping people starving. | ||
| And it's happening at the same time as iPhones and the internet and electric cars and all the wonderful things that we're experiencing here in America. | ||
| It's the worst example of human life and it exists simultaneously. | ||
| I know it's a thing. | ||
| I thought if I can show them, tell them what's happening, I thought something's gonna change, right? | ||
| But of course not. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| And there's a reason why these problems keep existing. | ||
| But the thing is, I saw that one of the interviews we did with Elon Musk, right? | ||
| I have to be hopeful because what's the alternative? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| What is the alternative to being hopeful? | ||
| Nothing else. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| That's why even though I don't know people are going to now listen to me and help me to raise awareness and condemn Chinese regime to stop sponsor Kim Jong-un. | ||
| I don't know that's going to happen. | ||
| But I got to be hopeful. | ||
| That's the only thing we have as a humanity. | ||
| We got to be hopeful. | ||
| And we can do so much when we keep that hope alive. | ||
| It's just terrifying that it's ignored by the powers that be in not just this country, but many countries. | ||
| That they're not all just standing up and saying that this is an atrocity that's happening inside of our lifetime. | ||
| We're doing nothing about it. | ||
| It's the thing, like, I have no problem when people are going, like, at the Canada goods store, putting the, like, blood on them, like, in New York, Soho, right? | ||
| I remember when I was in South Korea. | ||
| This is, like, on TV, there's a national concert with the celebrities and singing and crying. | ||
| I thought like, okay, big disaster happened, right? | ||
| Why are these people all in motion and crying? | ||
| And it was a fundraising for the dogs and puppies and animals. | ||
| People eating animals? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| It was just like their environment, how shelter, like environment is hard for these animals. | ||
| How it's not clean, how they don't, you know. | ||
| Okay, animal shelters, right. | ||
| So they were crying and I was initially shocked. | ||
| Like, what do you mean animals have rights? | ||
| Right? | ||
| As a human being, I did not know I had the rights as a human. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| And what the F, really? | ||
| Like, animals, puppies have rights here? | ||
| And then, on top of that, I go meet so many people, the philanthropists, and they are willing to give millions of dollars to save animals and dolphins and little ducks that don't die from Canada goose. | ||
| But they do not want to rescue these girls who are raped every single day. | ||
| And somehow, I think this anti-human sentiment, I don't know even what that is. | ||
| The fact that we care about animals is a beautiful thing, isn't it? | ||
| We care that something cannot speak for themselves. | ||
| They are vulnerable. | ||
| And there are people, a lot of people cannot speak for themselves right now. | ||
| As you said, being free is an exception. | ||
| This is a very unusual thing. | ||
| Even to this age, like 4 billion people living under some authoritarian dictatorship countries. | ||
| So what we got is really unique. | ||
| And people somehow refuse to speak for another human being. | ||
| They would rather speak for a little puppy. | ||
| And it's very the hypocrisy that doesn't make sense. | ||
| Like if someone's suffering that bothers you, why the human suffering doesn't bother you? | ||
| I think it's so big and so insurmountable that they don't feel like they can do anything about it, and so they're scared. | ||
| And so they don't speak about it, because to actually do something would require an enormous effort. | ||
| To do something to change the regime of North Korea. | ||
| Like, what does a person who lives in Berkeley, who loves to support social justice causes, how is that person going to affect the dictatorship that's happening right now in North Korea? | ||
| They can tweet about what's happening that China does to North Koreans. | ||
| Yeah, they're scared to even tweet about China. | ||
| They'd rather tweet calling, you know, some white guy racist inherently or some, you know, this person or that or that person or this and come up with some sort of, you know, insults for people that don't agree with what they agree with. | ||
| It seems too big. | ||
| It seems like they can't put a dent in it, so they leave it alone. | ||
| But that's a lie, though, they are telling themselves. | ||
| Little thing, even little tweet would help. | ||
| I think a lot of people don't even know about it. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| Like, the mainstream doesn't give a platform to the people who want to challenge the CCP. Right. | ||
| So, I mean, these girls who were captured by Taliban, ISIS, few hundred thousand people were oppressed gets Nobel Peace Prize, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There are like 25 million people oppressed. | ||
| When did you hear anybody world recognizes from North Korea or anything for this cause? | ||
| What did you think when Trump met with Kim Jong-un? | ||
| Well, with Trump, that's a thing. | ||
| It seems like Trump got everything to do wrong or everything got to be right, right? | ||
| I mean, everybody, nobody's perfect. | ||
| I do think Trump was really right on calling out China. | ||
| He was the first president to actually talk about to Xi Jinping that you got to fix North Korea because you enabled it. | ||
| That was the first president ever mentioned China with North Korea. | ||
| That was great. | ||
| But sitting down with Kim Jong-un without any preconcession. | ||
| Because think about it. | ||
| Inside North Korea, there are military powerful men. | ||
| And they think if Kim Jong-un is backed by American president, they're not going to start a coup or do anything about it. | ||
| So for Kim Jong-un was a very good opportunity to legitimize his power within a country, inside North Korea to consolidate that power. | ||
| Because until that point, even Xi Jinping didn't invite Kim Jong-un to China over, even once. | ||
| So Kim Jong-un was more like this young man, nobody accepted. | ||
| But Trump wanted to meet with Kim Jong-un, so Xi Jinping invited Kim Jong-un to over first before Trump meeting. | ||
| So that's how he went to China for the first time, meeting Xi Jinping. | ||
| Because he knew that Trump was going to meet him. | ||
| So, I mean, of course, China won't have influence beforehand. | ||
| So right before the meeting, he went to China first. | ||
| And until that point, China didn't even invite Kim Jong-un. | ||
| It was too low for them. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, they were like a little brother of the puppet state. | ||
| So they would not treat Kim Jong-un like a leader. | ||
| He didn't even get the invitation to visit China. | ||
| Is there a real possibility that someone could overthrow him from inside the country? | ||
| It's impossible because China is behind it. | ||
| China is fully behind. | ||
| You know, China lent this land for 200 years, 50 years on this mine towns, mining, blah, blah. | ||
| Everything is lent to China. | ||
| So North Korea is not Chinese. | ||
| And the labor is free for the Chinese to use. | ||
| So everything is now Chinese in North Korea. | ||
| It's China, basically. | ||
| Nothing is North Korea's anymore. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| These mines, everything is land like 200 years. | ||
| That's the least they have. | ||
| I mean, how many generations did that change in 200 years' time? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So it's China. | ||
| North Korea is China. | ||
| There is really no distinction at this point. | ||
| And China is very clever in the way they have all these interests in all different parts of the world and in Africa and all these different minds. | ||
| It's like all through economic power. | ||
| That's how they disable them and enslaved to their ideology and then they cannot speak up and that's happening to American. | ||
| Even Ivy League schools get funding from China. | ||
| So all these researches, like papers, they don't do things that challenge their narrative. | ||
| And the media, Hollywood, they need money from China, so they're not gonna do anything about it. | ||
| So that's how slowly they infiltrate every sector that we have right now. | ||
| You know, part of me is very upset that more people have not talked to you. | ||
| Well, because I'm a liar. | ||
| Because I'm a liar. | ||
| I'm the propaganda puppet of the West. | ||
| CIA trained me. | ||
| That's what they say? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| So when I was starting giving interviews in the beginning, they're like 15 and 13, the age difference that I did not know, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| And then the mountain that I climbed, they went to Google Maps somewhere and checked the altitude. | ||
| So basically, silent altitude I should not have said it was a mountain. | ||
| It was a high hill. | ||
| But as a child, I don't know what altitude is a hill or a mountain. | ||
| I still don't know the difference. | ||
| So I said the mountain, then she's alive because what she climbed was a hill. | ||
| So they tried to get you on a technicality with that, with the altitude of the hill, and then also on a technicality with the age, which you explained. | ||
| So she's trying to change her neck. | ||
| But one thing I did hide was that I trafficked in China. | ||
| Because in South Korea, still girls, virginity is everything. | ||
| And I wasn't planning to come to America, right? | ||
| I didn't even have a right to come here. | ||
| I was South Korean. | ||
| I wanted to have a child. | ||
| I wanted to have family. | ||
| And if I say I was raped two years by a human trafficker, who's in any normal same family gonna take me? | ||
| So I had to lie that I said I was okay. | ||
| My mom only raped and she covered me. | ||
| And when I was writing my book, I knew, I mean, of course, Penguin is not stupid. | ||
| They took a legal team, the people with me, and then got the live recording of people who cross desert with me, who grew up with me, everybody. | ||
| So they got the live recording in the legal team. | ||
| So that's why after the book, there's not even one single accusation, because they were going to sue afterwards, like we have entire evidence. | ||
| So it was all everything before the book. | ||
| And also the thing is, I mean, a lot of Maoists, Leninists, they sympathize with the North Korean regime. | ||
| So many people hate America. | ||
| And I'm here saying America is the best country in human history. | ||
| Of course, I now became the symbol of this bigotry. | ||
| But I'm just shocked that more people in America are not talking to you. | ||
| More of these mainstream outlets don't want to hear your story. | ||
| Because of China peace. | ||
| My story is very inconvenient. | ||
| Because I'm a slave. | ||
| Actually, I was a slave. | ||
| And I was bought by Chinese and exploited by them. | ||
| So how do they cover my story without including China peace? | ||
| It's an impossibility. | ||
| I can't believe that that's keeping people like the Washington Post or the New York Times. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course it is. | |
| I know, but it's hard to believe that this isn't just a human story, a staggering human story, an amazing human story in terms of the education that you've had, the experiences that you've had, the way you've changed and evolved. | ||
| Having escaped from North Korea into China and then to South Korea and then eventually to America and experienced all these things from this very unique perspective. | ||
| It's an incredible story. | ||
| But no, because they expect me to become now a victim, right? | ||
| Because they expect me to hate all the men and the system. | ||
| But I do not tell, I'm not a victim. | ||
| I'm very grateful. | ||
| My book starts that there are two things I'm grateful for, that I was born in North Korea and that I escaped. | ||
| So I don't feed the narrative they are trying to portray in any way. | ||
| That's very disappointing to me that there is a narrative that they want you to portray because your actual story is a very human story and it's a contemporary story that's very important when you look at the way the world is being run. | ||
| Certain parts of it, like North Korea or like China, this is from a person like yourself, no one else is going to be able to tell that story. | ||
| Your story, it's impossible for anyone that hasn't experienced it to tell. | ||
| It has to be you. | ||
| Yeah, but that's why I'm grateful despite all that, you know. | ||
| North Korea did everything they could to character assassinate me. | ||
| Because that's what they have the biggest hackers. | ||
| And they have the armies of hackings and go harass people and hack the Sony studio. | ||
| Remember when they made a movie? | ||
| So they exactly the same thing. | ||
| They were reaching out to Penguin. | ||
| My editor is like, we're gonna blow Penguin if you write this book. | ||
| And there was so much harassment. | ||
| And internally, we were so scared. | ||
| Penguin people were like, we don't want to lose our job. | ||
| We don't want to blow up. | ||
| They don't even talk about in the public that you get attacked from North Korean regime. | ||
| North Koreans diplomat in London was reaching out to my editor to sit down and meet them in person. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| To stop the book. | ||
| And of course, everything is written on media. | ||
| That's all believable, right? | ||
| Everything is written, then people just believe whatever it was. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's now that's what North Korea is so good at. | ||
| Like creating this narrative and character assassin people. | ||
| And eventually it doesn't work, they're gonna kill you directly. | ||
| And that's what they did. | ||
| Initially they were like threatening me and stopped talking about it and then I still did. | ||
| So they put entire three generations of my family on that North Korean propaganda channel. | ||
| And they made them to denounce me. | ||
| And they were gone. | ||
| So... | ||
| They're gone? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because I still have agents in North Korea and they all disappeared. | ||
| So they were all killed? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Consentation game means death. | ||
| Even including my neighbors. | ||
| And that was so unbelievable. | ||
| I mean, what's the crime of being a neighbor? | ||
| They were not even that close to me. | ||
| But these neighbors, the fact that they knew me, that was their crime. | ||
| And this video is on YouTube. | ||
| So they went after everyone you knew? | ||
| Yeah, everybody I knew. | ||
| Everybody I knew. | ||
| In my entire town and my father's side and mother's side, entire generation and my cousin that I raised and Yeah, that's the thing. | ||
| I knew this is an evil regime. | ||
| But I somehow thought, how can they be threatened by 13 years old? | ||
| I'm not even sharing how North Korea develops their missile program. | ||
| All I'm saying is what the UN says. | ||
| There is a public execution. | ||
| You see from satellite photos, you see. | ||
| And there's 33,000 North Korean defectors made to South Korea. | ||
| They talk about starvation. | ||
| And then that we get captured in China and being sold, and there's documentaries about it. | ||
| So I'm not even sharing the first-class information. | ||
| I just didn't think they were going to be threatened. | ||
| I just really didn't think that I was going to be threatening to them at all. | ||
| They don't allow any dissent. | ||
| What do you think is going to happen with that country? | ||
| Like China, they can last a lot longer. | ||
| They might last longer than us. | ||
| They might beat us. | ||
| Because... | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| As you said, people become soft and they do not know how to be resilient, right? | ||
| And also, as you said, people here surrounding such a goodness of the world. | ||
| They don't recognize, they don't even know how evil can be a man be like, a regime can be like. | ||
| They don't know how cruel these regimes are. | ||
| They don't even recognize the darkness they see. | ||
| So I think because our inability to recognize this crime and darkness, I think they might outlast us. | ||
| So that is my biggest fear. | ||
| So you have a genuine concern that this country could collapse? | ||
| I mean, every civilization collapsed. | ||
| Persians, I mean, how many civilizations before us came? | ||
| Right. | ||
| The Greeks, the Romans. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So there shouldn't be any exception to Western civilization if we do not appreciate and guard this civilization, the alignment that we got. | ||
| Especially if you pay attention to what's going on right now. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And especially the way it's emanating from the universities, which is what's teaching and, you know, putting ideas in the minds of young people who will then go on to run things. | ||
| This foundation is corrupt. | ||
| The only way that is to us to change is getting rid of the Western civilization, getting rid of American constitution. | ||
| I'm not saying like every class you set up at Columbia, that's how they end the class, right? | ||
| Every problem goes going back to root, getting rid of white men. | ||
| They are the problem. | ||
| They are the source of every single problem that we have. | ||
| They mess up Africa, they mess up Asia, they mess up every single thing. | ||
| And like one class I remember at the end of senior year, taking the music class, right? | ||
| It should be the least political. | ||
| Western music is a core, one of the core curriculum. | ||
| And the professor asking, who has a problem studying Western music? | ||
| And of course, everybody raised their hands. | ||
| Because of these bigots like Mozart and Beethoven, they silence all the minority groups. | ||
| We have to listen to these bigots right now. | ||
| And it's the fact that Columbia having this core is like a shame. | ||
| So I'm like, I'm studying in the West. | ||
| What's the problem studying music in the West? | ||
| Right? | ||
| Well, not only that, you're studying musical history. | ||
| You can't deny the history. | ||
| You can't deny that these people made this music. | ||
| It doesn't absolve anyone of any crimes that they committed, if they committed crimes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But to deny it all. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Reading Jane Austen is like a hidden oppression that we don't see because she was living in a time of white colonialism and white supremacy. | ||
| So the fact that you read Jane Austen is you get subconsciously brainwashed. | ||
| This is how you need to look for hidden oppression. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| It's so disturbing. | ||
| It's so real, though. | ||
| I mean, that's really what's happening right now. | ||
| And people are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to have their children indoctrinated into these ideas. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know where we're going to end up in 10 years. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know either. | ||
| But I really enjoyed talking to you. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| You're a very, very brave person. | ||
| And I think that your message is... | ||
| It's very important. | ||
| And it's also... | ||
| There's no one else who can tell it. | ||
| It has to be someone like you who's gone through what you've gone through and I think it's huge for the world to hear. | ||
| It's incredibly significant and I hope more people want to talk to you. | ||
| No, I think I'm so grateful is that in the desert, when I was crossing the desert, my father died a few months from a cancer he had in the concentration camp. | ||
| And he died and I had nobody to call, right? | ||
| He died in the morning, 7 a.m. | ||
| Waiting till night so I can bury him in the middle of a mountain. | ||
| And I couldn't even cry because if you cry, people are going to, neighbors are going to hear. | ||
| So I'm numb, sitting next to the dead body. | ||
| And I was thinking, wow, being a human means nothing. | ||
| Even if a dog dies, you go to your neighbor and ask them, your dog died. | ||
| And in that desert, that's the thing, I wasn't afraid of dying. | ||
| I was thinking, nobody knew that I existed. | ||
| Nobody knew that I came to this earth and left in this middle of desert. | ||
| And that's the thing. | ||
| Nobody knows that North Koreans exist. | ||
| Nobody knows our stories. | ||
| So I think the fact that people know my father and my people is the biggest comfort for me. | ||
| You know, I think that's not even given to us. | ||
| They don't know we exist. | ||
| So I'm so grateful that you gave me this opportunity. | ||
| Well, I'm very grateful that you came here just to talk about it and to tell people. | ||
| And I'm glad a lot of people are going to hear this. | ||
| Thank you. |
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