Hyeonseo Lee Quotes

I hope you remember that if you encounter an obstacle on the road, don’t think of it as an obstacle at all… think of it as a challenge to find a new path on the road less traveled.

Leaving North Korea is not like leaving any other country. It is more like leaving another universe. I will never truly be free of its gravity, no matter how far I journey.

This is when I understood that we can do without almost anything – our home, even our country. But we will never do without other people, and we will never do without family.

Kindness toward strangers is rare in North Korea. There is risk in helping others. The irony was that by forcing us to be good citizens, the state made accusers and informers of us all.

After years in the Chinese workforce, I had developed an emotional attachment to money. My earnings were my hard work and long hours; my savings were comforts deferred.

Kind people who put others before themselves would be the first to die. It was the ruthless and the selfish who would survive.

As many discover, freedom – real freedom, in which your life is what you make of it and the choices are your own – can be terrifying.

One of the tragedies of North Korea is that everyone wears a mask, which they let slip at their peril.

I had to learn Mandarin. And I had the best teacher – necessity. You can study a language for years at school, but nothing helps you succeed like need, and mine was clear, and urgent.

Dictatorships may seem strong and unified, but they are always weaker than they appear.

It was the dilemma all three of us had. Every choice we made cut us off permanently from someone we loved.

I will never truly be free of its gravity, no matter how far I journey.

I wanted to belong, like everyone else around me did, but there was no country I could say was mine. I had no one to tell me that many other people in the world have a fragmented identity; that it doesn’t matter. That who we are as a person is what’s important.

He’d valued his dignity more than his own life.

I was already hiding beneath so many lies that I hardly knew who I was any more. I was becoming a non-person.

Dictatorships may seem strong and unified, but they are always weaker than they appear. They are governed by the whim of one man, who can’t draw upon a wealth of discussion and debate, as democracies can, because he rules through terror and the only truth permitted is his own.

This is the first time I will tell my story in English, a language still new to me. The journey to this moment has been a long one.

In her world, the law was upside down. People had to break the law to live. The prohibition on drug-dealing, a serious crime in most countries, is not viewed in the same way – as protective of society – by North Koreans. It is viewed as a risk, like unauthorized parking. If you can get away with it, where’s the harm?

North Koreans who have never left don’t think critically because they have no point of comparison – with previous governments, different policies, or with other societies in the outside world.

One of the main reasons that distinctions between oppressor and victim are blurred in North Korea is that no one there has any concept of rights. To know that your rights are being abused, or that you are abusing someone else’s, you first have to know that you have them, and what they are.

North Korea is an atheist state. Anyone caught in possession of a Bible faces execution or a life in the gulag. Kim worship is the only permitted outlet for spiritual fervour. Shamans and fortune-tellers, too, are outlawed, but high cadres of the regime consult them. We’d heard that even Kim Jong-il himself sought their advice

In North Korea the only laws that truly matter, and for which extreme penalties are imposed if they are broken, touch on loyalty to the Kim dynasty.

History lessons were superficial. The past was not set in stone, and was occasionally rewritten.

Behind the bluster, I sensed fear. Dictatorships may seem strong and unified, but they are always weaker than they appear. They are governed by the whim of one man, who can’t draw upon a wealth of discussion and debate, as democracies can, because he rules through terror and the only truth permitted is his own.

Not only did I believe that humans were selfish and base, I also knew that plenty of them were actually bad – content to destroy lives for their own gain. I’d seen Korean-Chinese expose North Korean escapees to the police in return for money. I’d known people who’d been trafficked by other humans as if they were livestock. That world was familiar to me. All my life, random acts of kindness had been so rare that they’d stick in my memory, and I’d think: how strange.

Among the 27,000 North Koreans in the South, two kinds of life have been left behind: the wretched life of persecution and hunger, and the manageable life that was not so bad. People in the first group adjust rapidly. Their new life, however challenging, could only be better. For the people in the second group, life in the South is far more daunting. It often makes them yearn for the simpler, more ordered existence they left behind, where big decisions are taken for them by the state, and where life is not a fierce competition.

She liked to dress well because she thought this made up for plain and ordinary looks. In fact she was prettier than she knew.

Suicide in Korean culture is a highly emotive means of protest. The regime regards it as a form of defection.

She’d said nothing about keeping this a secret, but I knew I would never mention it to my mother or my father or anyone. I was too young to know that talking about it is exactly what I should have done.

I ate noodles every day. After a week, I wanted a change and rang Kim to ask him the English word for bab. ‘Rice,’ he said. ‘Lice,’ I repeated. ‘Not lice, rice. They’re two different things. You must ask for rice.’ ‘Got it. Lice.

The school year started in September, with a long vacation in the winter, not the summer, due to the difficulty of keeping the schools warm in North Korea’s harsh winters. My kindergarten had a large wood-burning stove in the middle of the classroom and walls painted with colourful scenes of children performing gymnastics, children in uniform, and of a North Korean soldier simultaneously impaling a Yankee, a Japanese and a South Korean soldier with his rifle bayonet.

It was an aspiring neighbourhood that retained a faint edge of slum, typical of Shanghai. Pensioners in Mao-era padded jackets would sit on doorsteps playing mah-jong, oblivious to the Prada-clad girls sweeping past on their way to work.

In truth there is no dividing line between cruel leaders and oppressed citizens. The Kims rule by making everyone complicit in a brutal system, implicating all, from the highest to the lowest, blurring morals so that no one is blameless.

It was at school in Hamhung that I received my initiation into ‘life purification time’, or self-criticism sessions. These have been a basic feature of life in North Korea since they were introduced by Kim Jong-il in 1974, and are the occasions almost everyone

I’ll do whatever it takes. Humans are selfish and care only for themselves and their families. Am I any different?..... Not only did I believe that humans were selfish and base, I also knew that plenty of them were actually bad – content to destroy lives for their own gain.

It is mandatory from elementary school to attend public executions. Often classes would be cancelled so students could go. Factories would send their workers, to ensure a large crowd. I always tried to avoid attending, but on one occasion that summer I made an exception, because I knew one of the men being killed. Many people in Hyesan knew him. You might think the execution of an acquaintance is the last thing you’d want to see. In fact, people made excuses not to go if they didn’t know the victim. But if they knew the victim, they felt obliged to go, as they would to a funeral.

Her job at the local government bureau also meant that she had access to farm produce managed by her office.

My kindergarten had a large wood-burning stove in the middle of the classroom and walls painted with colourful scenes of children performing gymnastics, children in uniform, and of a North Korean soldier simultaneously impaling a Yankee, a Japanese and a South Korean soldier with his rifle bayonet.

In North Korea, suicide is taboo. Not only is it considered gravely humiliating to the surviving family members, it also guarantees that any children left behind will be reclassified as ‘hostile’ in the songbun system and denied university entrance and the chance of a good job.

Kindness toward strangers is rare in North Korea. There is risk in helping others. The irony was that by forcing us to be good citizens, the state made accusers and informers of us all. The episode was so unusual that my mother was to recall it many times, saying how thankful she was to that man, and to the passengers. A few years later, when the country entered its darkest period, we would remember him. Kind people who put others before themselves would be the first to die. It was the ruthless and the selfish who would survive.

Sometimes, at the dinner table, my mother would say to my father: ‘I’m so happy I met you.’ And my father would lean towards me and whisper, loud enough for my mother to hear: ‘You know, if they brought ten truckloads of women for me and asked me to choose someone else, I would reject them all and choose your mother.

the historian Andrei Lankov put it, a regime that’s willing to kill as many people as it takes to stay in power tends to stay in power for a very long time.

From an early age I helped my mother clean them. We used a special cloth provided by the government, which could not be used for cleaning anything else. Even as a toddler I knew that the portraits were not like other household items. Once, when I pointed a finger at them, my mother scolded me loudly. ‘Never do that.’ Pointing, I learned, was extremely rude. If we needed to gesture towards them, we did so with the palm of the hand facing upward, with respect. ‘Like this,’ she said, showing me. They had to be the highest objects in the room and perfectly aligned. No other pictures or clutter were permitted on the same wall. Public buildings, and the homes of high-ranking cadres of the Party, were obliged to display a third portrait – of Kim Jong-suk, a heroine of the anti-Japanese resistance who died young. She was the first wife of Kim Il-sung and the sainted mother of Kim Jong-il. I thought she was very beautiful. This holy trinity we called the Three Generals of Mount Paektu. About once a month officials wearing white gloves entered every house in the block to inspect the portraits. If they reported a household for failing to clean them – we once saw them shine a flashlight at an angle to see if they could discern a single mote of dust on the glass – the family would be punished.

Saying Kim Il-sung’s name, for example, and forgetting to affix one of his titles – Great Leader, Respected Father Leader, Comrade, President or Marshal – could result in serious punishment if anyone reported the offence.

I was too young not to believe every word. I believed absolutely that this heroic family had saved our homeland. Kim Il-sung created everything in our country. Nothing existed before him. He was our father’s father and our mother’s father. He was an invincible warrior who had defeated two great imperial powers in one lifetime – something that had never happened before in five thousand years of our history. He fought 100,000 battles against the Japanese in ten years – and that was before he’d even defeated the Yankees. He could travel for days without resting. He could appear simultaneously in the east and in the west. In his presence flowers bloomed and snow melted.

My father’s job gave him access to goods most other people didn’t have. We ate fish or meat with most meals. I did not know then that many North Koreans ate fish or meat so seldom that they could often remember the dates on which they did so – usually the birthdays of the Leaders, when extra rations were distributed.

Songbun is a caste system that operates in North Korea. A family is classified as loyal, wavering or hostile, depending on what the father’s family was doing at the time just before, during and after the founding of the state in 1948.

The banjang was usually a woman in her fifties whose job it was to deliver warnings from the government, check that no one was staying overnight without a permit, and to keep an eye on the families in her block.

His family and hers had good songbun, which made their position in society secure. Songbun is a caste system that operates in North Korea. [...] Within the three broad categories there are fifty-one gradations of status, ranging from the ruling Kim family at the top, to political prisoners with no hope of release at the bottom. The irony was that the new communist state had created a social hierarchy more elaborate and stratified than anything seen in the time of the feudal emperors.

North Korea is an atheist state. Anyone caught in possession of a Bible faces execution or a life in the gulag. Kim worship is the only permitted outlet for spiritual fervour.

The sessions taught me a survival lesson. I had to be discreet, be cautious about what I said and did, and be very wary of others. Already I was acquiring the mask that the adults wore from long practice. Often,

It is mandatory from elementary school to attend public executions. Often classes would be cancelled so students could go.

The people would realize that full human rights are exercised and enjoyed by one person only – the ruling Kim. He is the only figure in North Korea who exercises freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of movement, his right not to be tortured, imprisoned, or executed without trial, and his right to proper healthcare and food.

Ordinary people are made persecutors, denouncers, thieves. They use the fear flowing from the top to win some advantage, or to survive.

My closest friend at this time was my tiny pet dog - it was one of the cute little breeds that people in other countries put frocks on. I wouldn't have been allowed to do that, because putting clothes on dogs was a well-known example of capitalist degeneracy.

He showed me that there was another world where strangers helped strangers for no other reason than that it is good to do so, and where callousness was unusual, not the norm.

The South Koreans treated me well. I could not bear to imagine their reaction if they’d known I’d grown up in the bosom of their archenemy. At times this felt surreal. We were all Koreans, sharing the same language and culture, yet we were technically at war. I

The irony was that the new communist state had created a social hierarchy more elaborate and stratified than anything seen in the time of the feudal emperors.

People in the hostile class, which made up about 40 per cent of the population, learned not to dream.

Afterwards, wedding photographs were taken, as was customary, at the feet of the great bronze statue of Kim Il-sung on Mansu Hill. This was to demonstrate that however much a couple might love each other their love for the Fatherly Leader was greater. No one smiled.

The strength of my parents’ feelings for each other, however, was a worry to my grandmother. She warned them that if a couple loved each other too much it would condense all the affection that should last a lifetime into too short a period, and one of them would die young.

My closest friend at this time was my tiny pet dog – it was one of the cute little breeds that people in other countries put frocks on. I wouldn’t have been allowed to do that, because putting clothes on dogs was a well-known example of capitalist degeneracy.

These birthdays were national holidays and all children were given treats and candies. From our youngest years we associated the Great Leader and Dear Leader with gifts and excitement in the way that children in the West think of Santa Claus.

She was a manager at Department Store Number One in Pyongyang, which was regularly featured on the television news, showing shelves laden with colourful produce. But when I visited her there she told me that the goods on the shelves were for display only, to impress foreign visitors. The store had no stock to replace what was sold.

Every so often the authorities registered voters in order to find out who was missing and why. I had turned eighteen and was old enough to vote in North Korea’s ‘elections’, which always returned Kim Jong-il, with a hundred per cent approval.

There was just one problem, however, and it was a major one. I wasn’t choosing any of this. It was all happening to me.

Sixty thousand yuan – a fortune representing ten years’ wages at the restaurant – and a week’s imprisonment with the threat of rape, and all I’d achieved was a three-minute reunion with Min-ho.

After years in the Chinese workforce, I had developed an emotional attachment to money. My earnings were my hard work and long hours; my savings were comforts deferred. North Koreans have no way to relate to this. In the outside world, they believe, money is plentifully available to all.

Most of the brokers who help defectors are human traffickers. They help women escape, not men. They’re paid to bring us to China either as brides or prostitutes. What I’m doing is a kind of prostitution, I guess, but it’s very new.

This was the first time I had ever known that North Korea has gay people. I am embarrassed to admit that I had thought of homosexuality purely as a foreign phenomenon, or a plotline in TV dramas. One woman in the room told me that homosexuals in North Korea are sent to labour camps, that they suffer alone and cannot even confide in their families. I had not known this either. In fact, this was the first of many things I was to learn about my country.

It’s funny how the final straw is invariably a trivial incident.

At the end of that first year at secondary school the ceremonies held on the anniversary of the Korean War affected me deeply and made me very emotional. The day began at school with outdoor speeches from our teachers and headmaster. They opened with the solemn words, spoken into a microphone: ‘On the morning of 25 June 1950, at 3 a.m., the South Korean enemy attacked our country while our people slept, and killed many innocents …’ The images conjured for us of tanks

If the North Korean people acquired an awareness of their rights, of individual freedoms and democracy, the game would be up for the regime in Pyongyang. The people would realize that full human rights are exercised and enjoyed by one person only – the ruling Kim. He is the only figure in North Korea who exercises freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of movement, his right not to be tortured, imprisoned, or executed without trial, and his right to proper healthcare and food.

The sessions taught me a survival lesson. I had to be discreet, be cautious about what I said and did, and be very wary of others. Already I was acquiring the mask that the adults wore from long practice.

All these cars. All these lights. I’d seen them in the illegal South Korean TV dramas, but I’d always thought it was propaganda, that they’d brought all the cars in the city to the same street where they were filming.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s astonishing.

But we will never do without other people, and we will never do without family.

Leaving North Korea is not like leaving any other country. It is more like leaving another universe.

a regime that’s willing to kill as many people as it takes to stay in power tends to stay in power for a very long time.

Every child learned to subordinate their will to that of the collective. In other words, though we were too young to know it, mass games helped to suppress individual thought.

Suicide in Korean culture is a highly emotive means of protest. The regime regards it as a form of defection. By punishing the surviving family, the regime attempts to disable this ultimate form of protest.

Ice, or crystal methamphetamine, had long replaced heroin in North Korea as the foreign-currency earner of choice for the state. It’s a synthetic drug that is not dependent on crops, as heroin is, and can be manufactured to a high purity in state labs. Most of the addicts in China were getting high on crystal meth made in North Korea. Like the opium of the past, crystal meth, though just as illegal, had become an alternative currency in North Korea, and given as gifts and bribes.

In her world, the law was upside down. People had to break the law to live. The prohibition on drug-dealing, a serious crime in most countries, is not viewed in the same way – as protective of society – by North Koreans. It is viewed as a risk, like unauthorized parking. If you can get away with it, where’s the harm? In North Korea the only laws that truly matter, and for which extreme penalties are imposed if they are broken, touch on loyalty to the Kim dynasty. This is well understood by all North Koreans. To my mother, the legality of the ice was a trifling matter. It was just another product to trade.

a clear night in early October 2004. Standing beneath the trees on the riverbank, I stared across at North Korea. The mountains were black against the constellations. Hyesan itself was in utter darkness. I could have been looking at forest, not at a city. It was almost as if the sky was the substance. The city was the void, the nothing. My country lay silent and still. I felt immensely sad for it. It seemed as lifeless as ash.

We can do without almost anything – our home, even our country. But we will never do without other people, and we will never do without family.

One of the main reasons that distinctions between oppressor and victim are blurred in North Korea is that no one there has any concept of rights. To know that your rights are being abused, or that you are abusing someone else’s, you first have to know that you have them, and what they are. But with no comparative information about societies elsewhere in the world, such awareness in North Korea cannot exist. This is also why most people escape because they’re hungry or in trouble – not because they’re craving liberty.

I started thinking deeply about human rights. One of the main reasons that distinctions between oppressor and victim are blurred in North Korea is that no one there has any concept of rights. To know that your rights are being abused, or that you are abusing someone else’s, you first have to know that you have them, and what they are. But with no comparative information about societies elsewhere in the world, such awareness in North Korea cannot exist. This is also why most people escape because they’re hungry or in trouble – not because they’re craving liberty. Many defectors hiding in China even baulk at the idea of going to South Korea – they’d see it as a betrayal of their country and the legacy of the Great Leader. If the North Korean people acquired an awareness of their rights, of individual freedoms and democracy, the game would be up for the regime in Pyongyang. The people would realize that full human rights are exercised and enjoyed by one person only – the ruling Kim. He is the only figure in North Korea who exercises freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of movement, his right not to be tortured, imprisoned, or executed without trial, and his right to proper healthcare and food.

Dear Leader’s Joy Division

Until a few years previously, the Party had still seriously been thinking of abolishing money. When the system actually worked, money was only needed as pocket money, or for the beauty parlour. But most of the time, the communist central planning system was so inefficient that it frequently broke down, rations dwindled or disappeared through theft, and people relied more and more on bribery or on unofficial markets for their essentials – for which cash, and often hard foreign currency, not the Korean won, was required.

Farmers had been cultivating poppies since the 1970s, with state laboratories refining the raw produce into high-quality heroin – one of the few products the country made to an international standard. It was sold abroad to raise foreign currency.

political disloyalty, the faintest hint of which, real or imagined, was enough to make an entire family – grandparents, parents and children – disappear.

felt caught in an absurd situation. East and West Germany had long since reunified. So had North and South Vietnam. Why were we the only nation on earth still suffering from a bizarre division that should have vanished into history? Why was my family paying the price of that division in this faraway and unwelcoming country? I stood still in the empty street, thinking that my whole life lay in the distance between these two flags.

One of the main reasons that distinctions between oppressor and victim are blurred in North Korea is that no one there has any concept of rights. To know that your rights are being abused, or that you are abusing someone else’s, you first have to know that you have them, and what they are. But with no comparative information about societies elsewhere in the world, such awareness in North Korea cannot exist.

the North Korean people acquired an awareness of their rights, of individual freedoms and democracy, the game would be up for the regime

Dictatorships may seem strong and unified, but they are always weaker than they appear. They are governed by the whim of one man, who can’t draw upon a wealth of discussion and debate, as democracies can, because he rules through terror and the only truth permitted is his own. Even so, I don’t think Kim Jong-un’s dictatorship is so weak that it will collapse any time soon. Sadly, as the historian Andrei Lankov put it, a regime that’s willing to kill as many people as it takes to stay in power tends to stay in power for a very long time.

Most defectors’ knowledge of history consisted of little more than shining legends from the lives of the Great Leader and the Dear Leader. This was when they were told that it was an unprovoked attack from the North, not from the South, that began the Korean War on 25 June 1950. Many rejected this loudly, and outright. They could not accept that our country’s main article of faith – believed by most North Koreans – was a deliberate lie. Even those who knew that North Korea was rotten to the core found the truth about the war very hard to accept. It meant that everything else they had learned was a lie. It meant that the tears they’d cried every 25 June, their decade of military service, all the ‘high-speed battles’ for production they had fought, had no meaning. They had been made part of the lie. It was the undoing of their lives.

North Koreans pride themselves on their directness of speech, an attitude that had been encouraged by Kim Jong-il himself. Foreigners are often taken aback by the bluntness of North Korean diplomats. Ok-hee’s experience was the first hint I got that the two Koreas had diverged into quite separate cultures. Worse was to come. After more than sixty years of division, and near-zero exchange, I would find that the language and values I thought North and South shared had evolved in very different directions. We were no longer the same people.

North Koreans have a gift for negativity toward others, the effect of a lifetime of compulsory criticism sessions.

putting clothes on dogs was a well-known example of capitalist degeneracy. The Yankee jackals care more about dogs than people.

there were informers everywhere – on the military base where we lived, in the city streets, in my kindergarten. They reported to the provincial bureau of the Ministry of State Security, the Bowibu. This was the secret police. The translation doesn’t convey the power the word Bowibu has to send a chill through a North Korean. Its very mention, as the poet Jang Jin-sung put it, was enough to silence a crying child.

Dick's guesthouse was nicer than mine. I had not expected him to pay for my room, on top of what he'd already done, but he did. When you've lived your whole life as I had, calculating the cost of even the smallest decision, such generosity wasn't easy to accept. It allowed a loss of control.