Yeonmi Park is a human rights activist, her life story is incredible.

 

Yeonmi Park is a human rights activist, her life story is incredible. 

This interview video is long, 2 hours, but totally riveting and worth watching.

Turning on CC for text of her Korean accented English may be helpful. 

If you're not familiar with her, she has a 10 minute TED talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLzTo-y8Ef0

Some spoilers from that 2 hour interview, 

if like me, you're skeptical about spending 2 hours of your time and need some justification.

She escaped with her family from North Korea into China, where she's part of China supported human slave trafficking (sex slave included) starting at the age of around 13. She, her sister, and mom were all sold into slavery. China supports this, because of the one child policy causing so many female fetuses to be aborted,  they have 30 million men with no potential female partners.

China is also propping up the North Korean gov't. 

She became a mistress of a slave trader, who was violent, abusive, but did help purchase her mom and reunite them. Later, Chinese slave trader lost all of his wealth gambling, and 15 year old Yeonmi had to sell her mom back into slavery, because that was better than the alternative of both of them starving to death.

Yeonmi considered suicide seriously a number of times while inn China, decided to live, then had a choice between prostitution or working in chat rooms (video sex with customers?). 

At some point Yeonmi came into contact with Christian missionaries from South Korea and China, and gave her an opportunity to be smuggled into South Korea (free from Chinese slavery). What they asked in exchange was devotion to Jesus Christ, and to prove that devotion the girls had to memorize bible verses, for about a year. 

One of the most heartbreaking things from the interview, was hearing how the Chrisitan missionaries told Yeonmi it would have been better for her to kill herself than commit the sin of working in the sex trade. 

Part of the trip to south korea meant walking to Mongolia, crossing the Gobi desert with a group of 8 women, and an infant, through -40 degree weather (comparatively, Chicago in winter is nice), and they're all wearing thin warm weather clothes. If they stopped, they would literally freeze to death in place within an hour. All 8 in the party survived the journey.

In south korea, Yeonmi wants to get a high school education, and in one of the most competitive schooling environments in the world, starting with a 7 year old education level, she got into a 4 year university in 2 years. Working part time as well in as waitress type of jobs, she would read about 100 books per year.

Later ends up in New York columbia university.

One of the coolest things about her, and the single most important reason you should watch this video, is that despite the torture that she went through, she still had compassion and understanding for her tormentors, and to understand the complexity of the human condition. She even sent money to free the chinese sex slave trader from debters jail. Even though he was cruel to her, she still appreciated that having food to eat in China as a sex slave was still an improvement of starving in north korea.