There are countless stories of defectors (people who have successfully escaped North Korea) publicly telling their stories and the truth about North Korea on Social Media. An example of this is a woman named Yeonmi Park. She escaped North Korea when she was just a teenager. She had only escaped with her Mom because her Dad ended up dying, from all the harsh treatment he received at the Prison Camp he was in. Yeonmi Park buried her dad before escaping North Korea.
When she escaped, she first went to China then South Korea. But when she was in China with her Mom, she and her Mother were put on the market. People could buy them for just $100. Yeonmi Park even witnessed her mother getting sexually assaulted. This just goes to show everything that defectors go through and sacrifice to get themselves and their families to a safe country. And now Yeonmi is thriving.
However, there’s a lot of controversy about her story on Social Media. Since she does speeches in real life about her story, there have been countless TikToks saying that her story doesn’t align with the other speeches she’s done about the same story. People claim she says one specific thing in her story, but then she says something different at another date and time. Some people think that it’s because she’s lying to the public, but other people also say that she’s done this because she’s so traumatized by what she went through. Sometimes the brain forgets a specific part of the story, and you just make something up because the brain is not trying to re-encounter it.
She has a YouTube channel where she still talks about her experiences in North Korea. She has been the voice of all North Koreans who are living there right now. But with her being the voice, comes the North Korean regime putting Yeonmi Park at the top of their list to kill. So if Yeonmi Park goes anywhere near North Korea ever again, someone could just easily spot her and kill her right away. She has to stay in other countries like the United States or England. And that’s just one story of the many defectors that have also escaped North Korea.
The main place that defectors escape to is South Korea. It’s unbelievable how different North Korea and South Korea are from each other, even though they were once a union. You might wonder why that is, and it’s due to the dictators, politics, and leadership between these two countries. The leader of South Korea doesn’t pay much attention to starting wars and having hatred against others, he mostly just cares about bettering the economy of his country and creating alliances with other countries such as the United States. For instance, the South Korean president, Moon Jae-in met with Donald Trump at the United Nations in 2019. Even though Kim Jong Un has also met with Donald Trump, they only met because Kim Jong Un wanted something from him, which was for the U.S. to lift most of their sanctions, in exchange for North Korea taking down one of their nuclear facilities.
In South Korea, people from all over the world travel to see popular K-pop groups perform. South Korea has K-pop and lots of entertainment, but in North Korea, there’s none of that. Hopefully, people like Yeonmi Park and the countless other defectors who have gone through horrendous things just to escape North Korea will finally get the peace and liberty that they deserve.