Park Yeon-mi
Activist
1993-10-04
Quotes by Park Yeon-mi
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I was a slave. I was sold in China in 2007 as a child at 13 years old.
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When I was in South Korea, the books that I read about Americans were actually Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama. If this country actually oppresses people and enslaves the people, how are those two women billionaires?
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Kim Il Sung prepared Kim Jong Il for decades to be his successor and made it very clear from the beginning, 'This is my son and he's going to lead the country' and that took more than 10 years - almost 20 years.
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I have visited slums in Mumbai, I have visited slums in other countries, but nothing is like North Korea because North Korean starvation, it's a systematic starvation by a country that chose to starve us.
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Reading 'Animal Farm' set me free from the dictatorship in my head. I could see all the tactics used by the regime to control us - they were all in that book.
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I never used a translator, never thought that the journalists might not understand.
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North Korea is an unimaginable country. We aren't free to sing, say, wear or think what we want.
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North Korea spends billions of dollars to make this nuke test system. If they would spend just 20 percent of what they spent on making nuclear weapons, nobody would have to die in North Korea from hunger but the regime chose to make us hungry.
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North Korea was pretty insane. Like the first thing my mom taught me was don't even whisper, the birds and mice could hear me. She told me the most dangerous thing that I had in my body was my tongue.
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