Name: Defector Yeonmi Park on Escaping North Korea
Uploaded: 2021-08-03T20:17:17.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Defector Yeonmi Park on Escaping North Korea' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-08-03. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Defector Yeonmi Park on Escaping North Korea' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-08-03. Transcript available.

the Joe Rogan experience so you were 13 when you you and your family knew you
it was you and your mother escaped yeah how did you get out so that has been
right initially my sister and I was gonna escape but when North Koreans say
when you are escaping of course we don't have phones we don't have map we don't
know what's the outside the world to look like right luckily I was living in
this border town of North Korea by then so at night do you know if you see the
satellite photo of North Korea it is the literally the darkest place on earth
yes
we don't have electricity so I was seeing these lights coming from China so we
I
thought like if I go here the lights or 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 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 is that what was that experience like so this
is a so I
I told my mom like come with me to China and she my mom was like you know
father is like my father
was home he was waiting but the thing is that's the tragic thing for North
Korea 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 gonna be punished so much so it's better off that he does not
know that we are escaping
for his own safety because they're gonna torture you to the point that you're
gonna say anything
because they do this all subconscious like torture that they make you not sleep
in a single room has like no air much air if you put there
for 40 days alone you go crazy you say whatever they ask you so if you he
actually knew that we're escaping it
wouldn't go 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 this 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 why
what she meant by that
she's like you should just go with your mom and don't even tell those people
that's your mom
she said like you are like 18 or something and my mom was something 30 so she
told me that our wage
was age was different so and this would somehow another help you when you were
going across yeah
how would that help you I don't know or she told me what this is going to be
helpful and
well part of the issue is um in china there's a disproportionate number of men
in comparison
to women yeah and so they want as many women to come across as that are uh of
legal age like women that
can be married or can right is that the idea behind it it's it's a smuggling so
like it is you got it
right because of one child policy right a lot of girls got aborted in china so
they kept boys now
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 the wives so they over
30 million and it's number
gonna keep going up right now so that's a big problem for chinese region 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 is
sending them our suits
literally they are sending them to death camp but they 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 sees 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 going to go is going to police and then report on
them
why did they think that women coming over from north korea are going to somehow
or another collapse the
empire because uh though that's what kim jong-un believes he thinks they're
gonna collapse due to
the defection through the defectors so after kim jong-un came into power he
literally the country cannot
afford the electricity probably electrify the fence entire border not only that
putting the machine guns with
the guards have a shoot to kill order whoever crosses they don't even bother to
ask you stop they shoot
you right there and not only that he buried the land mines on top of that so
there's electric fence
and then there's guards shooting to kill and then past that there's land mines
yeah entire country
became a concentration camp entire country when did they start putting the land
mines in a few years ago so
this is after you had already escaped yeah now there's no you can you don't see
north can defect
escaping from north korea anymore it's impossible to escape at this point catch
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