What a weekend! My wonderful gf and I attended the wedding of my law school friends Lee and Lauren (an inspiration for all lawyer/law student unions out there! Find true love in law school!) in Santa Barbara and went all the way up the coast of California through Big Sur to a town south of San Francisco called Monterey, home of the Monterey Aquarium and Pebble Beach Golf Course. Great piece of land, great trip, met a great Caucasian/ Korean couple who are friends with my gf's mother and got into a great conversation about Bernie rallying in key swing states Ohio, Illinois against Hilary, the future of the U.S. educational system, ancient history (do you know that every living person today probably somewhere up the lineage had an ancestor who brutally murdered other peoples? History is written by the victors, but that had never occurred to me.....but it's probably true, humans conquer other people and do savage things to each other- basically the theme of The Walking Dead). I could write a whole article about just this weekend it was so awesome.
But what struck me out of all those wonderful things this weekend was a story I read called The Girl with Seven Different Names, a true story written by a North Korean defector, Hyeonseo Lee who left her home country under dangerous circumstances and then was able to go back and get her brother and mother from the country as well, through a thrilling, intricately detailed set of procedures and dangerous tactics. She really was a survivor and was able to overcome so many obstacles and challenges in her life by the time she was 25, I really have to admire her determination and spirit. This included changing her name 6 times for 7 different names. Plus she had to learn 2 separate languages (Chinese and English) after she had already become an adult including the impossibly complicated (in my opinion) language of Mandarin Chinese! As well as the slightly altered version of Korean South Koreans speak as opposed to North Koreans (didn't know that they had different accents and native speakers could tell).
What really struck me, however, was what the author, Ms. Lee, described everyday life in North Korean in vivid detail, from growing up in the North Korean education system which indoctrinated the values of loving the North Korean country and their dear leader (the Kim Jungs), as well as learning to be secretive and wary of neighbors as anybody might spy on one's neighbor and report them to the authorities. A very dangerous society where a small slight towards the higher-ups might result in heavy fines or worse, imprisonment and eventually death. According to the author (as I have no way to verify the facts but it certainly sounds like they are true, and it is very difficult to verify since the country is so closed off to the outside world) North Korea operates on systems of bribes and knowing who was above one in position and loyalty above all else. One could commit crimes and be fined or do jail time, but if one was suspected of dealing with the South Koreans or worse, the Americans, they'd be shot and killed in front of the public. Pretty brutal concept, and disallowing those who wish to leave to leave. Anyone found to have escaped to China would be captured and brought back and either imprisoned, tortured, and/or killed. Really feel for the North Korean people as they are trapped in a society they were born into and have no ways of getting out. I live in the best country in the world, but as spoiled as I am, I constantly think about vacationing in other countries, or if going to China and working a while there could break up my boredom. The people in North Korean want to escape their country, but boredom is the least from their mind: it's to escape the fear of death and need to conform completely to the society, a matter of life and death. Really opened my eyes up to a different country and how backwards and corrupt some parts of the world still are, even in a part of the world that I had naively assumed was becoming more developed and not in need of that much attention, Asia. (There's a few chapters that make Laos and China look pretty bad along with N. Korea).
What really bothered me about the story (among 15 other things) is how the N. Korean kids were brainwashed or raised: Schools had the habit of holding assemblies where a classroom would go around and have kids criticize each other for constructive criticism and how better they could serve the state, like an intervention peer-to-peer to get kids not to trust each other and keep each other in line. Really the polar opposite of the free-thinking, independent ideas society that is the ideal system. I'm so appreciate that I grew up in one.
It's really amazing that Pyongyang, capital of N. Korea, and Seoul, capital of S. Korea, are only 120 miles about. That's a little more than how far it is from Redondo Beach, where I currently live, to Santa Barbara, where I drove 2 hours to for the wedding. Incredible how worlds apart those 2 countries are despite their proximity.
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
No comments:
Post a Comment