A North Korean defector is speaking out this week to reveal just how awful life in the rogue hermit kingdom really is.

Yeonmi Park told the New York Post that growing up in North Korea, she had no concept of love and friendship. Her parents never told her they loved her, and it was normal for her to see people dying in the streets of starvation.

Park managed to escape North Korea with her mother in 2007, when she was 13 years-old. Now 26, Park a human rights activist living in Chicago, and she’s opening up about her experiences growing up in North Korea.

“What you need to know about North Korea is that it’s not like other countries like Iran or Cuba,” she said. “In those countries, you have some kind of understanding that they are abnormal, they are isolated and the people are not safe.”

“But North Korea has been so completely purged from the rest of the world, it’s literally a Hermit Kingdom,” Park added. “When I was growing up there, I didn’t know that I was isolated, I didn’t know that I was praying to a dictator.”

As a child, Park was taught that the late dictator Kim Jong Il and his son Kim Jong Un were gods who had the power to read people’s thoughts, which left North Koreans afraid to speak out against them. In school, she was taught to count using metrics “American bastards” and was forced to do “criticism sessions” in which she would find faults in her classmates, creating an atmosphere of mistrust.

“We don’t have friends in North Korea. We only have comrades. There’s no concept of friends,” Park explained.

She vividly remembers eating insects to survive, and said her uncle and grandmother died of malnutrition.

“You’d see so many people just dying. It was something normal for us to see the dead bodies on the street. It was a normal thing for me. I never thought that was something unusual,” Park said. “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.”

“North Korea spends billions of dollars to make this nuke test system,” she added. “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.”

Park and her mother were finally able to flee to China over the frozen Yalu River, but her mom was immediately raped by human traffickers. They eventually made it to South Korea, where Park was educated in Seoul before moving to New York City in 2014. She often speaks out against Kim Jong Un’s regime, even though doing so puts her safety at great risk. Many of her relatives have since disappeared.

“I don’t know if they’ve been executed or sent to prison camps, so I’m still not free,” Park said. “Even after I went through all of that to be free, I’m not free to dictators there. So it’s a very emotional thing for me.”

Despite everything that she has gone through, she is still grateful that she was born in North Korea.

“If I hadn’t been born in that oppression and complete darkness, I don’t think I would see the light here. I think people here, they don’t see the light and only see darkness and for me I see so much light,” Park said. “I feel so grateful that I can experience a country that is like a different planet.”

This piece originally appeared in UpliftingToday.com and is used by permission.

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