“The first thing my mom taught me as a young girl living in North Korea was don’t even whisper, because birds and mice could hear me,” Yeonmi Park told the audience that had come to hear her speak in Queens.
“This is what dictators do: they plant a spike everywhere, a distrust between people, a distrust between family, even.
The teachers tell their children,” she went on, “‘If your parents say one wrong thing, come to tell the teacher.’”It was a story that Ms. Park has told often, on television sets and conference stages and in a best-selling memoir, over the decade she has spent as one of the world’s most famous defectors from the Kim family’s isolated totalitarian state.
But in recent years, she has added a new postscript.
“And now,” she told the crowd in Long Island City last weekend, “I see the same thing in America.”
Persons:
”, Kim, “
Organizations:
Long Island City
Locations:
North Korea, Queens, Long Island, America