« Un professeur a demandé qui était la classe qui aimait les livres classiques, comme Jane Austen.
« J’ai dit : « J’aime ces livres ». J’ai pensé que c’était une bonne chose.
« Ensuite, elle a dit : « Saviez-vous que ces écrivains avaient une mentalité coloniale ? Ils étaient racistes et fanatiques et vous lavent inconsciemment le cerveau. »
Park a averti que les Américains se censuraient et se faisaient taire en annulant la culture.
« Volontairement, ces personnes se censurent, se font taire, aucune force derrière cela », a-t-elle déclaré. «D’autres fois (dans l’histoire), il y a un coup d’État militaire, comme si une force venait vous enlever vos droits et vous faire taire. Mais ce pays choisit de se taire, choisit de céder ses droits. « Je suppose que c’est ce qu’ils veulent », a-t-elle dit, « détruire tout et reconstruire en un paradis communiste. »
À la mort du prince Philip, un bibliothécaire du Kings College de Londres a fait circuler une photo de lui ouvrant la bibliothèque. Elle a été forcée de le retirer et de s’excuser pour le « dommage » qu’il a causé car il avait fait des déclarations racistes et sexistes dans le passé. Il y a quelques jours, il a été rapporté que le même collège avait honoré une ancienne étudiante, Teresa Cheng, la ministre chinoise de la Justice intransigeante, avec une bourse, malgré son rôle central (pour lequel les États-Unis l’ont censurée) dans la répression des pro- mouvement du mouvement démocratique à Hong Kong.
Je pense que je vais devoir relire le livre et repenser ma critique à la lumière de cet entretien avec l’auteur. Cela ajoute à ma connaissance d’elle et de ce qu’elle a vécu d’une manière dont je n’étais pas au courant.
Avis à réviser (voir spoiler)
Yeomi Park is born into a subsistence-level existence in North Korea which is reduced to almost lower than that when her father, a smuggler of metals, is sent to a labour camp. When he is released, he is a broken man.
« At three the following morning, Yeonmi and her mother took his remains to a nearby mountain and secretly buried them. ‘There was no funeral. Nothing,’ Yeonmi says. ‘I couldn’t even do that for my father. I couldn’t call anyone to say my father had passed away. He was 45 – really young. We couldn’t even give him painkillers. »
Eventually, with the ‘help’ of a trafficker, she and her mother cross to China where they are sold for the trafficker to recoup his costs. In another version, in an interview with a San Francisco radio station, Park says, « I escaped with my mum and father – the three of us.”
Because of China’s one-child policy there is a great shortage of women and there is no hope for many men ever to find a wife, so parents buy one for their son and this is what happened to the author’s mother. She was treated like a slave and scarcely allowed to contact her daughter. This would make a very interesting book, the social and personal costs to China of this shortage of women. Societies of men without women are very Lord of the Flies I would imagine. (Not so much like monks in a monastery, rejoicing in the feminine absence).
Yeonmi successfully fought off rape attempts but eventually gave in when the traffiker promised to buy back her mother and look for her family. He was true to his word and got himself sex with an unwilling 13 year old in return.
They were both sold on again and became friends with another North Korean illegal immigrant and planned their escape. This part of the story is very harrowing but interesting. Finally they are almost in South Korea when they are found by Chinese and Korean missionaries who arranged for their passage and papers for South Korea, meanwhile thoroughly indoctrinating them into Christianity as part of their compulsory education-for-South Korea programme.
South Korea in it’s turn re-educated her into their ways.
With the fervour of the newly-converted Yeonmi after several years adjusting to life in South Korea which seems to have some of the most racist people in the world living in it, went to Costa Rica, a missionary herself with an American group. It seems to me she was looking for a way into living in the US.
Yeonmi Park is no stranger to the media. Seems to me that it wasn’t long after Yeonmi Park got to South Korea, acquired a local, more acceptable accent and saw the Gangam style consumer culture and was driven by a desire for fame and money herself. She has marketed her story in a tv series in South Korea (in which she starred) as well as radio, the internet and now print to much success. Now she is living in New York (are you surprised?) America is the land of money, media and manipulation of how we should think of other cultures. This harrowing story by a very pretty young girl fits in well with the US constantly demonising North Korea. It might all be true, but maybe it’s no more true about North Korea than it is about Cuba.
I could give examples but read a very well-respected journalist’s (Mary Ann Jolley‘s article in The Diplomat on all the discrepancies between the author’s various retellings of her story. The rebuttal, quite obviously written by a PR professional to lessen the damage. There is one untruth in it though. Yeonmi Park’s website that the she says wasn’t meant to be live’ had a PayPal donate button on it, that doesn’t say ‘not meant to’ to me.
So did Yeonmi Park grow up in a professional family having fun with other children and hopes of a university education or did she grow up eating beetles in the direst poverty where even being sold as a slave was better than the life she had? The truth is probably a mixture of the two. Only Yeonmi knows and it’s not that she’s not telling, she certainly is, but not necessarily the same story every time. (hide spoiler)]