HEIN Educational Service

When I was young, I thought my country was the best on the planet. And I grew up singing a song called "Nothing to envy". And I was very proud. In school, we spent a lot of time studying the history of Kim-il-sung, but we never learned much about the outside world except that America, South Korea, Japan are enemies.

Although I often wondered about the outside world, I thought I would spend my entire life in North Korea, until everything suddenly changed.

When I was seven years old, I saw my first public ex*****on. But I thought my life in North Korea was normal. My family was not poor, and myself, I have never experienced hunger. But, one day in 1995, my mom brought home a letter from a coworker's sister.

It read, "When you read this, our five family members will not exist in this world, because we haven't eaten for the past three weeks. We are lying on the floor together. And our bodies are so weak, we are waiting to die."

I was so shocked. This was the first time I heard that people in my country were suffering. Soon after, when I was walking past a train station, I saw something terrible that, to this day, I can't erase it from my memory. A lifeless woman was lying on the ground, while an emaciated (starved and skinny over the bones) child in her arms just stared helplessly at his mother's face. But nobody helped them, because they were so focused on taking care of themselves and their families.

A huge famine hit North Korea in the mid-1990s. Ultimately, more than a million North Koreans died during the famine, and many only survived by eating grass, bugs and tree bark. Power outages also became more and more frequent, so everything around me was completely dark at night except for the sea of lights in China just across the river from my home.

I always wonder why they had lights, but we didn't. This (2:47) is a satellite picture showing North Korea at night, compared to neighbors. This (2:53) is the Amnok River which serves as a part of the border between North Korea and China. As you can see, the river can be very narrow at certain points, allowing North Koreans to secretly cross. But man die. Sometimes, I saw dead bodies floating down the river.

I can't reveal many details about how I left North Korea, ...

Hyeonseo Lee
Feb 2013
Long Beach, CA

My escape from North Korea | Hyeonseo Lee | TED As a child growing up in North Korea, Hyeonseo Lee thought her country was "the best on the planet." It wasn't until the famine of the 90s that she began to ...

"ပညာရေးသည် ညီမျှမှုကို ဖြစ်စေတယ်" တဲ့။ ပြောကြတယ်။

တကယ်က ပညာရေးက မညီမျှမှုကို ဖြစ်စေတာလို့ ပြောရမလားပဲ။ ပညာကောင်းကောင်းသင်နိုင်ဖို့ဆိုတာ ငွေရှိမှ ဖြစ်မှာ။ ငွေရှိတဲ့သူတိုင်းတောင် ပညာကောင်းကောင်း သင်ရကောင်းမှန်း သိတာမဟုတ်။ ဒီတော့ ငွေမရှိတဲ့သူက ပညာကောင်းကောင်း သင်ရဖို့ အခွင့်အလမ်း သိပ် မရှိဘူး။ ပညာကောင်းကောင်း မသင်ခဲ့ရလျှင် ငွေ များများ ရှာနိုင်ဖို့ အခွင့်အလမ်း သိပ် မရှိဘူး။