For a long time, the word “freedom” didn’t conjure up anything in Jihyun Park’s mind. It wasn’t a right, it wasn’t a dream. It was not a value, let alone an ideal. ” Nothing “, she repeats at the start of our conversation about her life in North Korea. The word did exist in the Korean language, but she could associate it with neither image nor sensation, no reality and therefore no possibility. It was as if “freedom” was… too much of a word. “In that societyshe tries to explain, the individual has no intrinsic value since he is only a cog in a huge machine. He must not think, he cannot choose. His life, all mapped out, is made up of nothing but duties towards the supreme leader, venerated like a god. » Could a regime succeed in padlocking dreams? Jihyun Park looks resigned. “You have never tested totalitarianism! A system where one seizes, at birth, each brain to put there a software which crushes any free will. A country where one works constantly, and where one dies without ever having experienced the slightest hint of freedom. Without even having dreamed of it since we don’t know what it is. » So what do we aspire to, faced with the harshness of everyday life? “To better serve our leader. And to eat his fill. Yes, we think of his stomach! »
How she would like us to understand her, Jihyun Park, her face so smooth, this June day in London, betrays nothing of the suffering endured in the fields and prisons of North Korea! And how she would like the veil to be lifted over this country where she was born in 1968 and lived for more than thirty years, before fleeing to China – “not for freedom, just to survive!” – and to eventually go into exile in the United Kingdom, a nation she knew nothing about except that it was only populated by white people, with elegant women and men in bowler hats. “You can imagine my surprise when I got off the plane! » The United Nations office in Beijing, to which she had made her request for exile in 2008, had given her the choice between South Korea, the United States and Great Britain. She opted for the latter, a little less demonized since her childhood than the other two countries, absolute symbols of hated capitalism.
“I landed on another planetshe says. North Korea is an airtight bubble and keeps the people in ignorance of the convulsions of the world. I didn’t know that the Soviet Union had broken up, that the Berlin Wall had been stormed, that Europe was one entity, that in America not everyone was starving…” She had to learn everything, reevaluate everything. “I didn’t even know about the existence of the Jews or their extermination during the World War. History, for us, began with the accession of Kim Il-sung and his glorious victory over the Japanese. From kindergarten to university, we studied his life, we learned his speeches by heart, we venerated his portrait, present in every home. He was the father who should be loved more than our father. He was the sun that the rest of the world envied us. »
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