<div class="bbWrapper"><blockquote data-attributes="member: 1" data-quote="MJ DeMarco" data-source="post: 969257"
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This looks phenomenal, did you get print or audiobook? Please let us know how it is.
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I'm reading on Kindle. Currently at 23% and it's pretty good. I find myself very eager to keep reading. There are some boring parts in the beginning (like talking about the background of her family, including short life stories of her grandparents) but overall it shows how horrible and different life in North Korea is on pretty much every page. Just a couple of examples:<br />
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I was taught never to express my opinion, never to question anything. I was taught to simply follow what the government told me to do or say or think. I actually believed that our Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, could read my mind, and I would be punished for my bad thoughts. And if he didn’t hear me, spies were everywhere, listening at the windows and watching in the school yard. We all belonged to <i>inminban</i>, or neighborhood “people’s units,” and we were ordered to inform on anyone who said the wrong thing. We lived in fear, and almost everyone—my mother included—had a personal experience that demonstrated the dangers of talking.
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This (particularly the first two sentences) sounds scarily familiar...<br />
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In most countries, a mother encourages her children to ask about everything, but not in North Korea. As soon as I was old enough to understand, my mother warned me that I should be careful about what I was saying. “Remember, Yeonmi-ya,” she said gently, “even when you think you’re alone, the birds and mice can hear you whisper.” She didn’t mean to scare me, but I felt a deep darkness and horror inside me.
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When Kim Il Sung came to power after World War II, he upended the traditional feudal system that divided the people into landlords and peasants, nobility and commoners, priests and scholars. He ordered background checks on every citizen to find out everything about them and their families, going back generations. In the songbun system, everyone is ranked among three main groups, based on their supposed loyalty to the regime.
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It was unusual for a North Korean woman of her status to get a higher education. But my mother was such a good scholar that she was accepted at a college in the nearby city of Hamhung. If given a choice, she would have liked to have become a doctor. But only students from better families are allowed a say in what they will study. The school administration decided she would major in inorganic chemistry, and that’s what she did. When she graduated, party officials sent her back to Kowon to work in a chemical factory there.
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There was a huge demand for foreign movies and South Korean television shows, even though you never knew when the police might raid your house searching for smuggled media. First they would shut off the electricity (if the power was on in the first place) so that the videocassette or DVD would be trapped in the machine when they came through the door. But people learned to get around this by owning two video players and quickly switching them out if they heard a police team coming. If you were caught smuggling or distributing illegal videos, the punishment could be severe. Some people have even been executed by firing squad—just to set an example for the rest of us.
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