- I recall sitting down in an empty apartment.
There was nothing.
No bed,
no chairs,
no dishes,
no clothes.
I sat on the floor at stared at the wall
for hours wondering what do I do now?
I was alone in a new country.
I had lost all my friends, and I had
no idea what happened to my family.
It all started over a dinner in Beijing.
I am from North Korea's elite class and I was one of the few
university students that was allowed to study abroad.
In China, I met a few South Korean students
and we became friends.
One night over dinner they began
talking about human rights in North Korea.
They criticized my country, and I was so confused.
What are human rights?
What is a dictatorship?
What is freedom?
I grew up very comfortably in
North Korea's capital of Pyongyang.
I never went hungry.
I could buy whatever I wanted.
I even owned a South Korean computer
and played video games on it, but there were
also moments when I questioned things.
There was the time I was interrogated for three days
for giving my friends some South Korean movies.
Or, the time my dad had to bribe the police to let me go.
But I thought it was just like that everywhere.
I cried out loud in a taxi on the ride home that day.
I was so frustrated that I didn't
have the words to defend my homeland.
After I came back my dorm room, I began
searching the internet for information on human rights.
My idea of North Korea died that night.
The place I called home, and the only system
I had ever known before, was all a lie.
I couldn't stop crying as I watched a documentary
about North Korea's political prison camps.
I didn't go to class after that.
I spent most of my time reading and learning the things
that I'd never known before about my country.
A couple weeks later, I was in an ice rink with my friends.
As I watching this little Chinese kid skate around
so carefully, something broke deep inside me.
I thought about the children in the documentaries
who would never get enjoy something like this.
That's when I knew I had to do something.
I began devouring books about democracy and freedom.
I watched more documentaries and read
political articles like Plato's The Republic.
If the regime discovered I was reading that book
it could have cost me my life.
But I couldn't cure my curiosity.
I couldn't unlearn what I now knew,
and I definitely couldn't go back to North Korea.
One day I received a call from the
North Korea embassy in Beijing.
They asked me to come in because they said
something was wrong with my visa.
Nothing like this ever happened before,
so it seemed strange.
I convinced that they knew what I had
been reading and thinking about.
I agreed to come in and hung up.
I never went to the embassy.
I destroyed my phone and ID cards that day
and left my dorm room with some cash.
A couple days later, I finally found a
South Korean pastor and he helped me
to find the way to get safely to South Korea.
It has been six years since I sat in the empty apartment
on my first day as a free South Korean citizen.
There was a moment while I sat there
where I began question everything.
Did I make the wrong choice?
What did I do to my family?
Will I really be okay on my own now?
But I reminded myself, I came here with a purpose.
To learn about democracy, to help my people
to get their freedom, so I put on my shoes,
I went to buy some groceries for the first time.