Hyeonseo Lee Quotes

After years in the Chinese workforce, I had developed an emotional attachment to money. My earnings were my hard work and long hours; my savings were comforts deferred.

The South Koreans treated me well. I could not bear to imagine their reaction if they'd known I'd grown up in the bosom of their archenemy. At times this felt surreal. We were all Koreans, sharing the same language and culture, yet we were technically at war. I

It was an aspiring neighbourhood that retained a faint edge of slum, typical of Shanghai. Pensioners in Mao-era padded jackets would sit on doorsteps playing mah-jong, oblivious to the Prada-clad girls sweeping past on their way to work.

She liked to dress well because she thought this made up for plain and ordinary looks. In fact she was prettier than she knew.

I hope you remember that if you encounter an obstacle on the road, don't think of it as an obstacle at all… think of it as a challenge to find a new path on the road less traveled.

The sessions taught me a survival lesson. I had to be discreet, be cautious about what I said and did, and be very wary of others. Already I was acquiring the mask that the adults wore from long practice. Often,

It is mandatory from elementary school to attend public executions. Often classes would be cancelled so students could go.

I was already hiding beneath so many lies that I hardly knew who I was any more. I was becoming a non-person.

I wanted to belong, like everyone else around me did, but there was no country I could say was mine. I had no one to tell me that many other people in the world have a fragmented identity; that it doesn't matter. That who we are as a person is what's important.

He'd valued his dignity more than his own life.

In her world, the law was upside down. People had to break the law to live. The prohibition on drug-dealing, a serious crime in most countries, is not viewed in the same way – as protective of society – by North Koreans. It is viewed as a risk, like unauthorized parking. If you can get away with it, where's the harm?

In North Korea the only laws that truly matter, and for which extreme penalties are imposed if they are broken, touch on loyalty to the Kim dynasty.

He showed me that there was another world where strangers helped strangers for no other reason than that it is good to do so, and where callousness was unusual, not the norm.

This is when I understood that we can do without almost anything – our home, even our country. But we will never do without other people, and we will never do without family.

Her job at the local government bureau also meant that she had access to farm produce managed by her office.

Leaving North Korea is not like leaving any other country. It is more like leaving another universe. I will never truly be free of its gravity, no matter how far I journey.

Dictatorships may seem strong and unified, but they are always weaker than they appear.