HYEONSEO LEE'S ESCAPE FROM NORTH KOREA

Hyeonseo is a woman who recently made a TED Talk explaining her experience as a former North Korean citizen and how she managed to escape.

Hyeonseo had a family where getting food was never an issue, she didn't know what hunger was. One day, her mother received a letter from one of her coworkers saying how by the time she was reading it, her and her family would be dead because of the extreme starvation they were suffering. That was the first time Hyeonseo heard the people in her country were hurting.

Due to the famine of the 1990s, over a million North Koreans died. She was secretly sent to China at the age of seventeen to live with some distant relatives and she would not see her family for the next fourteen years. While Hyeonseo was in China, she was captured by the Chinese police. They asked her infinite questions to make sure she was a native Chinese since someone had accused her of being North Korean. If a refugee gets repatriated, they send them back to their native country where the government imprisons tortures them or preforms public executions.

Ten years later, Lee restarted her life in South Korea. She started having problems with her identity, who she was and where she was from. After some time, Hyeoseo got a phone call, she was informed that her family would be moved to an isolated part of the countryside because some of the money she sent got intercepted. She was able to guide her relatives until Southeast Asia, during that time they were almost caught several times. One of them, Hyeonseo had to pretend her family was deaf and she was their caretaker because they couldn't speak Chinese.

They were caught in Laos's frontier, Lee had to bribe the guards and they let them out. Not long later, the family was put in jail once again. This time she didn't have enough money to pay for another fine. An unknown man saw how she was struggling and gave her all the money necessary. He wanted to help North Korean people, not expecting anything in return. They got reunited in South Korea and began working and training to adapt to the new lifestyle.

Hyeonseo Lee how explains she wants to give North Koreans a chance to escape and prosper.