Defector Quotes

“North Korean defectors often find it hard to settle down. It is not easy for somebody who’s escaped a totalitarian country to live in the free world. Defectors have to rediscover who they are in a world that offers endless possibilities. Choosing where to live, what to do, even which clothes to put on in the morning is tough enough for those of us accustomed to making choices; it can be utterly paralyzing for people who’ve had decisions made for them by the state their entire lives.”

“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.”

“Looking in those eyes I had grown to like so well - the eyes I trusted implicitly but could make my stomach writhe with pleasure - I felt a twinge of sadness that there was nothing in the future to suggest we might ever be a normal couple."If we don't make it out alive -"His shook his head once. "We will."I continued, more quickly this time. "If we don't -""Especially if we don't," he finished, pulling me into him. My lips met his - this time unsurprised. This time, I wanted it desperately.”

“Our society has long treated men as machines, as bodies expendable in the name of progress or profit. Men have overruled their pain and soul's delight, taught to think of themselves as "mechanisms". Such an estrangement wounds very deeply; it has gone on so long and is so taken for granted that healing individuals, let alone a whole gender, is a dubious undertaking. But the beat goes on, the Saturnian shadow lives, the only game in town, and shame on the defector. The wounding is institutionalized and sanctified, and men unwittingly collude in their own crucifixion.”

“He’d valued his dignity more than his own life.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”