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Yeonmi Park's long journey from North Korea to Chicago

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Yeonmi Park fled North Korea at the age of 13, only to endure sexual exploitation at the hands of human traffickers. Now she’s a human rights advocate.
SEOUL, South Korea — Polite, petite and soft-spoken, Yeonmi Park has emerged as an unlikely thorn in the side of North Korea’s blustering leader, Kim Jong Un.
Park fled North Korea at the age of 13,crossing the partly frozen Yalu River into China in 2007.
She says she endured repeated sexual exploitation at the hands of a human trafficker and watched as her mother was sold off and forced to marry a Chinese farmer. Park later trekked across the Gobi Desert to seek refuge in Mongolia before reaching South Korea.
Speaking out has earned her censure in her homeland. Pyongyang has called her a “poisonous mushroom” and a “human rights propaganda puppet.”
Park takes those epithets as compliments. She is glad to have made Kim’s regime “feel threatened by my voice.”
Now 24 and living in Chicago with an American husband and a newborn son, Park told NBC News how propaganda infused every school lesson. Kim Jong Il, the father of North Korea’s current leader, was regarded as a deity whose portrait hung in every home.
“I thought Kim Jong Il was a god who could read my mind,” she said. “I thought his spirit never dies, and I never thought he was a normal human being.”
Indoctrination made questioning one’s circumstances practically unthinkable, and voicing displeasure with the regime could put one’s whole family in danger. “I just never learned to think critically,” she recalled.
But smuggled foreign DVDs like “Titanic” offered a glimpse of life outside of the repressive, poverty-stricken pariah state.
At first, Park struggled to understand how a three-hour movie could be made about a love affair, rather than glorifying a regime.
Her state-run school taught fealty to the government and impressed a hard-line stance toward its enemies, America and Japan.
Park was born in the northern city of Hyesan, near the border with China. Her father trafficked in Chinese-made goods on the black market — clothes, cigarettes, sugar and rice — and later smuggled stolen metals into China. At one point he was arrested and sent to a forced labor camp.

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