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Hey thanks for your thoughtful engagement on this! I grew up behind the Iron Curtain, in the middle of Siberia, and witnessed the “glory” of a totalitarian com

by e1g 5y ago

Hey thanks for your thoughtful engagement on this! I grew up behind the Iron Curtain, in the middle of Siberia, and witnessed the “glory” of a totalitarian communist government first hand. It was a different government, but also to a much more mature age than what Park saw herself. Since move abroad, I’ve seen “testimonials” from people with my background that were not technically wrong, but certainly were purified to fall into a specific spectrum of truth that is rewarded by the Western media. What strikes me the most is the way Park responded to the article - essentially she didn’t deny/engage any objections, and said she needs to review her (primary) sources. This position is as strong of an admission of “I don’t actually know what I’m talking about; these are folk stories I heard from someone else” as I’ve seen from my fellow countrymen and women. It’s not wrong, it’s “not even wrong”.

AzzieElbab 5y ago
Her experience is consistent with other North Koreans. I also grew up in the USSR, NK is on a completely different level of misery
- e1g 5y ago
  It's difficult to compare regimes based on individual narratives - in the USSR example, we have The Gulag Archipelago that is extremely rigorous, popular, and compelling (I read it in both the original and translated versions), but historically questionable, and the author's wife called it "folklore". For North Korea, the Wikipedia page for Ms. Park says this: "Many North Korean defectors accounts of North Korea, both good and bad, contradict claims Park has made. She has been accused of exaggeration and tall tales by some."
  - AzzieElbab 5y ago
    I looked into it. No one ever pointed to any significant discrepancies, not even on the wiki page. Does it really matter if her fathers was released a month earlier? Or that she mixed up some mountains names? I suspect she is being attacked for the political views she developed while living in US. Similar story with Ayana Hirsi Ali. Honestly, in todays climate Solzhenitsyn himself would have been cancelled within minutes
    - e1g 5y ago
      There are significant contradictions within her recollection, as cataloged in the article https://thediplomat.com/2014/12/the-strange-tale-of-yeonmi-park/ https://thediplomat.com/2014/12/the-strange-tale-of-yeonmi-p... Some examples (from the article) - * Park’s account of the mother’s crime changes constantly, depending it seems on her audience * Park says her father was sentenced to 17 or 18 years in prison. Her mother told us he was initially sentenced to a year, but later it was increased to ten years. * Park’s mother told us prosecutors interrogated her on and off for about a year – sometimes at home in Hyesan and sometimes elsewhere [...] But, in a recent BBC radio interview, Park claimed her mother was imprisoned for six months * When she spoke with us, Park told of how her and her sister, at just nine and eleven, were left to fend for themselves after their parents were jailed. “We have shower and wash our clothes there and then we go to the mountain to get the grass to eat,” she said. But, in the BBC radio interview, Park claimed her sister went to live at her uncle’s house * .... the host of the show says to Park’s mother, “When we talk about stories of people eating grass or people struggling to eat, Yeju (Park’s pseudonym) says, ‘Oh that never happened…’ * The story of her escape has multiple versions with incompatible fundamentals (like who escaped, when, and how), and increasing in brutality over time. The foundation of her story is a collection of self-contradicting childhood memories, making this case closer to the narration arc of Life of Pi (where the viewer is left guessing if the story was true or they were in the imagination of the protagonist). Even recent "vetted" "auto-biographical" stories like Lone Survivor can get so carried away in presenting the feeling of the situation that they sacrifice the facts, and we must be careful when trying to extract facts from the other side of the communication.

by e1g 5y ago

AzzieElbab 5y ago

Her experience is consistent with other North Koreans. I also grew up in the USSR, NK is on a completely different level of misery

e1g 5y ago
It's difficult to compare regimes based on individual narratives - in the USSR example, we have The Gulag Archipelago that is extremely rigorous, popular, and compelling (I read it in both the original and translated versions), but historically questionable, and the author's wife called it "folklore". For North Korea, the Wikipedia page for Ms. Park says this: "Many North Korean defectors accounts of North Korea, both good and bad, contradict claims Park has made. She has been accused of exaggeration and tall tales by some."
- AzzieElbab 5y ago
  I looked into it. No one ever pointed to any significant discrepancies, not even on the wiki page. Does it really matter if her fathers was released a month earlier? Or that she mixed up some mountains names? I suspect she is being attacked for the political views she developed while living in US. Similar story with Ayana Hirsi Ali. Honestly, in todays climate Solzhenitsyn himself would have been cancelled within minutes
  - e1g 5y ago
    There are significant contradictions within her recollection, as cataloged in the article https://thediplomat.com/2014/12/the-strange-tale-of-yeonmi-park/ https://thediplomat.com/2014/12/the-strange-tale-of-yeonmi-p... Some examples (from the article) - * Park’s account of the mother’s crime changes constantly, depending it seems on her audience * Park says her father was sentenced to 17 or 18 years in prison. Her mother told us he was initially sentenced to a year, but later it was increased to ten years. * Park’s mother told us prosecutors interrogated her on and off for about a year – sometimes at home in Hyesan and sometimes elsewhere [...] But, in a recent BBC radio interview, Park claimed her mother was imprisoned for six months * When she spoke with us, Park told of how her and her sister, at just nine and eleven, were left to fend for themselves after their parents were jailed. “We have shower and wash our clothes there and then we go to the mountain to get the grass to eat,” she said. But, in the BBC radio interview, Park claimed her sister went to live at her uncle’s house * .... the host of the show says to Park’s mother, “When we talk about stories of people eating grass or people struggling to eat, Yeju (Park’s pseudonym) says, ‘Oh that never happened…’ * The story of her escape has multiple versions with incompatible fundamentals (like who escaped, when, and how), and increasing in brutality over time. The foundation of her story is a collection of self-contradicting childhood memories, making this case closer to the narration arc of Life of Pi (where the viewer is left guessing if the story was true or they were in the imagination of the protagonist). Even recent "vetted" "auto-biographical" stories like Lone Survivor can get so carried away in presenting the feeling of the situation that they sacrifice the facts, and we must be careful when trying to extract facts from the other side of the communication.