Hyeonseo Lee Quotes

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

Hyeonseo Lee

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

Hyeonseo Lee

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

Hyeonseo Lee

#4. 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,

Hyeonseo Lee

#5. 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

Hyeonseo Lee

#6. 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.

Hyeonseo Lee

#7. Kindness toward strangers is rare in North Korea. There is risk in helping others. The irony was that by forcing us to be good citizens, the state made accusers and informers of us all.

Hyeonseo Lee

#8. Kind people who put others before themselves would be the first to die. It was the ruthless and the selfish who would survive.

Hyeonseo Lee

#9. 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.

Hyeonseo Lee

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

Hyeonseo Lee

#11. This is the first time I will tell my story in English, a language still new to me. The journey to this moment has been a long one.

Hyeonseo Lee

#12. Suicide in Korean culture is a highly emotive means of protest. The regime regards it as a form of defection.

Hyeonseo Lee

#13. 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.

Hyeonseo Lee

#14. My closest friend at this time was my tiny pet dog - it was one of the cute little breeds that people in other countries put frocks on. I wouldn't have been allowed to do that, because putting clothes on dogs was a well-known example of capitalist degeneracy.

Hyeonseo Lee

#15. 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.

Hyeonseo Lee

#16. 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.

Hyeonseo Lee