Hyeonseo Lee

In the 1990s, a devastating famine struck North Korea. Hyeonseo Lee, who lived near the Chinese border, began to realize that something was wrong – people should not be starving to death in the streets. The version of life depicted on the Chinese TV channels she could pick up was so different from North Korean propaganda channels. Life across the river just seemed brighter.

In 1997, Hyeonseo crossed the border and it would be 12 years before she saw her family again – only after they made a desperate 2,000-mile journey across China, suffered several arrests and benefited from the kindness of a stranger to make it to freedom in South Korea.

In China, Hyeonseo lived in constant fear that the authorities would catch her and send her back. After moving to South Korea that fear faded, but the life of a defector was still not easy.

“It is hard for the average person to imagine how it feels to realize that everything you learned was a lie,” she says.