Ji Seong-ho
| Ji Seong-Ho | |
|---|---|
| Born | North Korea |
| Residence | South Korea |
| Occupation | Human rights activist, speaker |
| Korean name | |
| Hangul | 지성호 |
| Revised Romanization | Ji Seongho |
| McCune–Reischauer | Chi Sŏngho |
Ji Seong-ho is a North Korean defector who currently lives in South Korea, where he works to raise awareness about the situation in the North and to help fellow defectors.
Ji grew up during the North Korean famine of the mid-1990s. In 1995, his grandmother died of starvation. “The family survived by eating the ground-up cores of corn husks and the roots of cabbages,” according to one report. Ji later said, “There was no meat and never any oil....Sometimes we could get seaweed and we would also eat mountain grasses....At harvest time, rats in the field would stash seeds down their burrows, which we would dig up. Often the rats would attack us and we would club some of them to death and that would give us a real feast.” Every few days, moreover, Ji would go out and steal coal from trains and try to exchange it in the markets for food.
On 7 March 1996, Ji, then in his early teens, was on a train gathering coal with his mother and sister when he lost consciousness from hunger while jumping from one train car to another and fell through a gap between the cars. The train ran him over and severed his left hand and foot. He later recalled regaining consciousness and seeing the rear of the train receding down the track and then realizing it had run over his body. “A piece of very thin flesh was holding my leg to the rest of my body. Blood was gushing out,” he recalled. “I needed to stop the bleeding. When I tried to work on my leg, I realized that three of my fingers on my left hand had been sheared off.” He underwent a four and a half hour operation without anesthetic. “The doctors were thinking whether they should let me die or if it was worth it to operate,” he later explained. “My mom was pleading and crying, so they decided to operate....On the operating table I could feel everything that was being done to my body. I was screaming at the top of my lungs....I felt the saw cutting into the bone of my leg, and the scalpel through my flesh. Every time I passed out from the pain the surgeon would slap my face to keep me awake. The whole hospital heard my screams....The simplest thing to do was cut off everything. They didn't try to save my remaining two fingers, they just cut off my hand.”
His father had been a devoted member of the ruling North Korean Workers' Party, but the accident and its aftermath changed his views. “When my father came to see me after the accident happened,” Ji later told The Guardian, “he finally realized that it was more important to save his family rather than the party.” For ten months, “his father nursed him back to health primarily by feeding him a little bit more food than usual, which he got by lessening the rations allocated for the other family members.” At times Ji blamed his father for his accident, because even though his father was a Party member Ji had to scrounge coal in order to eat. After the accident, his father “felt guilty” and “often apologized” to him. Eventually Ji realized “that it wasn’t my father’s fault, but the fault of the North Korean regime for not taking care of people.”
...
Wikipedia