Her “unusual” life story certainly gives her a unique vantage point from which to comment on global divisions. Because – having lived in Africa, America and Europe since leaving Pyongyang in 1990 – Macias thinks we’re all equally guilty of making oversimplified assumptions that we’re the goodies. And her extraordinary memoir, Black Girl from Pyongyang, asks Western readers to start asking themselves similar questions. Despite the temptation we all feel to cling to long-held world views, she began to challenge what she had been taught and, “saw fences in my mind that until then had been invisible to me”. When she told him to get up, he just laughed at her unquestioning devotion to authority and sighed that a girl brainwashed by the North Korean regime would never be able to think independently.īut Macias proved him wrong. Long taught to consider president Kim Il-sung as a godlike power, she was appalled to see a visiting Syrian student casually sit down on a newspaper with the Great Leader’s face printed on its front page. In 1989, Monica Macias experienced that unpleasant sensation for real, while at university in North Korea. In a brilliant 2008 comedy sketch, David Mitchell and Robert Webb played a pair of SS soldiers noticing that their hats were decorated with skulls and beginning to suspect they might be “the baddies”.
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