Text to World

In the book " In the Shadow of the Sun", the story mainly focuses on escaping North Korea and to get back their father who has been kidnapped by the military forces, in the book it seems to take a little bit of planning and smart ways to move just to escape and they eventually do with the help of friends outside the military and inside, using smugglers and innocent citizens to help feed them and shelter them. But in the real world it's not that easy as the military in reality is more sadistic than they are in the book, they kidnap citizens and anybody who tries to think of escaping, the book does really well with showcasing the harshness of the KPA. (Korean People's Army) They always ask the citizens for help of finding anybody who looked suspicious or anybody who has been hiding in alleyways in hopes to identify them usually interrogating innocent citizens just to get a word out of them cause if they don't comply they get publicly executed for not complying with the rules of North Korea. In a Ted Talk, a brave woman talks about her experiences about escaping from North Korea, she has always lived there thinking this country is like other countries, that public executions were normal and that is how life is everywhere but she soon learned that it was never like this everywhere, that this was the worst country to live in, she had experienced a woman laying there lifeless with a toddler in her arms who was hungry and starving, she knew that she didn't want to be here anymore, she wanted to be with her family, but soon she was sent to China to live with her relatives, but the constant fear she felt, saying "North Korean refugees are considered in China as illegal migrants, so I was living in constant fear that my identity could be revealed." (Lee 2013) She wasn't there legally, so that if the Chinese police knew that she was North Korean, they would send her back immediately, so she had to hide for ten whole years as a person she knew she wasn't but after ten years she took the risk to go to South Korea, she slowly realized that it was more different than she imagined but unexpectedly, she knew what she wanted was her family to be there with her, she took a plane back to China and started planning extensively on how to get her family out. "Since my family couldn't speak Chinese, I had to guide them somehow through more than 2,000 miles." (Lee 2013) She was able to get them to China and convince the Chinese police they were deaf and stupid people and continued on to Laos, she bribed the officer but even after all that her family was arrested and jailed for a month, she was able to get them out but was jailed again. She had lost all hope, she was so close but it wasn't enough she thought. That's when a strange man asked her what was wrong, after explaining the situation, the man paid for all of the fine and got them out, she lived happily with her parents cause of that stranger and kindness was also in play in the book, there was an innocent girl who had her father arrested in the book for nothing, the girl took over her father's duties and everyone looked at her like nothing. She wanted to help people and she stumbled upon Mia and Simon, helping these two foreigners in which she knew nothing about, fed them and sheltered them even though she knew that if they were caught, she would be either thrown in jail or executed. The book made such deep connections with friendship and kindness and I'd say the book is very accurate with certain things to real-life situations and connects deeply to the world.