Hyeonseo Lee’s story is a tale bound to pull at your heartstrings. She’s a North Korean refugee — and while helping her family flee the country in 2009, Lee’s mother and brother were detained in a Laos prison. At TED2013, Lee described how it was an enormously generous gift from a stranger that helped her […]
“North Korea is often in the news, conjuring images of missiles, weapons, dictatorships and sometimes eccentric habits,” says Adrian Hong, TED Fellow and guest curator of Session 9, Forces of Change at TEDGlobal 2013. “But underneath all that bluster is a country racked by starvation, by oppression, by fear, by concentration camps. In many ways, […]
A total stranger helped Hyeonseo Lee pay her mother and brother’s way out of jail as they fled from North Korea. Now, four years later, Lee has been reunited with that stranger, getting the chance to thank him in person. In Lee’s TED2013 talk, “My escape from North Korea,” she describes defecting from North Korea […]
North Korea is one of the most isolated countries in the world. So it’s exceptionally rare to hear a first-hand account of life there — in English, no less. In today’s brave talk, given at TED2013, Hyenseo Lee gives a riveting account of what it was like to grow up in North Korea. “I thought […]
Hyeonseo Lee saw her first public execution at age 7. A child growing up in North Korea, the moment affected her, but she didn’t have the frame of reference to understand the government repression going on around her. “When I was little, I thought my country was the best on the planet,” she says in […]
Each week, TEDx chooses four of our favorite talks, highlighting just a few of the great speakers from the TEDx community and its diverse constellation of ideas worth spreading. Below, give this week’s talks a listen. Let’s find the strength to change our slums: Boniface Mwangi at TEDxKibera While working as a photographer for a Kenyan news […]