A former trainer who fled North Korea and finally discovered a life within the UK is ready to run for workplace in upcoming native elections.
Jihyun Park will enter the British political historical past books if she wins a seat in native elections in early May.
She is standing as a candidate for Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party within the northern English city of Bury.
Jihyun Park’s outstanding story
Park first left North Korea in 1998 along with her brother after they witnessed their father and uncle starve to loss of life in a famine that swept the secretive nation.
However, she was trafficked to a Chinese man who stored her “like a slave,” she informed DW in 2015. They had one little one collectively.
She was unable to assert asylum standing in China, a rustic that has shut ties to North Korea, and was finally arrested and brought again to North Korea in 2004, leaving her son behind. She was despatched to a compelled labor camp to hold out work beneath harsh circumstances.
But she bought a second likelihood to flee. Park contracted gangrene on the jail camp, inflicting jail guards to ship her house believing that she would die.
She fled as soon as extra to China to be reunited along with her son earlier than touring on to Mongolia. She was helped by a form stranger who later turned her husband.
In 2007, a Korean pastor in Beijing put them in contact with the United Nations, which relocated the household to Britain.
She has lived in Bury since 2008. She now spends her time serving to different refugees from North Korea modify to life in Britain.
Repaying kindness
“We had a lot of problems [at first] because we didn’t speak English,” Park informed information company Reuters, including that the native council was very useful.
Additionally, “people [were] really nice to us, so they gave us lots of gifts, and that’s why today my family is [living] here.”
“I want to pay back this debt of gifts to the residents,” Park defined.