Vanessa Van Pak, a teenager whose parents fled as refugees from North Korea to America. Growing up as a child she beared witness to the pain and hardship of her parents remembering their troubling past. Although Vanessa herself wasn’t born in North Korea, she had a very cruel and unpleasant perspective of North Korea. She felt that the DHS (Department of homeland security) was treating Marcus, her best friend, and herself in a way that North Korea would treat their own citizens. In the North Korean concentration camps, most prisoners who were there were convicted of opposing the government. This is similar in a sense to how Vanessa and her friends were locked up for allegedly committing acts of terrorism. Terrorism is when you use violent actions …show more content…
Box room torture is when prisoners are put into a cell, left alone to starve as they get no food or water until the guard or officer gets what they want. Darryl, one of Vanessa’s close friends, never came out of the prison and was assumed dead. Concentration camps in North Korea were known to make secret executions. Darryl was presumed dead from the terrorist attack since the DHS covered it up. North Korean guards would make sure that no one would know of those who were secretly executed by covering it up as an accident. North Korea controls what their citizens see and constantly check on what they are doing by giving them no privacy or freedom. The citizens of San Francisco are constantly being surveilled, the DHS tracks where people travel, what they do, and their online activity. There are even officers on every street monitoring citizens. Citizens cannot do anything without be watched. In the same manner, being children of Sri lankan parents who evaded the Sri lankan war, relates to Vanessa’s fear of North Korea, knowing the terrors that our parents were forced to experience helped us develop a strong fear of our homeland