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Profile: Ji-Hyun Park

Cherwell Comment
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Profile: Ji-Hyun Park

The gangrene was ripping through Ji-hyun Park’s leg. She was so close to death that the guards threw her out of the camp, after which she was trafficked to China for the second time in her life. This time she would make it all the way to the UK.

The experiences she has lived are of an incomprehensibly difficult life. She is one of few people who has managed to escape North Korea twice. Earlier this week, I had the chance to hear her story and speak with her in a talk hosted by Oxford International Relations Society.

“My story is the story of every woman in North Korea”, Ji-hyun accentuated at the beginning. She first defected from North Korea in 1998 with her brother after he was almost beaten to death for leaving the military. With their father’s help and urging, they made it to China.

Soon, she was separated from her brother and forced to marry a Chinese farmer by the human traffickers who got them across the border. Later, Ji-hyun and her arranged husband, who treated her like a physical and sexual slave, had a child, who was proclaimed stateless by the Chinese government. After neighbours discovered her identity, she was deported back to a North Korean labour camp and separated from her child. In 2008, she finally managed to escape North Korea permanently, reunite with her son, and settle in the UK.

Sharing her story to students of Oxford University was obviously an emotional experience for Ji-hyun, which showed both in her speech and the reaction of an enrapt, hundred-person audience.

Ji-hyun’s talk was filled with anecdotes of the horrifying conditions and human rights violations in North Korea. She described how she wished to hide her past when she came here. She told the hall how she couldn’t look people in the eye because, back in North Korea, guards considered eyecontact disrespectful.

Someone from the audience asked whether Ji-hyun finds anything in North Korea better than in the UK. Her immediate and definite answer was “No.”

When I got a chance to meet with her after the talk and ask her about her day-to-day life before she defected, I learnt that her experience had been immensely inhumane.

Her daily routine consisted of 20-hour shifts of hard, agricultural labour in horrific conditions. While there, she and three other women would regularly have to push tonnes of agricultural product in a cart.

“We were treated like animals”, Ji-hyun said. “The hygiene was terrible and we never had the chance to wash up”, Ji-hyun said, highlighting the difficulty of being a woman in these conditions. “I never thought about the future”.

They often did not have food, but would be told they can be fed on political ideas when actual food runs out.

It was here that she developed gangrene and nearly died after a severe beating by the guards and a festering infection due to unhygienic standards. She managed to convince the doctors not to amputate and was released to an uncle.

She’s said in the past that she only began to relax and plan for the future when her plane touched down at Heathrow after years of limbo, escape and trial.

Through her time in prison camps and early life in North Korea, she received no information about the outside world. “North Korea is closed”, Ji-hyun noted simply.

In many way, the state exists essentially separately from the rest of the world. “It would be important to send reliable information to North Korea”, she continued. “Today, many people in North Korea do understand that the government is problematic”.

Ji-hyun also emphasized how the change has to happen within North Korea and its people, “North Koreans must stand up and fight the North Korean government”.

Lack of information on the country extended to Ji-hyun’s knowledge of her family’s whereabouts. Ji-hyun still doesn’t know what happened to her father, whom she had to leave behind, when she first defected. On top of that, when she got sent back to a North Korean labour camp, she also couldn’t contact her child until she left the country again.

Sharing information has another big role in Ji-hyun’s life. When asked how to best raise awareness of the human rights violations in North Korea, Ji-hyun answer was: “We need to share our story”.

She stresses that those who have managed to get out need to spread the word of their experiences in order to raise awareness for North Korean people still in the country. Today, Ji-hyun works as a human rights activist for the European Alliance for Human Rights in North Korea and is developing their outreach program.

With a line out the door and a big crowd lingering behind to have a chat with Ji-hyun after the talk, it’s obvious people are interested in knowing about somewhere like North Korea and spreading its realities, as she does, is possible. In addition, Ji-hyun’s story sparked many questions from the audience ranging from censorship in North Korea to YouTuber Fun For Louis’s recent videos about the country.

Noting the increased interest in human rights violations from reporters, Ji-hyun lamented that many of these journalists were insensitive, wishing they would treat her more compassionately when asking for interviews about North Korea.

“We are also people”, she said simply.

Today, Ji-hyun has finally had the chance to experience happiness in moments many of us shamelessly take for granted, like a comfortable life in Manchester with her family.

“When I first came to UK, the most shocking thing was couples holding hands in public, kissing even”, Ji-hyun said. “It was shocking—and also amazing”. Ji-hyun described how her time living in England starkly contrasted with her experiences in North Korea. For example, public displays of affection were unheard of and it is deemed proper to exhibit very little emotion, even to one’s own family. It’s taken her time to get used to the cultural shift, but it’s getting easier.

“Nowadays, sometimes we even hold hands in public with my husband when we are shopping.”

In the end, Ji-hyun learned English to get closer with her kids. “One day my children brought home a letter from their school and homework, but I couldn’t help them”, Ji-hyun said. “I decided that I want to learn the language, as I couldn’t show emotion to my children otherwise.”

It is these kinds of remarks about happiness and emotion, which makes it so hard to imagine what kind of background Ji-hyun has. Yet, after hearing her story, it’s hard not be stricken by her composure and strength as she has waded through such difficult times only to make it out and, to use her words, share the story.

A treasure trove of unrequited love

Priya Khaira-Hanks
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A treasure trove of unrequited love

Unrequited love has become something of a hobby. I say ‘love’ for ease and aesthetics— ‘infatuations borne out of lust, boredom and having read too many romance novels’ doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. Unrequited love is something to make your toes tingle in an odd sort of way, something to push me to the bitter edge of my emotional capacity and draw me back down to Earth again. It often doesn’t even hurt. It’s just something I do to switch my brain off. My equivalent of knitting, Twitter or Suduko.

There may be times when the habit of unrequited love passes that fine line between enjoyable melancholy and real, raw, searing pain — and that is when you end up snottily crying in a stairwell, wishing you’d just played Candy Crush to pass the time instead.

On the bright side, my pathetic peccadillo has given me a treasure trove of unrequited love songs. It started with Kate Nash’s ‘Nicest Thing’, which captures the latent narcissism of unrequited love. It is not enough to find someone who is wonderful and savour the small golden things about their personality.

You need them to feel the exact same way about you. Nash sings about how she wishes her beloved would map every mole on her body and be unable to sleep or eat without her. She wants to be valorised and obsessed about in a way that is hardly realistic, or healthy. Yet her series of bratty demands, reaching a desperate crescendo alongside whining violins, perfectly encapsulate that secret human desire to be utterly, irrevocably and unconditionally adored.

A similar kind of bitter yearning pervades so much of Radiohead’s music. In ‘All I Need’,

Kate Nash

the mind-numbingly heartwrenching In Rainbows track, Thom Yorke evokes the self-destruction that often underlies our obsessions with people who will never want us back. When he laments “I am a moth/ Who just wants to share your light/ I am just an insect/Trying to get out of the night”, he seizes upon how unrequited lovers believe that all their happiness lies in a certain person, without realising that, like the unfortunate moth, their desire can never be anything but damaging.

Rufus Wainwright sings about a girl who falls for ‘The Art Teacher’; Rembrandts, Turners and John Singer Sargents feed into and inform her love for the man who opened up this world for her. Years later, she has swapped uniform for a pant-suit yet is still devoted to him. This is the stagnation of unrequited love, which, never having the chance to reach the logical conclusions of reciprocal love affairs, often never truly dies. Wainwright’s besotted teenager has grown up, but her outfit is still “uniformish”, gesturing towards the vulnerable, younger self so many of us still carry with us, especially in relation to our old, unfulfilled loves.

Review: The River

Nina Sandelson
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Review: The River

9/10

Jezz Butterworth’s The River demonstrates an acute awareness of the anxieties that plague human relationships, and Tallulah Vaughan’s 2nd week production at the Burton Taylor Studio retains every inch of this. We are invited into a cottage at an unspecified rural location by our similarly unnamed protagonist, a nod to the play’s embrace of universal themes. The protagonist is in the throes of an early romance with a woman he has enticed to his riverside cottage to introduce her to his foremost joy in life: sea trout fishing. However, after a scene change in which we witness a similar interaction with a previous lover we realise that this routine is, indeed, routine for him: and so begins a long series of lies that threaten to undo the parallel relationships we witness during the 80 minutes.

The cast is superb, with palpable energy and chemistry sustained between each of the couples throughout. This is in part aided by the intimacy of the Burton Taylor Studio as a performance space: no body language goes unnoticed by the audience, with each glance and hand placement adding to the intensity of the relationships portrayed. Charlie Tyrer plays the almost psychopathic ‘Man’ with commendable intensity, clearly conveying the complexities of an individual who struggles to approach his love for women with the same commitment as he does his love for fishing. He and Megan Thresh (The Woman) perfectly capture the awkward eager-to-please stages of an new relationship, keen to ‘do things’ for the other – ‘describe this sunset’ ‘read this poem’, and most importantly, come fishing – in attempt to engage with one another’s interests and passions. However, this exposes most clearly the metaphor of fishing for ‘reeling in’ women: just as she discovers she is by no means the first woman brought to the cottage, she reveals that she has been able to fish since childhood, prompting, albeit in a very comical scene, a rage comparable to her own. Thresh’s performance is excellent and very believable, with her tolerance being pushed ever closer to its limit.

Scene changes are handled cleverly and smoothly; the Woman leaves to shower whilst the Man prepares dinner, and the Other Woman (Ella Jackson) returns. This relationship is just as expertly acted, and Jackson brilliantly handles the emotional blow of romantic dishonesty. In the second half the script begins to drift into cliché, and Butterworth is at times too self-consciously literary: a kiss on the neck is like ‘gold shining down my spine into my stomach’ and the Man has ‘no next breath’ without saying ‘I love you’. This threatens to undo the subtlety of the first half, but the play is saved by the exceptionally engaging performances and right amount of ghostly tension that pervades the drama throughout. Overall the play is watertight and not worth missing: mysterious, comical and poignant in all the right doses.

Self-harm prevention app launched by Oxford students

Lowri Howard
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Self-harm prevention app launched by Oxford students

An app has been developed by Oxford University students with the aim of preventing students from self harm. Funded by the Oxford IT Innovation Challenge, Self-Heal is an anonymous and independent application that allows students to access motivation for recovery independently.

Self-Heal uses distraction tasks which are “inspired by techniques used in dialectical behavioural therapy (DBT), which is the frontline psychological therapy used in the UK to treat self-harm”. A gallery of over 750 different images and captions is used to motivate recovery, whilst the app also provides “distraction” techniques which is a key coping strategy to combat self-harming. Distraction methods include meditation and relaxation techniques, activities, and thought-provoking videos. Useful websites, articles and contact numbers are also available on the app at a click of a button in case of emergency.

It is estimated that 10 per cent of young people self-harm, with higher rates among women of which almost 1 in 5 between the ages of 16- 25 self-harm, which also leads to an increased risk of suicide.

Hadassah Buechner, a biomedical science undergraduate, has been working on the team to develop the app since July 2016, concerned about the stigma surrounding mental health issues like bipolar and schizophrenia. She argued that Self-Heal provides more immediate and accessible care than other support systems.

Buechner told Cherwell she wanted to widen the variety of support concerning mental health, emphasising that raising awareness about mental health problems should be a “top priority” for all Universities as academic stress has significantly contributed to its increase. Although the discussion about mental welfare and support is available in Universities, Buechner argues that this discussion “hasn’t yet reached its goal.”

The University currently offers both individual and group counselling services, a Peer Support Programme and weekly work shops such as mindfullness, combatting insomnia and overcoming panic. OUSU also provide mental health support through campaings such as Mind Your Head. Students can also see counsellors within college or their college doctor for mental health advice.

This news comes amid recent reports that demand for student mental health support including counselling has risen by 50 per cent in the last five years. First-year and international students are par- ticularly vulnerable, with higher proportions seeking counselling.

Keith Hawton, Professor of Psychiatry at Oxford, who has focused his research into self-harm told Cherwell that self-harm is an “extremely important public health issue” with a major impact on families, friends and colleagues.

Dervla Carroll, welfare representative at St Anne’s College JCR, sees the app as a step forward for mental health in Oxford. She told Cherwell, “We need to recognise the necessity of creating tools which are effective in managing ongoing mental health issues while simultaneously allowing easy integration into students lives. People who self-harm often struggle with a variety of triggers. For example, some people struggle with certain times of the day. In my opinion, this app is a natural step towards improving resource accessibility, which can only help to empower those struggling with self-harm.”

This follows recent improvements in how Oxford University is responding to mental health challenges. Student minds, a mental health charity for students, runs workshops at the start of every academic year. Nightline is a number that any student can call throughout the night for reassuring words. The service is free, anonymous and completely independent. It’s staffed by students from Oxford and Oxford Brookes from 0th week to 9th week running between 8pm and 8am.

The app is available now to download for free on Android and Apple.

Hash-up breakfast at the Randolph

Marianna Spring
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Hash-up breakfast at the Randolph

Oxford’s Randolph breakfast has come under fire from top food critic Giles Coren, who branded it “unfit for consumption in all but the grisliest prison”.

The five-star hotel located on Beaumont Street charges £21.50 for its fry up, which the Times writer awarded a 0 and branded “scandalous” in a tweet of the fry-up last Saturday.

The Randolph Hotel hit back at the review saying it was “disappointed” that Mr. Coren’s experience did not reflect its high standards.

It was also pointed out that for this price of £21.50 the food critic could have helped himself to 58 different products, including a range of cheeses, cold meats, pastries and cakes.

Despite his scathing review of the fry-up, columnist did give the hotel, which is situated just across the road from the Ashmolean Museum, a ten for its location.

In his review, he compared the mushrooms in the cooked breakfast to “cuttings from the scrotum of a tanned badger”.

He also added that the sausage was partly burnt and the single hash brown cold in the middle, claiming it is the “worst meal” he has been sold.

To test the accuracy of Coren’s claims, Cherwell sent an undercover reporter to the Randolph Thursday morning to sample the hotel’s full English breakfast. “To be honest, the bacon was undercooked, which is a cardinal sin,” he said. “But the breakfast did come with complementary tea and orange juice, so I think that’s more or less a wash. The eggs, as it so happened, were overcooked: I like a good runny egg, but the yolks were almost hardboiled. I have no complaints against the hash browns, black beans, or mushrooms, but I don’t think that says much at all. It is hard to butcher beans.

“More fundamentally, it remains unclear to me why anyone would enjoy an English breakfast at all. And the fact that the Randolph in no way impacted my view on this probably shows the meal wasn’t worth the £24 post-gratuity.”

News summary – 1st week

Philip Pope
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News summary – 1st week

The first instalment in our new series in which we summarise the most important news in Oxford each week. It has never been so easy to make it sound like you know a lot about current affairs.

New College’s new quad

Ellen Peirson-Hagger
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New College’s new quad

New College are to put forward multi-million pound proposals for off-site accommodation built around a new quad. The proposals would see the creation of the college’s first new quad for more than a century.

The development would span 500 square metres on the college’s Savile Road site. Plans include seventy student rooms, shared dining facilities, a common room, and lecture theatre. A new entrance to the site would be created on Mansfield Road. The proposals also include plans to provide new facilities for New College School.

New College is yet to submit its plans to Oxford City Council. A spokesman said it was first seeking feedback from local residents.

The college is due to hold a public exhibition of early designs on Wednesday and Thursday next week. Residents are invited to view designs of the scheme between 3pm and 7pm at its Holywell street site.

The proposals have been drawn up by David Kohn Architects (DKA), who won a private competition hosted by New College last year. DKA were founded in London in 2007. If the plans go ahead, DKA will introduce a “stone façade that bisects the site, holding back rooms to the north from landscapes to the south. The wall gently curves in plan to create a horseshoe-shaped central land- scape room. It continues to meander until it meets two existing Victorian buildings, creating a second quad to the east and a new children’s play- ground for New College School to the west. The resulting landscape and building plans are equivalent, like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle..”

Harry Samuels, Classicist at New College, told Cherwell, “While the style itself looks a bit strange, this will add sorely needed accommodation to New College, hopefully allowing third-year undergraduates to all live in finally. The addition of new practice rooms is also very exciting.”

New College warden Miles Young said, “This is a genuinely exciting plan and it will relieve pressure significantly on Oxford’s housing market. It also dramatically improves the facilities at New College School, while giving both college and community a new multi-purpose lecture hall. The plans are both striking and sympathetic.”

The Oxford Design Review Panel, which vets planning proposals for the city council, backs the new designs for Savile Road.

Alex Hollingsworth, the city council’s executive board member for planning said, “The council’s planning policies support the provision of more purpose-built student accommodation, in order to reduce the pressure on housing across Oxford.

“While this scheme will eventually be judged on its merits, it is always good to see proposals of this kind come forward.”

The college was the first in Oxford to be designed around the now ubiquitous quadrangle. New’s Front Quad was completed in 1386.

Students protest with red ribbons at matriculation

Jack Hunter
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Students protest with red ribbons at matriculation

Students wore red ribbons and squares at the University matriculation ceremony this Saturday, in support of what campaigners describe as “a free and decolonised education”. The campaign, styling itself as ‘matriculACTION’, was organised by a new collaboration between the Free Education Oxford and Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford groups, in an attempt to “demonstrate that the growing neoliberalisation and coloniality of the university are connected”.

Red ribbons and squares, as well as leaflets, were handed out to students outside the ceremony, as campaigners also staged a decolonisation protest under the Bridge of Sighs.

Lily MacTaggart, a campaigner with Free Education Oxford, said its purpose was to “call for free education and get people involved in our campaign”. She highlighted Oxford University’s decision to implement higher fees as one of the key points of issue, calling it “awful for access, as lower income students will be less ambitious with their applications”.

In September, Oxford University announced that undergraduate tuition fees would rise for current students to £9,250 in September 2017, up from the £9,000 cap set by the government in 2012. The government is expected to begin to enforce the new cap later this year.

Wadham fresher Rachel Collett, who wore a red square and ribbon, said, “any rise in fees can really put off students from underprivileged backgrounds, as they think an Oxford education is too expensive for them.”

A spokesperson for Rhodes Must Fall told Cherwell that “free education is instrumental to decolonisation. Increased reliance on donorship and private sponsorship limits democratic engagement, Oriel being a key example of this.”

The fusion of RMF and Free Education led to some controversy. Michael Kurtz, who wore a red square, told Cherwell, “I resent the fact that they amalgamated the two causes”. Also, red goes really badly with subfusc.”

Fresher Vida Adamczewski said she wore a red ribbon to protest that “Oxford doesn’t recognise its colonial history and should do more to promote diversity in the syllabus and student body.”

A University spokesperson said, ‘We expect our students to hold us to account and work towards a more diverse Oxford, and we are working across the university with them to improve Oxford’s diversity and ensure that the experiences of all students are represented and respected at Oxford. We are actively discussing with our students what more can be done to ensure a fully inclusive university experience.’

At a meeting organised by Free Education Oxford on Wednesday evening, OUSU VP for Academic Affairs, Eden Bailey, accused the university of “deception and confusion” in its dealings with student representatives, while members of the group encouraged “direct action” in the coming year to combat the “neoliberal wet dream” of the implementation of the government’s TEF policy and fee increases. Free Education Oxford told Cherwell that, “in our view a truly Free Education can only be a decolonised and anti-racist education”, citing the Fees Must Fall campaign in South Africa as evidence of the “intersection between the two issues…which has been incredibly successful.”

Ed Miliband: “I’m not going anywhere”

Tony Diver
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Ed Miliband: “I’m not going anywhere”

In an event at Nuffield College yesterday, Ed Miliband revealed that he has no plans to leave the House of Commons, and intends to stay and remain involved in parliamentary politics.

The seminar, which was advertised on the Department of Politics and International Relations lecture list for Michaelmas 2016, was attended by between 150 and 160 students.

The event was organised by Lord Wood and John Cruddas, both former staffers of Labour governments and visiting fellows at Nuffield, and is the first of a series of high-profile Labour MP speaking events on ‘The Future of the Left’, taking place in even weeks of Michaelmas Term.

Miliband was interviewed on stage by Steve Richards, chief political columnist of The Independent. Richards asked him whether he would remain in the Commons for the foreseeable future, and take a “high-profile” role in public de- bates, as he did in support of Remain during the EU referendum campaign.

Miliband replied that he is “not going anywhere” and has “no plans to leave Parliament”.

Felix Westerén, a second-year PPEist, told Cherwell, “The event itself was good, and gave us a comprehensive view of where Miliband stands now.

“Still although he can identify the issues facing Labour and their root causes quite lucidly, he seems to be as clueless as everyone else about how they can be overcome.”

Miliband’s former opponent at the ballot box, David Cameron, was also spotted in Oxford this week, visiting his old college Brasenose and the Blavatnik School of Government.

According to Matt Burwood, President-Elect of OUCA, Cameron’s visit was “not entirely surprising”, as he was “trying to discover what comes after politics by returning to where it all began.

“Turning a corner into Brasenose’s central quad, I was suddenly on collision course with the most recognisable face in recent British politics, and the party leader whose brand of liberal “One Nation” Conservatism first drew me to the Party,” he said.

“A chance to meet him without crowds in a re- laxed environment was quite the unexpected treat.”

Trinity freshers drunk and chanting during matriculation

Tony Diver
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Trinity freshers drunk and chanting during matriculation

Trinity College freshers were asked on Tuesday to make a charitable donation of ten pounds, to account for their “disgraceful behaviour” at Saturday’s matriculation ceremony.

In an email addressed to all undergraduate freshers, Trinity Dean Professor Jonathan Mallinson firmly condemned the actions of the freshers, whom he claimed behaved in a “noisy and undignified manner”, which he also described as “neither appropriate, clever nor funny”.

Freshers sang ‘We Will Rock You’, ‘Wonderwall’ and chanted “what do we think of Merton?” at other colleges’ students inside the Sheldonian. One Trinity first-year told Cherwell that “this was interspersed with Mexican waves and lots of stamping”.

Another fresher reported that “most people had had a bottle of prosecco before entering the Sheldonian” for their ceremony, which began at 1pm.

Professor Mallinson’s email to the first-years after the event said, “I recognise you have not
all contributed to equally to this display, but you must all take some measure of responsibility for the shameful impression which you gave to other members of the Uni- versity and to the general public”, it said.

“I am therefore asking you all, each individually, to make a donation of £10 to Great Ormond Street Hospital, a hospital dedicated to helping children who would doubtless be delighted to have the opportunities which you thought fit to treat so casually.

“I am prepared to think that you now understand that such behaviour brought into disrepute a college of which you have been a member for barely two weeks.
I shall judge by your response whether that conclusion is justified, or whether it will be necessary to take further action. I look forward to hearing from you.”

A Trinity fresher, who preferred not to be named, told Cherwell, “I think the behaviour was bad form given the opportunity invested in us and the traditional nature of the ceremony.

“However distasteful, I don’t think it was malicious, once a few chants had started people started thinking it was the norm, given that they had no experience of such an occasion.

“I think it was an error of judgement rather than deliberate rudeness. College responded appropriately and leniently in a way which should benefit a good cause.”

When contacted for comment, the Dean of Trinity said that his email was “self-explanatory”, but wished to stress that freshers were not required to pay a fine, but a donation to a medical charity.

A Trinity fresher told Cherwell, “the vast majority had drunk a lot (a bottle of prosecco at least) on Saturday.”

This is not the first incident of disruption at Matriculation celebrations. In 2012, Brasenose freshers and second-years received fines ranging from £25 to £100 for hosting and attending parties in college rooms. Three students were interviewed by the Dean and were assigned scout-work as a punishment.

Great Ormond Street Hosiptal was founded in 1852 and cares for approximately 268,000 children per year. Throughout its history it has been funded by charitable donations.

Trinity JCR committee declined to comment on the Matriculation incident.

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