In her new book, “Black Girl from Pyongyang,” Monica Macias writes about growing up in North Korea under the care of leader Kim Il Sung after being sent away by her own father, Francisc…
She writes about her unique upbringing, and her shock in learning how the rest of the world viewed her two fathers, in her new book, ““I grew up believing that America was an evil country who wanted to destroy North Korea,” Macias, 51, told the Post. “It became embedded in my mind.”
Everything she had learned about America as a kid — from the films she watched and the books she read — painted the US as a sinister empire intent on bringing ruin to her homeland. And she accepted it all as “unquestionable fact,” she writes. Macias flew to New York City in December of 2004, determined to “meet as many people as possible.” She found an apartment in Queens and a part-time job working at a local kindergarten.
When New Yorkers learned of her history, including her upbringing in North Korea, they made sure she knew that she’d escaped from the “Axis of Evil.” Her memories of her father, Francisco, are almost mundane in their ordinariness. She remembers him teaching her and her siblings, Teo and Maribel, how to weed in the garden.
Her boarding school classmates “did nothing without asking permission,” she writes. “I was used to speaking on a whim, when the thought occurred to me, but this was frowned upon. ‘Remember, you are a soldier!’ my teacher responded. I could not understand how I could be a soldier in a foreign country.”
In America, Macias found no one willing to entertain the notion that her fathers, much less her home countries, were anything less than corrupt.One of her neighbors in Queens even tried warning her friends that “I was a North Korean spy trying to recruit them to espionage,” Macias recalled with a laugh.
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