Witness to an enlightening talk: Seeing Laura Ling, American journalist captured and imprisoned in North Korea

I got the chance to see Laura Ling speak at the local university last night.

Laura was one of the two American journalists who were captured and detained in North Korea in March 2009, and sentenced to 12 years at one of North Korea's notorious hard labor camps. Fortunately for them, former US President Bill Clinton acted as an envoy to try to get Kim Jong-il to grant the women a pardon, which was successful. They were released on August 5, 2009, 140 days after being imprisoned.

Some of the things that really stuck out about her talk were: 

1. How she was captured

Walking across the frozen river on advice of the local guide they'd hired then being chased back across it and dragged out of China 

2. Human connection with the guards

The moments there was a more human connection with her guards, like with the guard who went to her hometown for a visit to her family. Upon return, Laura asked her how it had been and the guard said it was good but she felt bad she got to see her family and Laura couldn't do that with hers

3. Finding happiness in the smallest things, every day

The way she found hope in a bad predicament by finding SOMEthing every day she was thankful for - like "I got to see a butterfly out the window today"

and especially 

4. Why it was (and had to be) Bill Clinton who got her out 

Because when Kim Jong-il's father had died 15 years previous, even with the strained relationship between N. Korea and the US, Bill had been one of the first to just call and express his sympathies - even before N. Korea's allies - and Kim Jong-il had wanted to meet him ever since then. 

She also showed some clips of her previous work/stories, which were interesting, such as following other journalists in a part of Mexico dominated by drug cartels, where simply being a journalist can get you not only killed in the crossfire but targeted, as well as the Burmese monks who were involved in the protests in 2007. 

At the time the capture happened, I was only vaguely aware of the incident, but when the newspapers said they were "journalists" of a show I'd never heard of, I sort of wrote it off as them just being some sort of hack "journalists" (ie basically reckless tourists with a camera) who didn't really know what they were doing - or weren't really doing anything journalistically at all. In fact, they were doing a story on human trafficking into China, where the N. Korean women were sold as brides, prostitutes, etc. 

Laura and her sister Lisa Ling, who played a key role in bringing Laura back, have since written a book about the ordeal, and while of course the whole incident was regrettable for a variety of reasons, Laura said that if any part of it or the subsequent book might help bring to better light the original issues she was trying to report on, that would be a favorable thing.