The first time Monica Macias met an American, she ran away.
She was terrified, she said, convinced that she was in imminent danger.
The teachings came from the men who raised her — not one but two brutal dictators.
Francisco Macias Nguema, her biological father and the first president of Equatorial Guinea, committed so many atrocities during his reign that the country was dubbed the “Dachau of Africa.”
When he was faced with violent uprisings, Nguema sent Macias and her sister to stay with his friend Kim Il Sung — the ruthless leader of the North Korea, who had 100,000 of his own people imprisoned in gulags. (Macias’ brother, Teo, meanwhile was sent to Cuba.)
Kim Il Sung, who died in 1994, founded a dynasty of dictatorship: his grandson Kim Jong Un is the current supreme leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
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, “Black Girl from Pyongyang: In Search of My Identity” (Duckworth).
“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.”
When Macias arrived in Beijing, China, as a 17-year-old foreign exchange student, unable to speak Chinese and feeling like an outsider, it was her first time traveling outside of Pyongyang, North Korea, where she’d lived since she was 7.
She stumbled upon a white man willing to help her, but immediately recognized his accent as American.
“I froze,” Macias said. “A thousand thoughts crowded my mind.” When he reached out, “I snatched my hand away, turned and started to run, with all the force I could muster.”
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.
Her fear might seem ironic, given her backstory.
It wasn’t until Macias left Korea that she learned the most important male role models in her life were considered monsters.
“The popular depictions of both Macias and Kim were shattering to me,” she writes. It plunged her “into an identity crisis” in which she was forced to question everything — not just about her own memories of her family and the culture in which she was raised, but the assumptions made by the rest of the world.
“Why do Western narratives about Macias and Kim Il Sung differ from my own knowledge and personal experience?” she writes. “Why are these narratives accepted as truth? Do they tell the complete story?”
There was only one place where Macias could get answers.
“I needed to go to America, North Korea’s enemy number one, to understand the antagonism between these two countries,” 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.
Some of the things she’d been told about America turned out to be true — like an obsession with capitalism.
“Every conversation I got into, it was always about money,” she told The Post. “Eating, drinking, medicine, marriage, it was all driven by this desire to make more money.”
But she learned the most about Americans just by eavesdropping.
Macias traveled from New Jersey to Manhattan, hanging out at coffee shops just to listen in on conversations. “The things they talked about, it was like the silly stuff that my friends would talk about in Pyongyang,” she says. “Like boyfriends and dating problems and ‘Are you married yet?’ It’s very human, and it was very familiar.”
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.”
There were never questions filled with curiosity, just condemnation. One of the most common things they told her, Macias said, was, “I’m glad you left that country and came here to embrace freedom.”
“They would immediately jump to conclusions,” Macias said. “‘You are a communist,’ ‘You are brainwashed,’ or ‘You shouldn’t defend them. They are all evil.’ When I asked whether they had been to North Korea or how they knew the things they were saying to be true, their answer was: ‘I’ve never been there, and I don’t want to’ or ‘I learned it from the news and from defectors.’”
She didn’t fight back, she says. She only listened, and asked questions. And then, in her private moments, asked questions of herself. Was she remembering her own past accurately?
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.
“Papa,” as they called him, “would kiss our foreheads and ask whether we had eaten and done our homework,” Macias writes. Most of all, she remembers falling asleep in his lap as they watched movies together.
As for Kim Il Sung, she had less contact with him, but Macias recalls “his charismatic face, always with a smile,” and his advice that the “best weapon you have is education. Study a lot and never stop learning.”
Kim Il Sung told Macias and her siblings “that our father was a good friend, a good person,” she writes. “I had always imagined him as a hero who fought for the independence of our country.”
Growing up in North Korea wasn’t easy. She knew she was different, and not just because she was the only African girl in her class.
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.”
When her father was ousted from power in Africa, overthrown in a coup d’état by his nephew and executed in September of 1979, Macias fell into what she calls “traumatic amnesia… like a malfunctioning computer file that paralyses the machine and turns the screen black.”
It wasn’t until much later, when she met foreigners who insisted that her dads — both of them — were murderous tyrants, that she decided to “do my own research,” she said.
“For many British people, Winston Churchill was a hero,” she told The Post. “But for many non-rich, non-white people, like Nigerians, he was a villain. That just shows me that the narrative is related to power and race.”
Her biological father, she said, “claimed he was innocent, asked for a full investigation. But they wouldn’t listen to him, refused to give him a trial. So I sometimes ask myself, what would have happened if my father was white?”
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.
In 2007, she moved to Seoul, the capital of South Korea, and just 121 miles from Pyongyang. It’s roughly the same distance between Manhattan and Scranton, Pennsylvania. But in her youth, South Korea “seemed to be in a different universe,” writes Macias.
The adults she met in Seoul felt the same.
“Can young people in Pyongyang sit around and chat freely like we do here?” One of her new friends asked her. Another chimed in, “Come on, those people [in North Korea] are limited as to what kind of happiness they can enjoy.”
It was, Macias recalled, eerily similar to the things she was told about South Koreans during her childhood in North Korea.
“Whether it’s America or Korea or Guinea or Spain, we’re all the same,” Macias told The Post. “We have the same insecurities, the same worries, the same dreams.”
She realizes now that “I had been brainwashed,” she said. “An invisible fence had been erected in my mind of which I was unaware.”
And the only way over that fence was to overcome her fears and meet the people she’d be taught to despise.
“The mental barricade I had nurtured … for so long crumpled in a second,” she said of interacting with South Koreans and Americans. “When people interact in good faith and get to know each other, without the intervention of ideology and politics, respect and mutual learning flourish.”