Yeonmi Park

Yeonmi Park (born 4 October 1993) is a North Korean defector, YouTuber, author, and American conservative activist, described as being "one of the most famous North Korean defectors in the world". She fled from North Korea to China in 2007 at the age of 13 before moving to South Korea, then to the United States. Park made her media debut in 2011 on the show Now On My Way to Meet You, where she was dubbed "Paris Hilton" due to her stories of her family's wealthy lifestyle. She came to wider global attention following her speech at the 2014 One Young World Summit in Dublin, Ireland. Park's memoir In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom was published in September 2015, and as of 2023 has sold over 100,000 copies. During the 2020s, she became a voice for American conservatism with speeches, podcasts and the 2023 publication of her second book, While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America.
The authenticity of Park's claims about life in North Korea – many of which have contradicted her earlier stories or those of her mother and other defectors from North Korea – have been the subject of skepticism. Park attributed these discrepancies to her imperfect memory and language skills, and the co-author of Park's auto-biography, Maryanne Vollers stated that Park was the victim of a North Korean smear campaign, whose timeline of recollections is inconsistent as is common among trauma survivors. A 2014 article in The Diplomat by Mary Ann Jolley documented numerous inconsistencies in Park's memories and descriptions of life in Korea, and a July 2023 Washington Post lifestyle article stated that her claims about North Korea had long been questioned. Political commentators, journalists and professors of Korean studies have criticized Park's accounts of life in North Korea for having various inconsistencies, contradictory claims, and exaggerations. Other North Korean defectors and scholars have expressed concern that the tendency for "celebrity defectors" to exaggerate about life in North Korea will bring doubts on their stories and "overshadow genuine concerns about the dire state of human rights there", according to The Washington Post.
Park runs the YouTube channel "Voice of North Korea by Yeonmi Park", which as of July 2023 has over one million subscribers. Her political views have been characterized as "American conservative", and she has criticized the concepts of political correctness and woke culture in the United States, drawing parallels between political correctness in the U.S. and North Korea. In early 2023, screenshots of Park's 2021 interview with Joe Rogan became the center of memes accusing her of embellishing her stories.
Early life
North Korea (1993–2007)
Park was born on 4 October 1993 in Hyesan, Ryanggang, North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of Korea – DPRK); her father was Park Jin-Sik and her mother was Byeon Keum-sook. Her older sister, Eun-mi, was born in 1991. Her childhood was during the North Korean famine.
Journalists have stated that Park's memories and descriptions of her early life are often contradictory and at odds with those of her mother, as well as descriptions of life in North Korea by other defectors, and that her story has changed depending upon the audience.
Park's father was a civil servant who worked at the Hyesan town hall as a member of the ruling Workers' Party of Korea who supplemented his income by smuggling goods from China.
Park stated at the Oslo Freedom Forum when she was 21 that her childhood views of the ruling Kim family changed when she watched an illegally imported VHS of the 1997 film Titanic, which caused her to realize as a teen the "oppressive nature" of the North Korean government. She states that the movie taught her the true meaning of love and gave her "a taste of freedom".
Leaving North Korea for China (2007)
Park left North Korea in 2007 when she was 13. According to Park's account published in The Telegraph in 2014, after her father "bribe[d] his way out of jail", the family began to plan their escape to China, but Park's older sister Eunmi left for China early without notifying them. The family feared that they would be punished for Eunmi's escape, so Yeonmi and her mother left North Korea by traveling through China with the help of brokers who smuggle North Koreans into China. They escaped by crossing the border into Changbai Korean Autonomous County, Jilin, China, on the night of 30 March 2007.
According to the 2014 Telegraph account, and an account published in 2015 by The Guardian, Park's father was sick and stayed behind in North Korea, thinking his illness would slow them down. Other statements by Park in the same time frame suggested that her father had joined them in the crossing to China. After crossing the border, Park and her mother headed for Jilin. They unsuccessfully tried to find Park's sister, Eunmi, asking the traffickers about her whereabouts. Park and her mother assumed that Eunmi had died. Park's and her mother's accounts of her father's death differ.
Park and her mother found a Christian shelter headed by Chinese and South Korean missionaries in Qingdao. Due to the city's large ethnic Korean population, they were able to evade the attention of authorities. With the help of the missionaries, they fled to South Korea through Mongolia.
Claiming asylum in Mongolia
Park states that in February 2009, after spending two days at a Christian shelter in Qingdao, she and her mother travelled through the Gobi Desert to Mongolia to seek asylum from South Korean diplomats. Park claims that they reached the Mongolian border and that afterwards the General Authority for Border Protection guards stopped them and threatened to deport the pair back to China. Park recalls that at this point she and her mother pledged to kill themselves with their own razors, stating, "I thought it was the end of my life. We were saying goodbye to one another." Their actions persuaded the guards to let them through, but Park says they were placed under arrest and kept in custody at a detention center at Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia. Park later said in a podcast interview with Jordan Peterson that she believed the guards were toying with them since Mongolia's official policy on North Korean refugees is to deport them to South Korea. On 1 April 2009, Park and her mother were sent to Ulaanbaatar's Chinggis Khaan Airport to fly them to Seoul Incheon International Airport. She later told The Telegraph that she felt relieved when Mongolian customs officials waved her through. Many years later the South Korean National Intelligence Service informed Park that her sister, Eunmi, had escaped to South Korea via China and Thailand. Park and her mother eventually reunited with Eunmi.
South Korea (2009–2014)
Park was automatically granted South Korean citizenship after arriving in Seoul in 2009.
After receiving training at the South Korean Ministry of Unification's Hanawon Resettlement Center, Park and her mother settled in Asan. They had difficulty adjusting to their new lives in South Korea, but they found jobs as shop assistants and waitresses. Despite arriving in South Korea with only a second-grade education, Park achieved her high school equivalency after eighteen months. She was admitted to Dongguk University in Seoul.
Now On My Way to Meet You (2011)
In 2011, Yeonmi Park was a participant on the South Korean reality television program Now On My Way to Meet You, a show which has been credited for launching Park's career as a public figure. The program – broadcast on Channel A – began as an emotional dossier style documentary focusing on the reuniting of North Korean defectors with their families. It later evolved into a variety show featuring young and attractive North Korean defectors, who were dubbed "defector beauties". According to media academic Richard Murray, Park's ability to speak English, coupled with her being a young and physically attractive woman, contributed to her rise in popularity with journalists.
Park became known as "the Paris Hilton of North Korea" due to her relatively privileged upbringing in North Korea compared to her co-stars; her family had access to numerous luxury goods. Park's mother, who also appeared on the show, remarked that Park could not comprehend that her less privileged co-stars had come from the same country.
Life in the United States (2014–present)
In 2014, Park was selected as one of the BBC 100 Women. She moved to New York City in 2014 to complete her memoir while continuing to work as an activist. Park became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2021, and was married to an American man named Ezekiel from 2017 to 2020, with whom she had a son.
Park published her memoir, In Order to Live, in 2015, where she shared her journey from defection to higher education. She attended classes at Barnard College and then was accepted to the Columbia University School of General Studies, starting there in the Fall 2016 semester. She graduated from Columbia in 2020.
In 2021, she described her education at Columbia University as "forcing you to think the way they want you to think", claiming that she was scolded by a professor for enjoying literature by Jane Austen. Columbia University declined to comment on this anecdote. Park criticized political correctness at Columbia University, saying, "I thought America was different but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying", and added that "America is not free". She said that "our education system is brainwashing our children to make them think that this country is racist and make them believe that they are victims."
Following the publication of her memoir, Park "began presenting a far more harrowing description of life in North Korea than she had shared with South Korean TV fans", according to The Washington Post. Experts on North Korea noted that Park had shifted the tone of her portrayal of life in North Korea following her jump from reality television to speaking at human rights conferences, going from claiming to have lived a life of luxury to claiming to have never seen eggs or indoor toilets.
Veracity of claims
As early as 2014, journalists began questioning Park's stories; between 2014–2015, John Powel, a journalist based in Seoul, wrote two articles criticising Park's claims and questioning the inconsistencies. In 2016 he recalled that both himself and his employer "got into a load of shit" following the publication of his articles, with right-wing political activists both online and off-line questioning the validity of Park's stories. In December 2014, Mary Ann Jolley of The Diplomat, who had previously worked with Park on a documentary, wrote of problems in Park's story. The Diplomat also published a response from Park, in which she said that the discrepancies in her stories came from her limited English skills at the time, adding that her "childhood memories were not perfect" and that she had begun to review her accounts more often with her mother.
In the face of the scepticism and criticism that Park's stories have garnered, the co-author of Park's auto-biography, Maryanne Vollers, stated in 2015 that she believes that Park is the victim of a targeted smear campaign by the North Korean government. Vollers cited past cases where the North Korean government has attempted to silence critics of their government, and stated that she received a strange "email warning [her] not to write the book" just weeks before a video titled "The Human Rights Propaganda Puppet, Yeon-mi Park" was released on a website run by North Korea, which Vollers described as:... having the production values of a Stalin-era newsreel, the footage was chilling: some of her uncles, aunts and cousins still living in North Korea were paraded in front of the camera to denounce her. The worst they could come up with was that Yeon-mi was an ambitious child. But it was horrifying for her to see them so vulnerable. At least she knew they were still alive.
Vollers wrote that she had noticed Park's jumbled recollections, but attributed them to her not yet being fluent in English, that Park had been trafficked in China so changed details in her story to avoid revealing her secret, and that memory processing is impacted by survivor trauma. Vollers cited Judith Lewis Herman, a Harvard University psychiatrist and trauma expert, who stated that:Traumatised people don’t give you a perfect, complete narrative on the first go-round. You see this all the time with refugees seeking asylum. That doesn’t mean their story isn't credible, because the gist of their story is consistent.
Vollers reported that she had "been able to verify [Park's] story through family members and fellow defectors who knew her in North Korea and China".
In 2023 The Washington Post published an article by Will Sommer after the launch of Park's second book, While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America, described as Park's "disenchantment with American liberalism", writing that "Park is making the media rounds to raise alarms about another nation: the United States". Sommer wrote:"But while Park's moral authority as political pundit rests on her experience as a refugee from an authoritarian pariah state, she has been dogged for years by accusations that some of her more lurid tales of state vengeance and extreme societal decay don't add up. Scholars on North Korea who are skeptical of Park say she's symptomatic of a booming market for horror stories from the cloistered nation that they believe encourages some “celebrity” defectors to spin increasingly outlandish claims."
Other North Korean defectors and scholars have expressed concern that the tendency for "celebrity defectors" to "spin increasingly outlandish claims" under "pressure to serve up a dramatically compelling account of their previous lives" will "overshadow genuine concerns about the dire state of human rights there"; these documented abuses include "rape, murder and forced abortions ... forced sterilization, executions and 'arbitrary' detentions as part of a long array of 'significant human rights issues' in the country", according to The Washington Post. According to The Diplomat: "They worry that Park’s inconsistencies and flawed accounts will make the world start to doubt their stories."
38 North, a website dedicated to news on North Korea, has noted that some critics, including other North Korean refugees, have accused Park of embellishing her accounts or appropriating elements from others' escape stories. John Lee, a journalist focusing on South Korean foreign policy and relations with the U.S., criticized Park in an opinion piece in NK News for "muddl[ing] her message with ... nakedly partisan punditry" in favor of conservative causes and media in the United States and South Korea.
Political writer A.B. Abrams, while accusing Park of fabricating her stories of life in North Korea, compared Park's life story to both the Nayirah testimony and Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations Security Council. Michael Bassett, who had spent several years in the demilitarised zone as a member of the United States military, accused Yeonmi Park of fabricating her stories about North Korea, criticising her use of the word "holocaust" to describe the situation in North Korea, and accusing her of working on behalf of free-market think tanks to support economic sanctions against North Korea. The reliability of Park's stories about North Korea has been questioned by the political commentator and journalist Will Sommer. Sommer noted parallels between Park's exaggerated and inconsistent stories with testimony of Shin Dong-hyuk, who amid pressure from fellow North Korean defectors, admitted that he had lied about key aspects of his life story. Jay Song, a professor of Korean Studies at the University of Melbourne, has expressed scepticism over the validity of Park's account of life in North Korea, accusing Park of misrepresenting the Korean expat community and alleging that her stories were undermining the reputation of fellow North Korean defectors. Christine Hong, a professor at the University of California in Santa Cruz, an expert in North Korean defectors and a member of the Korea Policy Institute, also criticised Park stories, stating that Park's testimonies did not match with her mother's accounts of life in North Korea.
Execution for watching foreign movies
Park claimed that, when she was nine years old, she witnessed her best friend's mother being publicly executed in a stadium in Hyesan. However, fellow North Korean defectors also from Hyesan say that public executions never happened in stadiums, and that public executions had been halted several years before Park claims she witnessed one.
According to Park, this woman was executed for watching a film produced outside of North Korea. However, Park's account of which movie this was has changed depending on her audience. When speaking in Hong Kong, she claimed the woman was executed for watching South Korean movies; however, when speaking to audiences in Ireland she claimed this woman was executed for watching a James Bond movie. Park's claims that people in North Korea were executed for watching foreign movies was mocked and criticised by multiple North Korean defectors, who told journalists that Park's story was unlikely.
Andrei Lankov, a professor at Kookmin University and an expert on North Korean politics who has interviewed hundreds of defectors from North Korea, said that he was "skeptical whether watching a Western movie would lead to an execution", and that he felt it would not even be likely for one to be arrested for it. He said that public executions in North Korea were only reserved for the most extreme crimes including murder and involvement in large scale criminal networks. Following these criticisms, Park changed her story:
Inconsistencies between Park and her family
Park has claimed that both her mother and father had served prison sentences for alleged crimes in North Korea but her recollection differs from her mother's. Park said in an interview that she initially believed her father's sentence was seventeen to eighteen years, but that North Korean records indicated it was eleven years. Park's mother stated he was initially sentenced to one year that was extended to ten.
During a BBC interview, Park stated that her mother was imprisoned for six months after her father was sent to jail. However Park's mother stated only that she was interrogated sporadically over the course of a year and was not detained. In some interviews, Park claims she and her sister were left alone to live in the mountains after both their mother and father were jailed, and that they both survived by eating grass. However during a BBC interview, Park changed her story and claimed that during this time she lived with her aunt and her sister lived with her uncle. Park's mother also contradicted Park's claims that she was starving, telling the host of Now On My Way To Meet You that Park and her family never faced starvation. In an interview with the libertarian for-profit organisation called the Freedom Factory, Park recalls her upbringing in Korea, never mentioning starvation, and said she was given two meals daily.
Escape from North Korea
In 2014, Jolley questioned Park's claim that during the night of her escape from North Korea, she crossed several mountains. Jolley noted that there are no mountains between Park's hometown of Hyesan and China, and that the two countries are instead separated by a river. In response, Park wrote, "And there are mountains you can even see on Google Earth – maybe you call them big hills in English – outside of Hyesan that we crossed to escape." In multiple interviews Park says she escaped North Korea with both her mother and father, however during the One Young World Summit in Dublin, Park claimed that only her mother had accompanied her and that she watched her being raped by a Chinese man.
In a 2014 speech, Park says that she escaped North Korea by being driven in a car from Korea into China. In a later speech in Ireland, Park instead claimed to have fled North Korea on foot and travelled over mountains.
After escaping North Korea for China, Park and her mother then travelled to Mongolia, where according to Park they were both arrested in Mongolia where the guards stripped them naked every day. Experts, including professor Shi-eun Yu who worked with North Korean defectors for many years and Professor Kim Hyun-ah, were both highly skeptical of this story. They told journalists that they had never heard of any North Korean defectors being stripped naked in Mongolia. According to professor Yu: "In the past, the South Korean government has sent counselors over to Mongolia to help North Korean defectors in detention ... so how can defectors be stripped naked everyday?"
The Telegraph account says that in January 2008, while the family was living in secret, her father died. The family was unable to formally mourn him, fearing that they would be discovered by Chinese authorities, and buried his cremated remains in the ground of a nearby mountain. Park's mother told The Diplomat in 2014 that they had paid two people to help carry his body up the mountain for burial instead. In one interview, Park claims her father died during her escape from North Korea and that she buried him alone. In other versions of her story, Park instead claims to have cremated her father.
2020 George Floyd protest mugging
During a 2021 interview with Joe Rogan, Park claimed that in August 2020 during the George Floyd protests in Chicago, she and her son were attacked and robbed by three African-American women. Park claimed that when she attempted to call the police following the robbery, a crowd of approximately 20 white bystanders "accused her of being racist". Park cited the incident as a catalyst for her "speaking out" and becoming "the enemy of the woke." During the same interview with Rogan, Park recounts the event, stating: "There's so much crime in Chicago, they are not going to prosecute somebody who robs. And that's when I was thinking, ‘This country lost it.'" Park's retelling of the events of the robbery differ from a statement released by the Chicago Police Department, which states that Park had been robbed by two people, one man and one woman, and that the female suspect had pleaded guilty to a crime and was sentenced to prison. Park later acknowledged the prosecution in her book While Time Remains.
Romance in North Korea
During an interview with podcaster Tim Pool, Park claimed that North Koreans do not have words to describe romantic love outside of admiration for the ruling Kim family. Professors Andrei Lankov of Kookmin University and Jay Song of the University of Melbourne, both denied Park's claim that romantic love does not exist in North Korea. Political writer A.B. Abram called Park's claim "totally ludicrous" and noted the large number of love songs popular in North Korea.
Other North Korea
Stories told by Park concerning life in North Korea were mocked by writers for Dazed, including Park's claims that ice cream does not exist in North Korea, that North Korea only has a single train that only runs once a month which passengers have to push to move, and that children in North Korea eat mud. Park's claims of human corpses floating down North Korean rivers being a common occurrence were criticised by Swiss businessman Felix Abt who had lived and worked in the DPRK for seven years.
Further claims about North Korea made by Park were debunked by Professor Andrei Lankov, including Park's claims that North Koreans do not have access to world maps, and that North Koreans are not taught basic maths including "1+1=2".
A.B. Abrams criticised other claims by Park, including that North Korea has zero access to the internet and that North Korea only has a single television channel. Responding to Park's claim that North Koreans are unaware of the existence of Africa, Abrams points out that almost every middle and senior school in North Korea has a world map which includes Africa, that performing arts students from multiple African countries including Uganda, Zimbabwe, Senegal, and Nigeria, have all put on shows in Pyongyang. Abrams also questioned Park's claims that all North Koreans above 4'10 feet tall were conscripted into the military, stating that: "Of hundreds of North Koreans the writer has met and the dozens to whom he has spoken about the military, none recalled ever being conscripted and all were over five foot."
Views
Park believes that there are positive and negative possibilities for North Korea to be reunified with South Korea, and that there are neither northerners nor southerners in Korea, just Koreans.
According to the National Review, Park presumes that "the regime adjusts, as the Chinese Communists and the Vietnamese Communists have done. That would allow the North Korean Communists to hang on for untold years longer." She has stated that the Jangmadang (the black market of North Korea), will transform or develop the country's society by providing access to outside news media and information. According to Park, "If I ever return to a reformed North Korea, I will be thrilled to meet my peers as we attempt to bring wealth and freedom to people who were forced into poverty by the Kim family dynasty." She considers Kim Jong Un to be a "cruel" leader.
Park is outspoken against tourism to North Korea, as visitors are encouraged to bow to statues of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung, which she sees as "[aiding] the regime's propaganda by allowing themselves to be portrayed as if they too love and obey the leader".
Political
Park believes that left-wing political ideologies are the dominant ideologies in American society. She has also stated that she believes that the United States is close to becoming a "liberal dictatorship", and that "that 'cancel culture' at U.S. colleges is the first step toward North Korean-style firing squads", according to The Washington Post.
Park believes the U.S. is a "tolerant country"; she criticized African-American track and field athlete Gwen Berry for turning away from the national anthem at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics in protest of racial and social injustices.
Media, speaking and internet presence
Park has written and spoken publicly about her life in North Korea, has written for the Washington Post, and has been interviewed by The Guardian and for the Australian public affairs show Dateline. She was a co-host on five episodes for Casey Lartigue, a talk show host of the podcast North Korea Today, which focuses on North Korean topics and the lives of refugees after their escapes. Park has told the story of her defection at several well-known events, including TEDx in Bath, the One Young World summit in Dublin, and the Oslo Freedom Forum.
Park is a member of the Helena Group think tank.
At a speaking engagement at Texas Tech University in April 2021, Park claimed that speech criticizing the North Korean Supreme Leader had become a crime in South Korea, possibly referring to South Korea's passing of an amendment to the "Inter-Korean Relations Development Act" prohibiting South Koreans from sending, amongst other things, anti-Pyongyang leaflets, auxiliary storage devices (for example, USB drives), and money or other monetary benefits to North Korea. In 2021, she was a guest on the podcast of YouTuber Tim Pool, on the Joe Rogan podcast, and made an appearance as a guest on a talk show belonging to American conservative Candace Owens.
According to the conservative media outlet Campus Reform, in 2023 students at Syracuse University tore down posters advertising a speech by Park, and used online platforms to accuse her of lying. She appeared on a February 2023 podcast of Fox News presenter Megyn Kelly, who acknowledged that many aspects of Park's stories had shifted, before telling her audiences that she had verified Park's stories about Korea. In the same month, she appeared on the show of comedian Andrew Schulz.
In early 2023, a screenshot of Yeonmi Park's interview with Joe Rogan became an internet meme; the format of the meme is a screenshot accompanied by a caption detailing an unbelievable story. According to the editor of Know Your Meme, Don Caldwell, "The joke is that she'll say anything that's just wildly outlandish, and Joe will just accept it as true."
Finances
Yeonmi Park stated in 2023 that she was paid $6,600 per month by Turning Point USA, and had engagements with numerous "conservative audiences", according to The New York Times. Park has also received support from the Atlas Network, a conservative organisation which has received funding from the US State Department and the United States Congress.
In 2015, Park's speaking agent told NK News that Park charged between $12,500 and $17,500 plus expenses for each speech.
Bibliography
Yeonmi Park's first book was her memoirs titled In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom (2015), which was published in the United States by Penguin Press. It was created as a collaboration between Park and the veteran ghost writer Maryanne Vollers, who had previously worked with notable public figures including Hillary Clinton and Ashley Judd. As of July 2023 In Order to Live had sold over 100,000 copies.
Park's second book While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America (2023) included a forward written by the conservative commentator Jordan Peterson. It was published in the United States by a "conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster", according to The Washington Post, which says it contains allegations of censorship and cancel culture on American college campuses, "warning that America is on the verge of liberal dictatorship". It has sold over 130,000 copies as of June 2023.
In the acknowledgements, Park thanks a variety of American conservative media personalities, including the YouTuber Dave Rubin, and Emma-Jo Morris who is the editor for the far-right conspiracy theory website, Breitbart News. Park's spokesperson and literary agent, Jonathan Bronitsky, is the former chief speech writer for William P. Barr, the 2016–2020 Trump administration's attorney general.
See also
Lee Soon-ok
Shin Dong-hyuk
Jumana Hanna
Media coverage of North Korea
Nayirah testimony
Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations Security Council
References
External links
While They Watched (2015), documentary feature film starring Yeonmi Park
Yeonmi Park's speech at the One Young World Conference (YouTube)
Yeonmi Park's Ubben Lecture at DePauw University; 5 October 2015
1993 births
American anti-communists
American Christians
American conservative talk radio hosts
Asian conservatism in the United States
Barnard College alumni
Columbia University School of General Studies alumni
Conservative media
Converts to Christianity from atheism or agnosticism
Dongguk University alumni
Korean anti-communists
Living people
North Korean Christians
North Korean defectors
North Korean emigrants to the United States
North Korean escapees
North Korean women activists
People from Hyesan
Political repression in North Korea
South Korean Christians