Yeonmi Park (; born October 4, 1993) is an American conservative activist and author. Born in North Korea, she defected from the country and was described by The Washington Post as "one of the most famous North Korean defectors in the world".
Born in Hyesan, Park fled from North Korea to China in 2007 at age 13 before moving to South Korea, then to the United States. She 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 after 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 2015, and as of 2023 has sold over 100,000 copies. During the 2020s, she became a conservative political commentator in the American media through 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 and those of both her mother and fellow defectors from North Korea – have been the subject of widespread skepticism. Political commentators, journalists and professors of Korean studies have criticized Park's accounts of life in North Korea for inconsistencies, contradictory claims, and exaggerations. Other North Korean defectors, including those from the same city as Park, have expressed concern that the tendency for "celebrity defectors" to exaggerate about life in North Korea will produce skepticism about their stories. In 2014, The Diplomat published an investigation by journalist Mary Ann Jolley, who had previously worked with Park, documenting numerous inconsistencies in Park's memories and descriptions of life in Korea. In July 2023, a Washington Post investigation found there were some discrepancies to Park's claims about life in North Korea. Park attributed the discrepancies to her imperfect memory and language skills, and her autobiography's coauthor, Maryanne Vollers, said Park was the victim of a North Korean smear campaign.
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 called "American conservative", and she has criticized political correctness and woke culture in the U.S., drawing parallels between political correctness in the U.S. and North Korea.
Early life North Korea (1993–2007)
Park was born on October 4, 1993, in Hyesan, Ryanggang Province, 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 1990s North Korean famine. Park's father was a civil servant who worked at the Hyesan town hall as a member of the ruling Workers' Party of Korea and supplemented his income by smuggling goods from China.
Journalists have said that Park's memories and descriptions of her early life are often contradictory and at odds with her mother's, as well as with other defectors' descriptions of life in North Korea, and that her story has changed depending upon the audience.
In 2014, at a speech at the Oslo Freedom Forum, Park spoke about her life as a young teen watching the 1997 film Titanic. Park had previously believed that "dying for the regime"—the Kim family—"was the most honorable thing" one could do, citing the film's themes of romantic love and selflessness as a broadening in her thinking from sacrificial national loyalty to a more personal, sacrificial devotion.
Leaving North Korea for China (2007) Park left North Korea in 2007, when she was 13. According to her 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 March 30, 2007, after Park had to witness her mother undergoing sexual assault. She states: "I saw my mother raped. The rapist was a Chinese broker. I will never forget his face. ... I was only 13 years old."
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 missionaries' help, they fled to South Korea through Mongolia.
Park's father and the family's defection Park has given three separate and vastly different accounts of her father's and the family's defection from North Korea, claiming that her father chose to stay in North Korea because he believed his illness would slow them down, claiming that she defected alongside him and buried his corpse after he died from illness during their defection, and also claiming to have left him behind in North Korea having never told him the family planned to defect. 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 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. In an interview with Joe Rogan, Park claimed that she and her family left their father behind in North Korea without telling him they had left.
Claiming asylum in Mongolia
Park says that in February 2009, after spending two days at a Christian shelter in Qingdao, she and her mother traveled through the Gobi Desert to Mongolia to seek asylum from South Korean diplomats. Park claims that they reached the Mongolian border and that the General Authority for Border Protection guards stopped them and threatened to deport them back to China. Park recalls that at this point she and her mother pledged to kill themselves with their razors, adding: "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, Mongolia's capital. Park later said in an 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 April 1, 2009, Park and her mother were sent to Ulaanbaatar's Chinggis Khaan Airport to be flown 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 upon 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 life in South Korea, but found jobs as shop assistants and waitresses. Despite arriving in South Korea with only a second-grade education, Park achieved her high school equivalency in 18 months. She was admitted to Dongguk University in Seoul.
Now On My Way to Meet You (2011)
In 2011, Yeonmi Park participated as Yeju Park in the South Korean reality television program Now On My Way to Meet You, a show that has been credited for launching her 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, dubbed "defector beauties". According to media academic Richard Murray, Park's ability to speak English, coupled with her being a young, 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 well-off 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.
In 2015, Park published her memoir, In Order to Live, in which she describes her journey from defection to higher education. She attended classes at Barnard College and was accepted to the Columbia University School of General Studies, starting there in 2016. She graduated from Columbia in 2020.
In 2021, she described her education at Columbia 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 declined to comment on this anecdote. Park criticized political correctness at Columbia, saying, "I thought America was different but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying", adding, "America is not free". She said, "our education system is brainwashing our children to make them think that this country is racist and make them believe that they are victims."
After her memoir's publication, 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 after jumping 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.
Skepticism of claims As early as 2014, journalists began questioning Park's stories; in 2014–2015, John Power, a journalist based in Seoul, wrote two articles criticizing Park's claims and questioning the inconsistencies. In December 2014, Mary Ann Jolley of The Diplomat, who had previously worked with Park on a documentary, wrote about problems with 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.