All Episodes
Previous Next
May 25, 2023 - Viva & Barnes
01:02:24
Interview with Yeonmi Park - From North Korean to Woke Academia - Viva Frei Live!
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
People, take two.
This is the good one.
No intro video this time because we have one hour.
And I'm going to make proper use of all of it.
Not that I don't make proper use of it.
Here I go, wasting time.
Yay on me, Park People, author of two books, the most recent of which is While Time Remains, the first one was called In Order to Live.
The first book details her escape from the dictatorship that is North Korea.
And the second is a warning, drawing some parallels between What is dictatorship to the next level and the horrors of North Korea compared to what is becoming the unfortunate reality in the West?
Everybody, yes, we all saw that the Oath Keepers was just sentenced to 18 years in jail.
We'll talk about that tomorrow.
Although it's reflective of the injustices that we can tolerate in the name of justice at home while condemning similar injustices in authoritarian regimes in Russia, North Korea, etc., etc.
Yeonmi Park people, if you don't know her, you're going to know her now.
I'm bringing her in.
Yeonmi?
Hi.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well.
Thanks for having me on.
Thank you very much.
I'm going to keep it like this.
You know what?
I think your backdrop is so beautiful.
We'll keep it wide-angle.
Yeonmi, I've been watching podcasts, reading up on you, reading up on the history of North Korea because we take for granted...
What North Korea is today without really appreciating how it got to be what it is today.
For those who may not know who you are, and I suspect there are very few, a very brief overview before we get into your story and what is ultimately your warning to the West.
Who are you?
I'm a nursing defector and now I work as a human rights activist.
So, straightforward.
And you were born and raised in North Korea.
You managed to escape at the age of 13?
Yeah, so I was born in North Korea in the 90s.
When I was growing up there, that was the height of the famine in North Korea.
So by the time I was 13 years old, we could not really simply find any food.
And that led us to escape to China in 2007.
Born in 1990?
1993, at the end of it.
Okay, 1993.
All right, we're going to get into this because it's fascinating, but the history of North Korea is after World War II and the surrender of Japan.
The north of Korea is sort of dominated by communist Russia.
The south is dominated by the west.
And there's a little line that was maintained there, became the demilitarized zone.
But ultimately, 1950, a proxy war between communism and...
Freedom broke out, ended in a stalemate, and thus was born North Korea, and it remained under the control of one dictator turned king for 45 years?
Yeah, I mean, he became a god.
So he literally came into power, and the first thing he really did was persecuting all religions, especially Christianity.
And then he made himself a god, and he pretty much every North Korean.
To believe that he can even read our thoughts.
That when I was in North Korea, I was even afraid to think.
And his family, the Kim family, still ruling North Korea like Kim's.
Okay, now you're born in 1993.
What's the name of the village or the town that you're born in?
So I was initially born in Heisan.
It's a Heisan city, right across from China, in the northern part of North Korea.
We don't have enough time to get into meticulous detail, but explain what childhood is like.
When you leave at the age of 13, you have very conscious, distinct memories of what life is like.
Just briefly describe what life is like growing up at the height of the famine, because what ended up happening is there was a particularly bad year in the early 90s, led to mass starvation.
That was when something else was going on, when the first dictator died.
But explain what life is like in a town growing up in North Korea at this time.
So this is where, after Soviet Union collapsed at the end of '89, they were stopped subsidizing North Korea's economy.
And I think this is a classic example how socialism only works until you run out somebody else's money.
Soviet Union stopped subsidizing North Korea's economy.
The regime decided not to give food to people.
Until that point, North Korea is a socialist country where people could not trade.
We cannot have a private property.
We cannot have any business.
That was illegal.
So in the 90s, for the first time, people were not receiving public ration from the government.
And that's how millions started dying from starvation.
And growing up in North Korea as a child at the time, literally, you know, looking at the body is like looking at a tree.
It was like normal daily life for me.
And the only reasons we couldn't know why somebody died is like if there's no body, nothing comes out of their chain because they were not cooking their meal and they died.
And that's how we find out our neighbors died.
I mean, what is like on a day-to-day?
People, you have nowhere, there's nowhere to go.
There's no work, I presume, like nobody's even working for the government at this point?
So North Korea, it's like everything is a collectivism.
There's nothing you can do as an individual.
So in the morning, even everybody, we have something called people's unit in North Korea.
So everybody belongs to this people's unit, and children belong to their school unit, and then parents belong to their adult unit.
So in the morning, our people's unit leader comes and asks, "Everybody wake up." And we wake up around 5 in the summer and the winter is like 5:30 because it's so dark.
We collectively wake up, we go to manual labor.
So that could be fixing the dam, helping the farmers, fixing the road.
We all collectively work together for two hours, three hours in the morning.
And then we come up, eat breakfast.
And then the adults have to go to this work.
And then children go to school.
So when we go to school, children, of course, we go to school to learn, literally get brainwashed.
It's not an education at all.
It's every subject, even math, being taught to us, like, there are four American bastards.
You kill two of them.
Then how many American bastards left to kill?
Even teaching us numbers is an opportunity for the regime to brainwash children.
And after this morning session is done with brainwashing, the afternoon is that children also need to be in the part of a forced labor.
So we need to, the government give us assignment that day.
So we collectively go to the farm, we collectively go to the road or dam and helping out.
And then we need to march together to go home at night.
And then this cycle repeats again.
We don't have electricity.
We don't even have what internet is.
We don't have public transportation.
Everything is through walking.
And everybody needs to be mobilized in this collectivism.
And also, the people who are teaching you, you have teachers.
They work for the government.
I mean, everybody works for the government.
Yes, everybody.
There's no private entity.
We don't know even what contract it is.
Everything is government.
And you have no right to...
That's like when I came to America, when people were saying, "America is so horrible because there are homeless people." In North Korea, if you choose not to do anything in your life and be homeless, they will send you to prison camp and torture you and rape you.
You have no right to not do anything in North Korea.
Everybody has to be mobilized in forced labor that doesn't pay you and doesn't feed you.
But we belong to the regime.
The regime owns all of us and they just move us like, you know...
Puzzle pieces.
Are there, I mean, is anybody getting food?
You're working, you're doing this stuff.
Who gets food?
Do the employers of the state get food at least?
So this is the thing.
In North Korea, the regime found the country in the name of equity, in the name of equality of outcomes.
That we are not going to have any poor people or rich people.
We are going to be all equal, right?
Because the regime was going to provide everything for free for all of us.
However, once they took everything from the people, they divided North Koreans into 51 different classes.
Five in one.
And Koreans are a homogeneous country.
We are semi-trained people, look the same, speak the same language, and divided 51 different classes.
So this cat system determines how much you get fat.
Most people don't get fat.
We don't get food.
So that's why my job was going to mountains looking for the wild flowers and plants.
And my biggest protein intake from was dragonflies and grasshoppers.
And a lot of boys catch snakes, rats, and even cockroaches.
They find insects to survive.
Because the regime would not feed all of us because they thought it was easier to control people when we are so hungry and we have no energy to fight back.
So you're born in 93. You escaped in 2007.
So your memory now, not to say that North Korea is any different now than it was then, but this is a very specific window of time.
No electricity.
Yeah.
Obviously, no internet.
But what does that look like in the town?
I mean, do people live in apartments?
Do they live in houses?
Do people do maintenance?
Like, I'm trying to understand, like, what buildings look like, what the streets look like.
Are you in the countryside?
Like, what does it physically look like where you're growing up?
So, like, think about dark ages.
We don't know what shower is.
There's no sewage at home.
There's no running water at home.
So the children, our job was in the freezing winter.
Go to the river to bring the water on our head.
And every road gets icy.
There are no cars in North Korea.
So roads are all ice in the winter most of the time.
And you fall a lot.
And we don't have laundry machines, so we have to bring our laundry to the river.
And in wintertime, we have to break the ice and, you know, in that freezing, using hand to wash clothes.
And at home, we don't know even what mattress is or we sleep on the cement hard floor.
And there's no way of changing your clothes.
We get one pair of clothes for years.
Literally when we grow, our mom like stitches it and extending it, extending it.
I had no concept of like work clothes, sleeping clothes, school clothes, same pair that we wear.
We only bathe a few times a year.
Like usually, New Year's before we bathe and in the summertime we go to the river and we wash in the river.
And that's probably it.
And for food, I mean, we don't know what a refrigerator is.
I never even knew what milk was.
I never had milk in my life.
So it's like, you know, the dark age literally where...
And it's a lot less freedom than them too.
Because in North Korea, if you dance in the wrong way, you get...
You send to prison camp.
If you wear wrong pants and you wear jeans, jeans were made in America and they thought that was a symbol of capitalism, they send you labor camp.
You cannot grow certain haircuts like me right now.
The government decides what haircut you can have, how many inches you can have, and they decide what you can read, what you can watch, what you can listen to, what you can talk.
So every aspect of your life is controlled by the government.
I've got so many questions.
I've just got to keep them remotely linear.
I remember in one interview that you gave, you mentioned how North Koreans are homogeneous and would be very similar, if not identical, to South Koreans, except for North Koreans typically are smaller because of malnourishment and haven't grown as much as people who eat a normal diet.
If I may ask a very personal question, in one interview you mentioned you were 77 pounds.
Was your growth physically stunted as well as a result of malnourishment as a child?
Absolutely.
I am so stunted and so balanced.
When I was pregnant, it was very, very high risk because I was so small.
And, you know, North Koreans are on average five inches shorter than South Koreans because of malnutrition.
And our generation is starting to keep getting shorter.
In South Korea, parents might be short, but children are very tall.
North Korea is completely opposite.
We keep getting older than our own parents.
How are you given apartments?
How does that work?
Does the government say your family lives in this in perpetuity?
The government owns everything.
If you have a good job considerably within the government, then they give you the house.
That was an assignment.
But once you are done working for the government, you need to give that house back to the government.
So you really have nowhere else to go.
And even top officials, even if they get the car from the government and drive, when they're done retiring, you need to give everything back to the government.
It's nothing, it's yours.
So a lot of people trading houses, like leasing houses illegally.
So we go like almost in a black market and then pay people private money and then have a right to stay in that home, not owning home.
You cannot own anything.
You can even own a car or car or anything.
No private ownership, but you get to live in that home during that period when you paid.
How many siblings did you have or do you have?
I have one older sister.
Is she still alive?
Yes, she's in South Korea.
And your parents?
My father passed away in China, but my mom is in South Korea with my sister.
And now this is the question.
So you're growing up in this world.
I know you've described it as like another planet, and listening to your descriptions of this, it's like, you know, in America they make horror movies that are just nothing but torture, and they call them torture porn movies.
This description of North Korea sounds like dictator porn.
Like, how much can we just punish a population?
How much misery can we put them through when you're growing up in this?
And I understand you're like indoctrinated from day one with a quasi-religious, inspired from the Bible, North Korean dictator legacy.
Does it feel normal?
When I grew up in North Korea, I did not know the alternative.
I did not even know that I was oppressed.
We did not even have the word to describe our situation.
Like, we don't have the word to stress.
Because how can you be stressed living in a socialist paradise?
So they don't give that word to us to describe our own situation.
And that's what, I think, true oppression looks like.
A lot of people in America, they say, like, they're oppressed.
But really, the concept is lost here because they've never seen a true oppression.
In North Korea, We don't know that life could be like here in freedom.
We don't even know the word free.
We don't even know the word love.
So I thought that was normal.
But this is another thing when people say, you know, happiness is a relative thing.
So therefore, you didn't see anybody better off than you.
You must have been happy.
You know, like if you are starving, if your family members are dying from starvation, and if you see your friends dying from starvation.
We don't even think about what happiness is because we are surviving.
It is true that happiness is a relative thing, but if we are miserable, even everybody suffers, you seem very much miserable.
I'm ending this on YouTube right now.
It's going to stay on Rumble.
It doesn't change anything on our end, ending in 3, 2, 1. And this is my question.
It's inconceivable where...
When we think back to the Holocaust or World War II and people who lived under freedom were subsequently placed under inhumane, unfathomable conditions, but they had a point of reference.
You're born into this.
You've never known freedom.
You've never known anything other than this.
You see people dying around you regularly during this...
They didn't call it the Great Famine.
They called it something else because, you know...
Arduous March.
The Arduous March.
You see people dying around you.
And then the question is, does life not have the same meaning that it does now, where you realize that this is not supposed to happen, this is supposed to be a tragedy, but when you're living in it and you've known nothing else, is it a tragedy?
Do you feel sad when people around you die, or is it a constant state of emotional, psychological numbness?
I was numb.
I never felt sympathy for the people who were dying, because that was just When you're born there, that's the first thing you see, in a way.
Nobody says you look at a tree and you feel sad for it.
And compassion is not even a word that people describe to the situation.
So I didn't even know what compassion was.
However, though, I did feel very much miserable because I was very hungry.
And every day I was sitting there, I didn't even know what God was anything, but...
I was hoping, what if somebody in the sky dropped me a bucket of bread?
Would that be possible?
Because I was so hungry.
All day, every energy that I had was thinking about food and looking for food.
And that's why the regime loves that idea, using starvation as a tool, because it occupies all of us as a surviving mode.
The only thing in our school you think about is finding the next meal.
If you made the lunch, you're going to think about how I'm going to find the next meal.
And if you make the one day, you don't know if you're going to make it the next day.
Tomorrow is never guaranteed to you, depending on how hard you fight for it and also how lucky you get for it.
So it's a constant paranoia of how I'm going to survive.
But not only that, you know, the first thing my mom told me as a younger, like, was that don't even whisper because birds and mice clear me.
They were constantly watching.
We did not know who was a spy.
We did not know how we could get in trouble with the regime.
Because the threshold to get in trouble in North Korea is so low.
Like literally, in North Korea, every room has a portrait of Kim dictators.
Every room has to have it.
And in the middle of the night, literally in the middle of the night, 2 a.m., 3 a.m., the officials kick your door and come in.
They bring this like white as cloth and then wipe the portraits on the edge.
If buying the dust and the whitest cloth, that's how you end up going to concentration camp in North Korea.
Literally, that level of oppression is a complete paranoia.
And now you see the people who do this.
Are the people who are doing it getting pleasure out of it?
Are they doing it so that they can rest assured that they get a meal?
How do other humans...
What's your impression of what they're thinking when...
Other people around you do these atrocious things.
It's very complex.
I do think that every human being is capable of being an angel or evil.
I don't think it takes special type of people to become the torturers at the concentration camp.
I think when they were born, they brainwashed to think that people are not trustworthy, that you need to watch them and surveillance them.
And, of course, when they do this job for the regime, they get public ration.
And not enough food, even for these officials, so they need to corrupt, be corrupt.
So they need to catch somebody doing something illegal, then demand a bribery, because the government salary for a medical doctor in North Korea is now $1 per month.
We cannot even survive one day with that in North Korea.
So everybody needs to be corrupt.
That it forces everybody to be cruel and corrupt.
Because the government's already...
Nobody can live off from that.
Now, people listen to this and they can't possibly understand the level of atrocity.
And some people say, okay, well, this was 20 years ago.
I see pictures of Pyongyang today and it looks like a very nice, bustling city, big modern buildings.
I mean, as far as you understand, is this type of horror still going on today?
And even back then...
How did it go on without it being known to or visible by the bigger cities and the cities that I guess had some form of international traffic to them?
So this is where North Korea is very successful at controlling information in both directions, right?
North Korea is a hermit kingdom for a reason.
Pyongyang in North Korea is a special place.
For North Korean people, we have no right to visit Pyongyang without a government permit, and that permit is very hard to get by.
Nobody in North Korea has the freedom of movement to travel around.
We cannot even have a sleepover at a friend's house.
We need to wrestle with the government to have sleepovers if we really want to do that.
So it's not like Pyongyang is ever a representation of North Korea in any way.
And that's why no journalist can go to North Korea and just look around and take pictures.
Everything is controlled.
And for the people, it got a lot worse, actually.
For the last 20 years, the livelihood for the North Korean people got so much worse, especially during the pandemic.
And now, actually, the cannibalism came back to North Korean people.
And the border security got so much tighter than Kim Jong-il under Kim Jong-un right now, that actually escaping from North Korea became impossible.
You will not see new North Korean escapees now.
Let me ask you the question that people are going to ask you.
How do you get your information insofar as people and information can't get out of North Korea?
So there are underground brokers and underground people...
In North Korea and we smuggled the phone from China to North Korea.
The border town of North Korea can get Chinese phone signal.
So that's how we call the Chinese phone from America.
Then North Koreans can answer that phone.
And that's how we get the information out of North Korea.
But escaping became impossible because North Korea, the country cannot afford electricity.
They put the wire...
Electrified wire fences the entire border.
And not only that, they buried the landmines on their border.
And they evacuated people from the border for miles and miles.
And they put their machine guns with their soldiers to shoot to kill.
And the persecution was so hard.
Now nobody in North Korea can escape.
I mean, it's a segue.
Explain to the world how you escaped.
I've heard the story.
I mean, I've heard you explain it, but many people haven't.
How did you ultimately get out, and how did your family get out?
So, initially, my sister escaped first when she was 16 years old.
And then she left me a note saying, why don't you go find this lady?
And to, you know, go to China, she will help you to come to China to find me.
So I found the note.
I went to find this lady with my mother at the time.
And then the lady said somehow she could have helped me to go to China.
And then she said, "If I go to China, I will see my sister again." And she drive the border guard.
As I said, there are border guards every 10 meters with machine guns.
It's not like you could just walk across the river.
They are like heavily guarded border.
And this lady drive the guard and we were able to cross the frozen yellow river into China.
The reason she was helping us was that she was selling us as sex slaves to Chinese people.
And that's how we got to China, through human traffickers.
Some people don't know about or the extent of the human trafficking of North Korean sex slaves to China.
Can you flesh that out for people who might not know that this industry exists and the extent of it?
Yeah, so China, I think a lot of people do know that China had a one-child policy, and that policy has a dark, dark consequences for the people, for Chinese people and for nursing people.
That policy forced people only have one kid, so they decided to abort a lot of girls and kept the boys.
Now there's a difference between men and women ratio so high in China.
There are more than 33 million adult men in China, cannot find wives.
Not is enough girls to go by.
So these men are desperately looking for women.
And they buy North Korean women.
So they sold my mom for $65.
And they sold me for over $200.
And they separate me from my mother and then sold us into sex slavery.
And there are more than 300,000 North Korean women in China currently are being sold.
And some of them buy them for their organ harvesters.
They buy these girls and take their organs off.
And some of them are buying them in the brothels, where they put a girl in the room, there is not even a window, and wait for 500 times a day.
And usually they don't last more than six months, and that's how they die.
And some of them buy these girls in the village of men, buy them.
And then a family of men buy the girl and then wait them around.
So we are literally a, you know, sex toy for this man in China.
And you were sold into this, but for the grace of God, you were purchased by somebody who loved you, liked you.
I mean, I don't know how you describe what the affinity was, but freed you.
No, he did not free me.
He bought me, and I was going to kill myself.
I had no reason to live anymore.
I was 13 years old.
I could not bear the shame of vaping by him.
And he offered me a deal that if I become his mistress and submit to him, that he was going to save my family for me.
So I became his mistress and he brought my mom back from the farmer that he sold.
He was a human trafficker himself.
And he brought my sick father to China and eventually passed away.
So after two years being with him, he became a gambling addict and he couldn't support, even feed us.
So we joined chat group where there are many ways North Korean women can survive.
One of the ways is like where we go to chat rooms where they put us in a room and give us food and place to sleep.
But for the price of that protection, we need to chat with the guys and showing our body.
And in this room, we met another North Korean girl and she told us that she knows some South Korean missionaries from South Korea.
And she said they rescued North Koreans to go be free in South Korea.
And that's how we heard about these Christian missionaries and they rescued us.
And that's how I crossed the Fungobi Desert into Mongolia and then from Mongolia go to South Korea.
So the Christian missionaries, they rescue you in terms of smuggling you out, not using diplomatic relations to get your safety?
Not even really smuggling.
Put us in a safe house in China where they gave us food and they gave us Bible to study and pray.
And several months later, after a lot of prayer, they told us how to go to Mongolia.
They couldn't come to that journey with us because the success rate of surviving the Gobi Desert is not even one percent.
Nobody can guide us through the Gobi Desert.
So they took us to the closest border in China to Mongolia.
And gave us compass and told us follow this direction.
And if you cross eight wire fences, it will be Mongolia.
And if you're lucky and not die from the minus 40 degrees cold or eaten by the animals, you can tell them that you want to South Korea.
And that's what we did.
How long did that journey take?
It took several days to go to that border town of China.
We had the border with South Mongolia.
But on the desert, it was one day.
And so you managed to escape.
So the missionaries...
Actually, I want to understand this mechanism also.
The missionaries know that there's this problem of human trafficking sex slave industry in China.
And so they are involved in rescuing people they identify as being sex prisoners.
Or it's just called slaves.
Yeah.
They get you out and then they say, well, you're going to...
Here's the journey.
Go to Mongolia, that's how you get out of China after having gotten out of North Korea.
The journey, you did this with your mother?
I did this with my mother and then they put us in a group and we had a few more other women and one man and then one child.
So total eight people in our team, we crossed together.
And now I know this from, you mentioned this in Rogan, but that some of the people who finally get you in Mongolia, they make some jokes about Bringing you back to North Korea or bringing you back to China?
Back to China means going back to North Korea.
So, yeah, they want to send us back to North Korea and we were going to kill ourselves.
And they had pure joy out of our reaction.
Because for North Korean people, going back to North Korea means sending Jews to us.
It's the exact same thing.
And the best thing could ever happen to us is like dying quickly ourselves before going through all that torture.
What happens when you get to Mongolia?
You get picked up by Mongolian border guards, and then where do you go from there?
What do they do with you?
Of course, they use a gun to ask us to raise our hands up and we are kind of invading their border, right?
And then after this prank of sending us back and...
We're nearly all about to kill ourselves in the last minute they stopped.
And sometimes they over got bored and the next team that follows, they went overboard and one lady had to swallow her poison.
But with us, they stopped in like the last second that we were going to kill ourselves.
And after this drama, they took us to a first interrogation detention center.
So we are not free in Mongolia.
They pronounce this detention center.
And then the investigation starts.
They asked us to write where we are from, you know, who's our neighbor, who's our parents, what we learned from North Korea, and write everything.
Literally, they asked us to write everything about what you lived through.
So we write these pages after pages and other pages, and then people come for the interview to verify our information.
And then they moved us to several detention centers in Mongolia.
It took many months.
And then eventually went to Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia.
And there, South Korean government sent somebody, sent a, in a way, fake passport because we didn't have identities.
And then flew us from Ulaanbaatar to Inche and South Korea.
And we left there in 2009.
You left South Korea in 2009?
No, no.
We left to South Korea.
We left Mongolia in 2009.
Now, I mean, I don't know what this possibly feels like to discover freedom.
And I presume for the longest time and maybe even to the present date, you still have this waking fear that someone can come and snatch you and bring you right back at any point in time.
Like, what's it like adjusting to life in South Korea?
It's very hard.
Freedom was not easy.
I remember at some point, like, I don't want to be free.
You know, it was so overwhelming and scary that...
Learning that freedom meant responsibility.
In North Korea, I never, in a way, had to think for myself.
Like, what I want to wear, government decides for you.
I never had to think about what do I want to do with my life.
I never had to even have an opinion.
Nobody asked me, somebody asked me, what's your favorite color?
And in South Korea, I was like, what do you mean?
Because in North Korea, my teacher told me my favorite color was red, because it was a revolutionary color.
Everything was determined for me.
And in South Korea, suddenly I had a thing for myself.
And that was exhausting.
And then, of course, eventually I got to know freedom and I'm loving it now.
But it took some, you know, used to.
So when do you...
So in 2009, you're in South Korea.
You are now, if I'm not...
93, 03. You're 16, 17 years old.
Yeah.
When do you come to America?
And how do you make the decision to come to America?
I came to America.
Initially, I visited in 2013 to Texas.
And then I moved here 2015.
All right.
And now, in the six years that you're in South Korea, you decide to go back to school, you start studying, you start absorbing everything that had been denied to you for your entire life?
Yeah.
I mean, in North Korea, I only attended one or two semesters total.
So I had no education whatsoever.
And in South Korea, that was what I did.
I caught up with the education system in one year and a half period for like 12 years of education.
And then I went to university studying criminal justice.
Criminal justice in South Korea?
Mm-hmm.
Cool.
Did you finish it?
No.
In my junior year, I transferred to Columbia University in New York.
Okay.
So now, holy cow, so you go from North Korea to China, to South Korea.
Now that you go to Columbia University in New York, and you are now 18 years old?
I was 22. In America, where did you learn to speak English?
In South Korea, I watched Friends, TV show Friends.
That's amazing.
That's how I learned.
And so you learned English from scratch at the age of 16, 17?
No, more like 19. Because initially I was catching up with learning South Korean.
South Korean is very different than North Korean.
So I had to learn South Korean first.
Amazing.
Okay.
And then you come to America and you're pursuing the American dream, studying...
What were you studying at Columbia again?
Initially I was studying economics and then human rights and political science.
All right.
And did you finish...
That's an undergraduate degree?
That I finished.
Okay.
Amazing.
And so now you're in America.
Where are your parents at this time and your other sister?
My father passed away in China, but my mom was in South Korea and my sister was also in South Korea.
Did they make their way to America or they're still in South Korea?
They're in South Korea.
They actually like it better there for some reason.
So I came here alone.
Okay.
And so now tell us, like, we're going to get into the second chapter of this story.
Let me just make sure that I haven't forgotten any of my important questions about the first part.
I'll ask this part now because it's going to actually come back a little later on.
In the chat on the internet, you get...
There's a lot of people who are trying to, I say, character assassinate, cast doubts.
Yeah.
Call you a liar, all sorts of things.
Your story doesn't make sense yet.
Has that always been the case or did that start only more recently when you started getting more vocal about...
Other issues that you've noticed in the United States?
So it happened in the very beginning, very, very beginning, like 10 years ago.
No, nine years, 2014, when I spoke up.
And that was actually the attacks were coming from the regime.
North Korean regime was attacking me.
That, you know, they were saying I'm a CIA spy.
I'm a Western propaganda puppet.
And, you know, I, my...
My father didn't die in China and we had to bring my dad's ashes to South Korea and is under the South Korean police protection.
So the North Korean regime creates all these threats and obviously they went after three generations of my family because I spoke out.
And then when I wrote the book with Penguin Random House, that book was based on, not my memory, it was based on...
People that I escaped with in the journey.
So I had a co-author, Marianne Boller, for that book.
So she literally went to South Korea with me, had a voice recording of this women's memory, because they could misremember it 10 years later.
So Penguin got all those voice files in the legal team.
They're not stupid.
They're like very credible publishers.
They're not going to write a book based on some girl's memory.
After that book, no accusations ever happened.
That book cleared everything up, up to that point.
But until that point, initially when I was speaking out, I did not know the difference between grass or plants.
When I looked at a pool in South Korea, it said grass, so I thought I ate grass, but turned out I ate the plants.
And when I was escaping, I climbed these mountains in town.
And turns out they went to Google Earth and checked the altitude.
It was not really technically a mountain.
It was a hill.
But I don't know the difference.
And just so I don't...
The purpose of that question was twofold.
Because there is presumably a meaningful external, out of North Korea type of enforcers.
Much like what we see outside of China in foreign countries.
Authorities reigning in...
Chinese nationals who are bad-mouthing China.
I have no doubt that there's a similar thing with North Korea.
And then the flip side of why I asked you is, I would imagine that once you started speaking out against what we typically or colloquially call woke culture in America, victimhood stuff, then the left, I presume when they started calling you a racist for the incident in New York, then this type of attack started to increase as well.
And I'm just wondering, was my anticipation accurate?
Or was it always like this?
So initially, I cleared all that up in the book, and then it was gone.
Now the second book came out, and then as you can see, the people who really criticized me, you will know that they are literally saying in their profiles, I'm the Maoist, I'm the Marxist, I'm a Leninist, right?
All these very left people.
And in a way though, North Korea is the only hope in the world for that, because this is the last country that holds socialist pure ideology firmly to this day.
And they are the enemy of America.
So anybody who hates Western capitalism and free market in America, they are allied with the North Korean regime.
So now I get the people who worship Marxism and Leninism and hate capitalism now all the attacks on me.
So it really just became a new thing for the last few weeks since the book became very popular.
What's amazing is I read the comments and it just...
I have a logical brain.
It just doesn't make sense that you're paid by the CIA or you're a glowy to make North Korea look bad, which would suggest that North Korea is not bad, which doesn't make sense.
To suggest that you're being paid to create public opinion support for a war in North Korea when nobody's touching North Korea despite having all of the reason in the world to do so.
And the only thing that makes sense to me is that there's a lot of people who, you know...
Pro-Chinese, pro-CCP involved who are probably likely behind this.
And the people out there who call you a racist because you called out some problems in America that they don't want to address or that they take pride in.
And for those who don't know, we're going to jump into this.
You were in fact called a racist.
A North Korean escapee defector called a racist because of an incident that occurred in New York where you were assaulted and mugged.
In Chicago.
In Chicago, sorry.
And when it came time to identify the thug or the attacker, and they happened to be black.
I mean, these things are not relevant, but in the minds of people who want to make them relevant.
When you identified it, you were called a racist.
Can you tell people what happened with that incident?
Why you were in Chicago and how it came to be?
So, I was married and we were in Chicago.
It's the first year of the George Floyd, the BLM protest, when all the looting was happening.
One day I was walking on the Michigan Avenue, it's like 5th of New York, it's like really main street in Chicago during the daytime in the afternoon with my son.
And walking, of course, a few black women pushed me on the side and I took my wallet out.
And I was trying to call the police and take a picture of this girl because she hits me back.
I never heard, but she hits me first.
And then I was trying to call the police and people literally on the street surrounded me saying I'm a racist and asked me why are you doing this?
Because they say the color of their skin does not make them a thief.
And they literally see me being punched and take my wallet out of me.
And they are saying that those people cannot be a criminal because of their skin color.
Well, let me ask you, I'll ask you the obvious question to which I already know the answer.
Did you say the person who did this to me was black, look for this person?
Or did you say the person did this to me because they were black?
I mean, it's a rhetorical question, but I presume you didn't use any ethnic slurs to refer to the person, nor suggest that it occurred because they were black, but rather this is the person that did it?
I didn't even use the word black.
I didn't even say anything.
I literally said, I'm not accusing you of anything.
I need to call the police.
Because she took my wallet out.
I did not even say you're a thief or help or anything.
I just want you to wait here until the police comes.
It's like, what are you talking about?
I'm not a thief.
It doesn't make me a thief because I'm a black.
I'm not accusing you of anything.
I just want you to hear until the police comes.
And then she was punching me and trying to run away from me.
And then that's when people were circling me around.
But this is the thing.
I was raped by Asian men.
I was not raped.
Anybody can be a murderer.
Anybody can be a rapist.
It's not about skin color at all.
And that's when I was so shocked how Americans got mad.
It's like the mad as a crowd.
They could not see the fact.
And the logic other than your skin color.
And they're horrified that somehow thinking, you know, I'm an Asian person.
Now they call me, I'm a white person.
Therefore, I am the oppressor, right?
I cannot be a victim.
And I don't deserve justice because of my skin color.
Now, I don't know what you were like politically before this.
Was this the eye-opening red pill experience of identity politics in America for you?
Yeah, I think I'm to this day, I'm more like libertarian.
I don't know why people keep trying to box me to think this is like ridiculous thing about Americans.
Like if you don't meet this box, you're not my ally.
No, you're my enemy.
You're the worst person ever existed.
So I don't even know I'm a libertarian.
I like small government.
I like free market.
I like less involvement from government.
I think people have the right to do whatever they want, as long as they don't harm other people, right?
I'm a classical liberal.
But until that point, I thought this madness, the anti-Western, anti-meritocracy, all of this was just a Columbia thing.
I thought this very privileged group of people at Columbia were just playing with this fire while they were in college.
And once they got out of school, I thought they were going to get over it and come to reality.
And that day I saw it was not just in school.
It was everywhere.
Everybody's gone mad.
And they are losing their common sense.
I do interviews with Robert Barnes, this other lawyer, and we talk about how these people graduate from university.
They become judges.
They become clerks.
They become not the gatekeepers, but the controllers of big institutions of society.
And it spreads out exponentially.
And so you had had...
You had had your experience in Colombia where you had had your experience with this identity politics sort of left-leaning believe the absurd and repeat the absurd if you don't want to get harassed by those who are trying to make you believe the absurd?
Yeah, it's a pure injustice.
What they are doing is a pure evil.
It's not even some type of politics they are doing.
It's just a pure evil.
Somebody committing a crime, they deserve to be punished for the crime.
It doesn't matter.
Like, this is common sense.
That's what I was saying.
Even North Korea would not be this crazy.
If somebody gets hit and somebody rocks somebody, they would try to help the victim.
They are not going to say, "What's your skin color?
And let's see.
If your skin color is this, you cannot be, you know, guilty of this." And I think this is where it shocks me with this much information that America has.
With the internet, with this much freedom, people became this much brainwashed.
That's what's mind-boggling to me.
There were some amazing parallels that you drew between what you experienced in North Korea and what you're witnessing in the West.
I forget how you described it in a previous podcast.
You're seeing the same thing to some extent, but explain for those who have not lived under and escaped from what you lived under and escaped from, explain the parallels that you see between the ideology of North Korea and what is becoming an increasingly pervasive ideology in the West.
Yeah, I think in America, this is definitely what is called groupthink, right?
And when you forget thinking for yourself.
And you have this group decides what is the truth, what is not.
And this is a very common characteristic that happens in dictatorship countries, where people forget what critical thinking is.
They don't know how to think for themselves.
And now you come to America, this American liberal elite decides the common sense, decides the law, and decides all the rules.
And you cannot challenge it.
If you challenge it, then you are suddenly like me, racist, and CIA spy.
And there are a lot of costs of not agreeing with this group think.
And I think a lot of people really succumb to that.
But I think a lot of them don't even know because this is a brainwashed thing.
And when you're brainwashed, you will not know that you're brainwashed.
Well, it's interesting.
When you said that, you know, you got to South Korea and you had to learn freedom and it was exhausting.
And then there are others, I mean, who go the inverse direction.
They're born with freedom.
It's exhausting.
And so it becomes a lot easier to just...
Resign yourself to authoritarianism or tyranny or some form of just tell me what to think because it's too exhausting for me to think on my own, which is the old expression, hard times create hard men.
I forget.
Darren, I'm going to screw up the expression, but the bottom line is soft men create hard times because they get lazy and they then create the conditions that...
You mentioned that Kim Jong-il or Kim Jong-un or his grandfather would punish generations of North Koreans for the crimes of the family.
Just explain that in a little more detail so I can ask the next question on this.
Yeah, it's something called the collective guilt.
The crime that an individual Commit.
It doesn't stop there, the punishment.
It goes through the generation after generation.
And you have to eliminate the generation.
Otherwise, they will stay in that generation.
So when I was born, my great-grandfather, like many generations ago, I never met him, seen him.
He owned the land.
And tiny land, not even a lot of land.
Therefore, he was marked by the regime that he's an oppressor.
And said that my blood is tainted because of my ancestors' crime.
And I'm sure you can see how exactly it's played in America right now where this thing called the white privilege and white guilt.
The collective guilt.
Collective punishment.
It's happening in America.
It's not about individual anymore.
It's not individual choices.
It's just all about what your ancestors did.
And there's nothing you can do to change your ancestors like you cannot change your skin color.
Racism is so bad because we are punishing people for something they did not choose.
Right?
And now we are doing exactly the same thing.
We are punishing white people.
They did not choose their skin color.
They did not choose their ancestors.
How do you change your heritage?
You cannot.
And is it happening here?
The analogy is kind of very compelling.
The collective guilt and the idea that, well, if one generation suffers, it will be righted as a wrong when it can't be in any event.
The other anecdote, which is amazing, getting people to believe the absurd or the unbelievable, where in your childhood, when they were trying to get you to believe that one plus one didn't equal two, and the explanation or the justification was, if you add one drop of water to another drop of water, you don't get two drops of water.
It's a good Zanonian-type paradox, but you said people would smile.
We know the truth, but we would still be compelled to repeat the lie.
Had your experience been like that in the States when you first got here?
Or have you seen this compulsion to believe the absurd getting worse year over year?
I think this is the inversion of truth, especially at Columbia.
They say, we are inclusive.
We have a safe space.
Not safe at all.
If you disagree with anybody, it's not safe.
You can get kicked out of the university and called all kinds of names.
But they call that bigotry that double-think almost totalitarian situation as a safe space.
And the inclusivity does not mean inclusivity of ideas at all.
It's a complete dictatorship where they decide one truth, right?
And so this inversion of truth is everywhere at Columbia.
And in the society right now too, it's all about the diversity, and it's not about diversity of ideas at all.
It's all about just one thinking.
And I think that's where redefining this concept for all of us.
And people, the words lose its meaning.
I think that's when you live in a social dictatorship of countries, it's very hard to know the truth because all the words lost their meaning.
Really, you don't know what means anything anymore.
And this is happening in America.
What does it mean safe space?
It's not safe.
It's a complete dangerous space you're getting into.
If anybody says it's a safe space, you know you need to shut up and just agree with whatever the organizers are saying at the moment.
And I think this is happening in America.
That's phenomenally insightful, actually.
Oh, I forgot my idea.
So you're writing the book, your second book.
It's drawing the parallels of what you've experienced in North Korea to what you see happening in America.
And I was asking somebody a question at one point where they said, I've moved to Canada to flee the communism.
And I said, well, what are you going to do if it happens?
But I see it coming into Canada.
I said, so are you going to go home?
And the person says, well, where do I have to go?
If it comes here, I don't have a home to go to.
I fled it because of it.
What's your goal to try to awaken some minds, wake people up in America, the last bastion for where freedom might exist?
Yeah, I think this is the last hope.
We have nowhere, no place to go if America falls.
But the thing is, I am hopeful because when I was born in North Korea, I did not know that I was oppressed.
And how do you fight to be free if you don't know you're a slave?
And in America, at least at this moment, we know something is wrong.
And I think that's the hope.
But once we pass this point where every word gets inverted that truth is lost, the people don't even know they're oppressed.
They don't even know this is abnormal.
That's when actually the hope is really lost.
However, at this point, as many people are losing their hope, we still have hope because we still have truth.
And we still can think independently outside this machine.
Fantastic.
Now, what was I going to say?
I wanted to flesh out a bit of the censorship issues in terms of Chinese influence in the West.
We don't have much time left, but can you clarify for those who might not truly appreciate the degree of influence of China in the West?
People ask, well, why don't we just go and take out Kim Jong-un or Kim Jong-il?
What are we on?
We're on Kim Jong-un.
And the obvious answer is China would not allow it.
China's influence in North Korea, China's influence in the West.
Explain it for people who might not fully understand the depth and scope of it.
Yeah, I think people really forget that we are not dealing with the Northern regime.
We are dealing with China.
So China sponsors North Korea.
They want North Korea.
And I think that's why no amount of North Korean threat comes to the American way.
America cannot stand up their ground because basically it's a Chinese threat.
And their Chinese influence is not just only over North Korea, even in Hollywood, academia, media, everywhere, especially in Hollywood, where there was a time when a Hollywood producer wanted to make a movie about my first book.
He sent me a script for the movie, a movie script, and in the script it says, "China was my promised land." When I got to China, they gave me protection and they gave me refugees.
And I called them like, this is like completely what you call misinformation, right?
What I told them, this is not what happened.
It's like, this is the only way we can make a movie about North Korea in current Hollywood.
That's why there's no Schindler's List.
There's not any gripping movie about North Korean rights abuses in Hollywood because they cannot offend China.
China controls all the narrative, what we can see, what we cannot see.
And I don't think people understand how much our reality is shaped by Chinese influence.
And the truth of the world is hiding from us because of Chinese money and so many people in America trying to appease China to make money from this evil regime.
Yeah, we've talked about this many times, whether it's LeBron James, you know, not wanting to talk bad about China because they've got a lot of financial interests for sporting, that actor.
John Cena, seemingly kissing up to China.
Red Dawn, the movie where they had to reshoot a scene because China said, you're not going to make us look like that, and then they still didn't approve of it.
People don't appreciate it, but let me ask you this question.
China has their foreign police stations in Western countries.
North Korea is something similar.
Do you have any real risk, or do you have any fear?
Of reprisals for what you're speaking out about in the West?
So I've been informed by South Korean intelligence.
So it's interesting.
I was cancelled by the FBI.
So when people are saying that I'm backed by the American government, they cancelled me.
The FBI invited me to speak at their Houston office.
And then two days before, the head of diversity woman calls me and says, "We need to cancel your speech because of your political opinions." So when people keep saying I'm like paid by American government, they cancel me actively.
But this information came from South Korean intelligence years ago where they told me that I was on the killing list of Kim Jong-un and I need to avoid countries like Malaysia where Kim Jong-un killed his half-brother at the airport.
And there's many countries that North Korea has embassies and can hire hitmen and kill me easily.
So I have to be careful with which country I go and which country I don't go.
And so far, I live in New York City.
In midtown, there's a North Korean consulate.
But they never showed me at my door yet.
So I think I'm okay in New York.
Amazing.
And now, I mean, to ask the absurd question again, you know, people talk about how bad North Korea is and then it ends there because I think people have resigned themselves to being citizens with no power, no control over everything or anything.
What are you continuing to do now and what can people do?
I don't know, raise awareness to try to do something?
What can an ordinary person do to help?
Why both this time get the right politician in American government that can stand up against China and demand accountability from Chinese regime?
Because ultimately the key is in Chinese hands.
If they decide to give freedom to nursing people, we're going to get it.
But they are not doing anything about that.
And of course, all these people in America saying that slavery is wrong.
Of course it's wrong.
Why are we not doing anything about this modern-day slavery?
Just a new report came out by the UN that said more than 50 million people are modern-day slaves right now in the 21st century.
And America is completely keeping silence about the modern-day slavery, and they only talk about the slavery that happened hundreds of years ago.
So I think that awareness is also important.
But I think mostly it needs to come from our leader in American government where they can stand up against China and hold them accountable.
And I think as people living in democracy who have power to vote, that's important power that we have.
Fantastic.
Now, Yanmi, I know you have a hard out and it's been an hour and one minute.
So I'm going to...
Did I forget to ask you anything or is there anything that you would have wanted to say had I asked you the question?
Now I think you covered so many good questions.
Where can people find you?
I've got the Amazon affiliate link for your new book and your old book, but where can people find you and how can they follow you?
They can find me on Twitter, youngniparknk or Instagram or YouTube, but just not on TikTok.
I guess it goes without saying.
A question for my own curiosity, so I don't forget.
Is Park your real last name or is it like when a lot of immigrants from Eastern Europe came over to America, they gave them random last names?
Oh, this is North Korean name.
Everything.
I don't change a single thing in my name.
It's a complete North Korean name.
Okay, very cool.
Chat, if I didn't get any questions you had, my apologies.
Yay on me.
Thank you very much.
I mean, we'll keep in touch after this.
We'll stay in touch.
Thank you for doing this.
Thank you for speaking out and thank you for agreeing to come on.
I'm going to end the stream.
We'll say our proper goodbyes, but everyone else out there, you know where to find her?
I'll put all the links in the pinned comment.
Thank you very much.
▲
Export Selection