Yeonmi Park

Park Yeonmi
Park at the Atlas Network Liberty Forum Conference in New York in 2014
Born	(1993-10-04) 4 October 1993 Hyesan, North Korea
Citizenship	South Korea
Occupation(s)	Human rights activist Talk show host Reporter Speaker

Park Yeon-mi
Hangul	박연미
Revised Romanization	Bak Yeon-mi
McCune–Reischauer	Pak Yŏnmi

Park Yeon-mi (stylized as Yeonmi Park; born October 4, 1993) is a North Korean defector and human rights activist who escaped North Korea in 2007 and currently lives in South Korea. She was once part of a ruling elite in North Korea. She now works as an activist, reporter, and speaker, appearing as a celebrity on talk shows and TV programs advocating for the cause of North Korean refugees.

Yeon-mi rose to global prominence after she delivered a speech at the One Young World 2014 Summit in Dublin, Ireland - an annual Summit that gathers young people from around the world to develop solutions to world issues. She gave a speech about her experience escaping from North Korea at the One Young World Summit in Dublin that received over 2 million views on YouTube.

Early life

Park was born on October 4, 1993 in Hyesan, Ryanggang, North Korea. Her father was a civil servant who worked at the Hyesan town hall as part of the ruling Workers Party, and her mother was a nurse for the North Korean Army. Her family lived in Hyesan until 2002, when she moved to Pyongyang to join her father who was then a businessman. Her family was wealthy during most of her childhood, although the family later struggled after her father was imprisoned for allegedly engaging in an illegal business. Park has an older sister, Eunmi.

Escape from North Korea

Park’s father was arrested for illegal trading and subjected to hard labor. Her views of the Kim Dynasty changed when she watched a pirated DVD of the 1997 movie, Titanic," which caused her to realize 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.” This realization of the government’s cruelty was further revealed when, at nine years old, she witnessed the execution of one of her mother’s friends for selling DVDs and watching a James Bond movie.

Park's father was diagnosed with colon cancer while interned in a labor camp. In 2005, he used a bribe to secure his release from the camp in order to receive medical treatment. When reunited with his family, he urged them to plan their escape to China. Unfortunately, her older sister Eunmi left for China early without notifying them. Park and her family escaped North Korea by traveling through China with the help of brokers who smuggle North Koreans into China. Chinese and Korean Christian missionaries helped them relocate to Mongolia, and South Korean diplomats facilitated the family's transition into Seoul. After this harrowing journey, which concluded in 2007, Park became a full-time activist for human rights in North Korea.

China

Park and her family escaped North Korea by crossing the border into China. On the night of March 30, 2007, with the help of a broker, Park and her mother crossed a frozen river and three mountains to get into the Chinese border. Park’s father stayed behind in North Korea, thinking his illness would slow them down. After crossing the Chinese border, they headed for the Chinese province of Jilin. The family tried to find Eunmi by asking the smugglers her whereabouts, but they were unsuccessful and Yeonmi and her mother assumed Eunmi had died.

One of their smugglers threatened to report them to the authorities if Park didn’t have sex with him. Her mother intervened for her safety by offering herself to the smuggler, who then raped her in front of Park.

A few days later, Park’s father joined them. They sought shelter at a great-aunt’s home outside of Shenyang, China, a hiding place unable to pay for running water. Park then realized that China’s living conditions were as poor as North Korea's.

In January 2008, Park's father died at 45 while the family was living in secret. They were unable to formally mourn him, in fear that their profiles would be discovered by Chinese authorities, and buried his remains in a nearby mountain. Park said, “there was no funeral. Nothing. I couldn’t even do that for my father. I couldn’t call anyone to say my father had passed away. We couldn’t even give him painkillers.”

After the burial, they rode a bus for two days to a Christian shelter headed by Chinese and South Korean missionaries in the port city of Qingdao, China. Due to the large Korean population in the city, they were able to avert the attention of authorities. With the help of the missionaries, they took a chance and fled to South Korea through Mongolia.

Mongolia

In February 2009, after receiving aid from human rights activists and Christian missionaries, Park and her mother journeyed to Mongolia to seek asylum from South Korean diplomats, traveling through the Gobi Desert.

When they reached the Mongolian border, 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 knives. “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 under custody at a detention center at Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia. On April 1, 2009, Park and her mother were sent to Ulan Bator’s Chinggis Khaan airport to fly them to Seoul. Park felt relieved to be free at last; the Daily Telegraph reported, "Oh my God," she thought when Mongolian customs officials waved her through. 'They didn’t stop me.'”.

South Korea

Park Yeonmi, in South Korea.

Park and her mother had difficulty adjusting to their new lives in South Korea, but they managed to find jobs as shop assistants and waitresses. Park also continued her education in Dongguk University in Seoul. In April 2014, South Korean intelligence discovered her sister, Eunmi, who is now living in Seoul; Eunmi had escaped to South Korea via China and Thailand. Park and her mother eventually reunited with Eunmi.

Controversy

Park was accused of exaggerating and fabricating her experiences as a North Korean defector when The Diplomat's Mary Ann Jolley highlighted obvious inconsistencies in her stories. Jolley compared and contrasted numerous anecdotes recounted by Park, to evince that she often changed the contents of her stories depending on the audience.

Activism

Since escaping, Park has written and spoken publicly about her life in North Korea, having written for the Washington Post, and has been interviewed by The Guardian. Park volunteers to become involved in activist programs such as being a media fellow for the Freedom Factory Corporation, a free market think tank in South Korea. She also became a member of LiNK (Liberty in North Korea), a nonprofit organization that rescues North Korean refugees hiding in China and resettling them to South Korea and the United States. On June 12–15, 2014, Park attended LiNK’s summit at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California. She and the other North Korean activists, Joo Yang and Seongmin Lee, worked in sessions and labs, educating participants in the conditions of North Korea and how LiNK can support the refugees. Park took part in LiNK’s campaign, the Jangmadang (장마당). The Jangmadang is a term for North Korea's black market where people exchange goods that where smuggled into North Korea. She recorded her story on video to assist with the campaign, which ran during the fall of 2014. Park has also been outspoken about tourism in North Korea, as they 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.”

Park told the story of escape at several well-known events like TEDx in Bath, TEDxHangang in Seoul, the One Young World summit in Dublin, and the Oslo Freedom Forum.

Education

Park works as a human rights activist and a celebrity while continuing her education in South Korea in 2014. Park is enrolled in Dongguk University in Seoul as a third-year student and majors in criminal justice. In her spare time, she has taught herself fluent English by watching a Friends series DVD box set and watching YouTube videos. She also took interests in Bastiat, the classical-liberal economics, and the Communist Manifesto. Furthermore, she is interested in her freedom to think and do whatever she pleases because being away from North Korea gave her the opportunity to experience freedom.

Celebrity

On My Way To Meet You

Park appears under the name Park Ye-ju (박예주) along with other North Korean defectors in a South Korean TV program called Now On My Way To Meet You (이제 만나러 갑니다), a chat show mixed with talent quest and musical broadcast. The show is about telling the truth about North Korea and mocks the North Korean regime. The defectors are giving the South Koreans insight about their life of abuse in the North.

North Korea Today

Park worked as a co-host for Casey Lartigue, a talk show host of the podcast-show North Korea Today. The podcast discusses North Korean topics and the life of the refugees after their escape. Park volunteered for this opportunity to make the world become aware of the repression of the North Korean refugees and how people can take action for their need of freedom. They hosted five episodes of the podcast.

Reporter

Park worked as a news reporter to write about the occurring events happening in North Korea. Park became a reporter for New Focus International, a newspaper company run by former North Korean Propagandist Jang Jin-sung. She and the other North Korean defectors use connections from the defectors to receive credible information from North Korea to write and publish articles on North Korean related issues.

Beliefs

Unification

Park believes that there are positive and negative possibilities for North Korea to be reunified with South Korea. Park doubts that there would be any chance of reunifying the Korean Peninsula because they don’t desire it; the South Koreans discriminate against the defectors for being illegal immigrants to South Korea. She believes that there are neither northerners nor southerners in Korea, just Koreans themselves. She also presumes that there is a possibility that there might be a chance for reunification if North Korea dissolves in the same manner as the Soviet Union.

North Korea

Park believes that change might occur in North Korea as long as she and the other North Korean defectors continue to advocate for human rights in North Korea. 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,” therefore the Kim’s would be able to focus on their people, and then they would be able to become more opened to the world. As long as the Jangmadang remains active, more North Koreans would be able to expose themselves to the outside world, and question their meaning of life.

Kim Jong-Un

Park considers Kim Jong-Un to be a cruel leader to the North Korean people for continuing the abuse of his own people. Park likens Kim Jong-Un to a description from Al Jazeera (Qatar), berating him as “a criminal for killing 80 people in one day for watching a movie or reading the Bible. This young man is so cruel. He ordered that people who attempt escape should be shot.” According to the Telegraph, Park believes that he must be punished for not just oppressing them, but toying his own people.

See also

• List of North Korean defectors in South Korea
• North Korean defectors
• Human rights in North Korea
• Liberty in North Korea

External links

• Official website
• Yeon-mi's speech at the One Young World Conference