59 Facts About Yeonmi Park

Yeonmi Park is an American conservative activist and North Korean defector, described as "one of the most famous North Korean defectors in the world".

Yeonmi Park fled from North Korea to China in 2007 at age 13 before moving to South Korea, then to the United States.

Yeonmi Park came to wider global attention after her speech at the 2014 One Young World Summit in Dublin, Ireland.

In 2014, The Diplomat published an investigation by journalist Mary Ann Jolley, who had previously worked with Yeonmi Park, documenting numerous inconsistencies in Yeonmi Park's memories and descriptions of life in Korea.

Yeonmi Park attributed the discrepancies to her imperfect memory and language skills, and her autobiography's coauthor, Maryanne Vollers, said Yeonmi Park was the victim of a North Korean smear campaign.

Yeonmi Park was born on October 4,1993, in Hyesan, Ryanggang Province, North Korea ; her father was Yeonmi Park Jin-sik and her mother was Byeon Keum-sook.

Yeonmi 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.

In 2014, at a speech at the Oslo Freedom Forum, Yeonmi Park spoke about her life as a young teen watching the 1997 film Titanic.

Yeonmi 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 claiming to have left him behind in North Korea having never told him the family planned to defect.

Yeonmi 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.

Yeonmi 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.

Yeonmi Park later told The Telegraph that she felt relieved when Mongolian customs officials waved her through.

Yeonmi Park was automatically granted South Korean citizenship upon arriving in Seoul in 2009.

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.

Yeonmi 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.

In 2014, Yeonmi Park was selected as one of the BBC 100 Women.

Yeonmi Park moved to New York City in 2014 to complete her memoir while continuing to work as an activist.

Yeonmi Park became a naturalized US citizen in 2021, and was married to an American man named Ezekiel from 2017 to 2020, with whom she had a son.

In 2015, Yeonmi Park published her memoir, In Order to Live, in which she describes her journey from defection to higher education.

Yeonmi Park attended classes at Barnard College and was accepted to the Columbia University School of General Studies, starting there in 2016.

Yeonmi 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".

Experts on North Korea noted that Yeonmi 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.

Abrams, while accusing Yeonmi Park of fabricating her stories of life in North Korea, compared Yeonmi Park's life story to both the Nayirah testimony and Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations Security Council.

Michael Bassett, who spent several years in the demilitarized zone as a member of the US military, accused Yeonmi Park of fabricating her stories about North Korea, criticized her use of the word "holocaust" to describe the situation in North Korea, and accused her of working on behalf of free-market think tanks to support economic sanctions against North Korea.

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, criticized Yeonmi Park's stories, saying that her testimony did not match her mother's accounts of life in North Korea.

Yeonmi Park claimed that, when she was nine years old, she saw her best friend's mother publicly executed in a stadium in Hyesan.

Yeonmi Park said that public executions in North Korea were reserved for the most extreme crimes, such as murder and involvement in large-scale criminal networks.

Yeonmi Park has said that her mother and father had both served prison sentences for alleged crimes in North Korea, but her recollection differs from her mother's.

Yeonmi Park said in an interview that she initially believed her father's sentence was 17 to 18 years, but that North Korean records indicated it was 11 years.

Yeonmi Park's mother said he was initially sentenced to one year that was extended to ten.

Yeonmi Park's mother said that she was interrogated sporadically over the course of a year and not detained.

In some interviews, Yeonmi Park said she and her sister were left alone to live in the mountains after their parents were jailed, and that they survived by eating grass.

Yeonmi Park's mother told The Diplomat in 2014 that they had paid two people to help carry his body up the mountain for burial.

In one interview, Yeonmi Park said her father died during her escape from North Korea and that she buried him alone.

Yeonmi Park said that when she tried to call the police after the robbery, a crowd of approximately 20 white bystanders "accused her of being racist".

Yeonmi Park later acknowledged the prosecution in her book While Time Remains.

Yeonmi Park said that during her life in North Korea she had never witnessed romantic love in fiction; this was contradicted by her earlier interviews in which she said she had watched romantic movies featuring Cinderella and Snow White and said that watching Titanic caused her to question the North Korean government.

Yeonmi Park responded that she had never seen people pushing trains in North Korea, though she believed that it did happen and claimed she had photographs to prove it.

Yeonmi Park sent three of these photos to journalist Laura Jadeed, but Jadeed wrote that none of them showed people pushing trains.

Stories Yeonmi Park told about life in North Korea were mocked by writers for Dazed, including her claims that there is no ice cream in North Korea, that North Korea has a single train that runs only once a month and that passengers have to push, and that children in North Korea eat mud.

Yeonmi 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.

On social issues, Yeonmi Park is against the recognition of transgender people, and wrote in her second book that she believes Columbia University brainwashed one of her classmates into believing they were non-binary.

Yeonmi Park is opposed to African-American athletes taking the knee in protest of racism.

Yeonmi Park believes the US is a "tolerant country"; she criticized African-American track and field athlete Gwen Berry for turning away from the national anthem at the US Olympic track and field trials for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics in protest of racial and social injustices.

Yeonmi 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".

Yeonmi Park believes that left-wing political ideologies are the dominant ideologies in American society.

Yeonmi Park has stated that she believes that the United States is close to becoming a "liberal dictatorship", and that "'cancel culture' at US colleges is the first step toward North Korean-style firing squads", according to The Washington Post.

Yeonmi Park is a Christian, and has attributed South Korea's economic success to its adoption of Christianity.

Yeonmi Park said, "I don't know what the connection is, but South Korea became very blessed when they embraced Christianity".

Yeonmi 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.

Yeonmi Park 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.

Yeonmi 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.

At a speaking engagement at Texas Tech University in April 2021, Yeonmi 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, and money or other monetary benefits to North Korea.

Yeonmi Park 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 November 2023, Yeonmi Park was paid to give a speech at Wake Forest University at an event hosted by the conservative group Young Americans for Freedom.

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.

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.

Yeonmi Park has received support from Atlas Network, a non-governmental organization that provides services which include training, networking as well as grants for libertarian, conservative and free-market groups around the world.

In 2015, Yeonmi Park's speaking agent told NK News that Yeonmi Park charged between $12,500 and $17,500 plus expenses for each speech.