Born in Hyesan, North Korea on October 4, 1993, Yeonmi Park has become a leading voice for those oppressed by communism around the world and a champion of America and American values. Her 2014 article about North Korea’s “Black Market Generation” in The Washington Post created a sensation worldwide, and the memoir about her escape from North Korea, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom, has been published in twenty languages.
The Impact Fund audience fell silent as Yeonmi Park recounted her survival of and escape from North Korea and her admonition to Americans to not lose what makes us great. This greatness animates her, in part because she was raised in a culture of fear and ignorance.
The very first lesson that my mom told me as a young girl, I still remember, is that she said: ‘Don’t even whisper because the birds and mice could hear me.’ . . . So I learned not to even whisper. And when you cannot talk, of course it leads to not being able to think. So, North Koreans don’t even know what critical thinking is.
On why the North Korean people don’t rise up against their oppressors:
The reason that we don’t rise up is because we don’t know that we are slaves. We don’t know that we are oppressed. We are oppressed to the point where government removes words like liberty, freedom, human rights, or even love. . . The fact that you don’t have the word means you don’t understand the concept.
Ms. Park’s harrowing journey led her from eating insects to survive in North Korea, to escaping over a frozen river into China, to being taken by human traffickers and sold into exploitation, to a long, perilous trek through sub-zero temperatures en route to South Korea. Even after coming to America, she was shocked to find familiar communist narratives embraced.
I went to Columbia University, my university professors at the Ivy League school told us that math is made up by the white man to control the minority. And I remember my very first lesson in North Korean school from my teacher. She asked me, ‘What is one plus one?’ I answered two, and she said I was wrong. Kim Jong Il one day added one drop of water to another drop of water. What does it become? It becomes a bigger one. So that’s how he proved that math was made up by the greedy capitalists in the West to control the minority, and the exact same lesson we were taught in the twenty-first century at Columbia University. So, you know, I didn’t escape that far from the tyranny, I guess.
Ms. Park wanted those present to know that slavery is still practiced today, and she urged Americans not to weaken themselves with falsehoods when we live in the greatest nation in history and there is so much to be done.