Featuring Yeonmi Park
North Korean Defector, Author, and Human Rights Activist
June 2023
Yeonmi Park is a well known human rights advocate, speaker, author, and refugee from North Korea. Her experience of living in North Korea, fleeing with her mother, and arriving eventually to the United States has raised awareness of the plight of North Koreans, particularly women. She is a voice not only for the oppressed but also for those who live in freedom, to be vigilant to protect the rights and opportunities available to them in the United States.
When she was ten years old, her father was sentenced to hard labor for smuggling in North Korea. Due to this, her family faced starvation until he was released from medical leave. When her father was released the family decided they had to flee from North Korea but were separated. In 2007, when she was 13, Yeonmi Park and her mother crossed the Yalu River into China. When they arrived in China they were taken by human traffickers, raped, and sold into sex slavery. Her mother was sold as a bride to a Chinese Farmer. Eventually, in February of 2019 when she was 15, Yeonmi and her mother were able to flee through the Gobi Desert of Mongolia to a plane that took them to South Korea with the help of Chinese and Korean Christian missionaries who operated an “underground railroad.”
Yeonmi Park eventually came to the United States where she advocates for freedom and liberty. She attended Columbia University School of General Studies with a focus on human rights. She regularly is invited to speak on issues in North Korea but also freedom and liberty concerns in the United States. She is passionate and concerned with preserving the freedom and liberty she and others have fought so hard to reach.
Yeonmi Park is an author and speaker on human rights and freedom concerns in North Korea and throughout the world. She has authored two books - In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom and While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector’s Search for Freedom in America. She has been selected as one of the 100 Women of 2014 by BBC for her activism on behalf of the North Korean people. She has spoken or written for numerous news outlets in the United States and elsewhere and spoken throughout the United States at universities on issues related to human rights and freedoms in North Korea and the United States. Her TED Talk, “What I learned about freedom after escaping North Korea, has been viewed nearly 5 million times.
Despite her lived experience in North Korea and China, Yeonmi Park remains resilient and proud to be from North Korea. She is determined to bring attention to the travesty occurring to the citizens of North Korea, advocating for change within her home country.