The Buckley Beacon’s exclusive interview with North Korean defector, human rights activist, and bestselling author Yeonmi Park.
Owen Tilman
Editor-in-Chief, The Buckley Beacon
In April of last year, demonstrators assembled on Yale’s cross campus and erected an encampment in support of “Palestinian liberation.” Most notably, said demonstrators required spoken deposition to the pro-Palestinian cause for safe passage across the patch of land they had taken hostage. Any non-participating students, faculty, and New Haven residents who refused were turned away, the protesters citing their appropriately named “zero-tolerance policy” for quote-unquote “discrimination.”
Similar displays of censorship on American university campuses since October 7 have led to a broader national conversation about the dangers of far-left social activism, censorship, and a contempt for western values and ideas. In light of the fraught national conversation, The Buckley Beacon recently sat down with Yeonmi Park, international human rights activist and bestselling author who defected from North Korea in 2007 at the age of 13. Park is the author of 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, a national bestseller. In 2014, Park delivered a since-famous speech at the 2014 One Young World Summit in Ireland documenting her emotional story of defection, ultimately amassing over 82 million views on social media.
Park has over 220,000 followers on X, 561,000 on Instagram, and 1.1 million subscribers to her “Voice of North Korea by Yeonmi Park” channel on YouTube.
Born in 1993, Park’s childhood was characterized largely by the Arduous March famine, one that left upwards of several million North Koreans dead between 1994 and 1998, according to some estimates. In her interview with The Beacon, Park emphasized the toll the tragedy took on the first few years of her life.
“I was simply starving,” Park said. “I remember, really, seeing dead bodies on the street. It was as common as looking at trees in America right now, it was such a daily life thing. For me, I thought that was normal life.”
To combat starvation, North Koreans often turned to illegal, black-market private trading for food. When Park was nine, her father, Park Jin Sik, was arrested in connection with a similar scheme and subsequently sentenced to 17 years in forced labor, ultimately bribing his way out of the camp just a few years into his sentence. After doing so, Yeonmi Park’s family fled the country by bribing agents on the North Korean-Chinese border, according to Park’s account.
“I had to go to China,” Park described, and “several years later, I crossed [the] Gobi Desert into Mongolia, and that led me to go to South Korea and be free.” Before making it to South Korea, however, Park and her mother were sold into Chinese sex trafficking in exchange for defection. In her viral 2014 address at the One Young World Summit in Dublin, which amassed over 82 million views on social media, Park emotionally outlined the harrowing story of seeing her mother raped — who was, per her account, sold as a sex slave for the equivalent of $65, whereas then-13-year-old Park was sold for $260.
“People had no clue what was happening in North Korea … that there were slaves in the twenty-first century,” Park added. Moreover, as she did in her 2014 address, Park told The Beacon that her and her mother’s stories are often overlooked by Western countries due to financial entanglements with the Chinese Communist Party. The “North Korean regime is propped up by the CCP, and so many countries in the West are afraid of China,” Park said. Western corporations, she continued, “want to be taking the market share in China, and do business with the CCP.”
Park and her family claimed asylum in Mongolia and later in South Korea. Upon moving to the United States, Park enrolled at Columbia University’s School of General Studies in 2016 at the age of 23, where she was distressed to find a pervasive contempt for the United States and western nations among her peers and professors. In a 2021 interview with Fox News, Park compared the culture at Columbia to the culture of thought-policing and censorship back home in North Korea, citing a supposed spat with a professor after Park praised the literature of Jane Austen.
“There are professors literally brainwashing students to hate America,” Park summarized to The Beacon. “It’s literally driven by Marxist ideology, where you divide people as victims and oppressors.”
Park characterized the root of said ideology, at least in its modern adaptation, as based on an ancestral guilt — something that, in her view, links the communism of North Korea with the progressive racial politics of left-wing activists in the United States. “In North Korea, too, if you were the landowner, if your family were capitalists, they say your blood is tainted,” Park said. “And they now call white men, they say their blood is tainted because your ancestors supposedly owned the slaves. The division by your ancestors’ crimes is, in America, by the race.”
Park also deplored the progressive gender ideology she found popular among her college peers, remarking that “even North Korea didn’t go that far” and that “they still know what a ‘woman’ is” in her home country.
Since October 7, Park has expressed concern over pro-Palestinian activism on American and western university campuses, implying it to be similar to her own experiences on Columbia’s campus. Park did not, however, express explicit support for certain proposals of the new presidential administration, including President Trump’s proposal to deport any international student who participates in demonstrations, especially those that turn violent. “I’m not an expert, and in general, I believe in freedom of speech, including hate speech,” Park noted. “But I don’t know in what, how much that right gets extended. I’m not sure if they are engaging in any looting, or terrorist activism, or inciting violence.”
Park did, however, express optimism in the administration’s ability to cultivate greater national security, including against her own home country. At first in 2016, Park admitted she was skeptical of President Trump’s ability to negotiate with Kim Jong Un, and was outwardly critical of Trump’s friendly demeanor towards the North Korean leader.
“When President Trump met Kim Jong Un at Vietnam or Singapore, I was [at] the forefront criticizing Trump over complimenting Kim Jong Un, like how he is ‘loved by his people’. But,” Park clarified, “what I learned over the years about President Trump is that a lot of these are tactics. You really also have to see his actions, he [met] with Kim Jong Un but he did not make any concessions.”
Park also made the comparison between Trump and former President Biden, noting the latter’s weakness in preventing North Korea’s testing of long-range ballistic missiles.
“Despite those love letters,” Park said referring to the 27 letters Trump exchanged with Un in between 2018 and 2019, “North Korea was actually threatened by Trump, and they did not conduct long-range missiles tests that was threatening his neighboring countries.” Under Biden, by contrast, Park noted “of course there were no love letters, but Kim Jong Un was not fearful of America, and conducting so many long-range missile tests which was threatening the world peace.”
While Park acknowledged that a “human rights agenda” is “not even [Trump’s] remotely top issue” as it pertains to North Korea, Park again expressed optimism in the future over Trump’s national security policies. “I do think we will be a lot safer with President Trump in the office than Democratic Party would be,” Park concluded.