Park’s journey from despotism to freedom
“I did not escape for freedom; I did not know what that was,” said Yeonmi Park.
Last week, Park was invited by the UD Young Americans for Freedom to visit the University of Dallas and give a talk to everyone in the community.
Park heroically shared the story of her escape from communist North Korea and spoke on the topic of the “fragility of truth.”
Park recalled how, when she was just a little girl, she considered North Korea to be a communist paradise. This is what she was told. No one in her family contradicted this belief, out of fear of intense punishment.
“How do you fight to be free if you don’t know you’re oppressed?” asked Park.
Park spoke on how she had not only no concept of “freedom,” but she also did not know any word to convey that concept. That country, she noted, seemed to have taken George Orwell’s book “1984” as a step-by-step guide on how to control people.
North Korea, just like the government in Orwell’s dystopian novel, changes the meanings of, or outright removes, words that can lead to seditious thoughts such as “freedom” or “love.”
Angela Philpott, the chairwoman of the UD YAF chapter, expressed her thoughts about the importance of Park’s words.
“What particularly struck me was the similarity of cancel-culture to the North Korean government striking words like love and compassion from the dictionary,” said Philpott.
In the last few days of Park’s time in North Korea, she came down with a painful stomach ache. Fearing for her life, her family took her to the hospital, where doctors mistakenly removed her appendix.
On a jovial note, Park remarked that if she ever returned to North Korea, she would sue those doctors for malpractice just as people do in America.
After her scarring stay at the hospital, she paid a small sum to be smuggled across the North Korean border to China. Then, her lot in life became immensely worse.
Park revealed she was sold as a sex slave to a Chinese man, who wanted her to be his mistress. Eventually, that man helped Park to free her mother who had fled with her into China but had been separated. He also smuggled her father into China.
After about two years, Park was finally able to flee to South Korea, which was not, as she had been brainwashed into thinking, a capitalist hell-hole.
There, she grappled with the fact that all she had learned about history, politics, foreigners and reality had been lies told to keep her in line.
In 2016, Park travelled to America after learning English, getting accepted to Columbia University and leaving all that she had ever known behind.
But immediately, the vision of the country that she had polished to perfection was met with a sordid reality. Park was called an “oppressor” because she was not aware that some people go by “they” pronouns. She was told that communism and collectivism were the future and that a capitalist system only creates inequality.
Park saw how inconsiderate Americans were of their own American system. Students, professors, and people she met on the streets would laud communism for its ability to create equality and disparage America for the inequality they saw as inherent in the system.
This did not sit well with Park.
“The very fact that you can go [publicly protest makes America an] ideal system,” she said. However, “There’s so much truth, like in North Korea, lost in America.”
Park lamented that Americans lack perspective: what some saw as inequality was in fact opportunity; what some saw as the rich stealing from the poor, was actually the successful execution of the basic principles of economics. What some saw as oppression was the expression of the Western theory of natural rights.
“It’s important for us to… know truth, to spread truth, so that we don’t end up like North Korea,” said Park.
This statement, coming from one of the few survivors of communist North Korea, should not leave us fearful that America will end up like that country.
It should, however, encourage us to bravely learn and love the truth through our education and experiences so that we can, with steadfast constancy, remind all those who would denounce America that this is the land of the free.
Samuel Korkus is a sophomore English major.