Editor’s Note: Young Americans for Freedom’s name was corrected from an error in the print version.
Yeonmi Park lived a difficult and complicated life before coming to America.
During her visit to Kansas State on Oct. 15, she shared her life story with students and Manhattan residents while explaining her firm stance against communism.
Park said she wrote her second book, “While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector’s Search for Freedom in America,” last year, and it focused more on American college students.
“I saw how the universities became this ground zero to indoctrinate American people to believe that America is evil,” she said. “So now I’m seeing the importance of why universities have to hear this.”
Throughout her speech, Park opened up to the audience about her experience escaping North Korea with her mother after nearly starving.
“So in the darkness, I saw the lights, and I guessed that if I go where the lights are, I might be able to find a bowl of rice,” Park said. “With that simple curiosity, I let my own sister at the age of 16 cross the Yang River into China. A few days later, my mother and I followed. Crossing the North Korean border into China was not like crossing the American border currently.”
Park said the guards at North Korea’s border have a shoot-to-kill order for anyone they spot attempting to flee. She and her mother found a woman who wanted to help them safely cross by bribing the guards.
“I didn’t ask why they were helping me, because it didn’t even occur to me, but I found out why they helped me to cross the border,” she said. “As soon as I got to the Chinese riverbank with my mother, it was March 30, 2007. I was 13 years old. The very first thing I saw was my mom being raped. So the reason this lady was helping us was because she was selling us as sex slaves to Chinese.”
Park said she later realized what she had been told about the outside world was untrue, and eventually made contact with Christian missionaries from South Korea who helped her escape her human traffickers.
“Do you know how many North Koreans made it to freedom, to America over the last 80 years?” Park said. “Just 209 of us made it, in the 80 years of time.”
As a result of her experiences, Park said she deeply values the freedoms she has now as a U.S. citizen.
“I remember entering Columbia University the very first day,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it. This is the land of opportunity. This is the promised land — a former enemy like me who was chanting death to America. This country gives a chance to people like me, even to come to study, like what an amazing tolerance system this country has.”
Park explained she strongly disagreed with many criticisms of the U.S. she heard in college.
“My professors were telling me, stay angry and stay outraged because America is fundamentally racist, and this system is being dismantled and the Constitution is being torn down,” Park said. “I was thinking, ‘Are you psychopaths? Have you been outside of America?’ There are human beings sold for like, 100 bucks.”
The key to ensuring the freedoms we enjoy in America stick around, Park said, is to prevent the spread of communist and socialist systems.
“I mean, this is a true, free country,” Park said. “People get to believe whatever they believe in, but when that idea becomes actually enough in a flotation stage right? This is a truly evil ideology. We learn so much about Nazis, we learn so much about American slavery, somehow we have failed educating our next generation on communism … Even Mao, he killed almost 60 million people, under one ruler. That’s how powerful and how evil and damaging his ideology is. … But I do doubt if somebody truly gets the education on communism, they’re going to say they’re communists, because nothing has been as disempowering and genuinely bad to human progress than socialism has ever been.”
Park said it’s extremely important for people to know, “you can be brainwashed.”
“When I read “Animal Farm” by George Orwell, this is when I understood it’s not that I’m just gonna blame the dictators — but my grandmother — they experienced time before Kims,” Park said. “They knew that life could be different, but they didn’t do anything because they were afraid. But this time, now, it came to me.”
Thomas Adcock, president and founder of K-State Young Americans for Freedom, said after hearing Park speak elsewhere, the group set the goal of bringing her to K-State.
“We approached the DEI board, and they were generous enough to give us some funding,” he said.
The junior in history said YAF is nearly two years old.
Gregg Hochderffer, a certified history teacher and Navy and Army National Guard veteran, worked with Adcock for this event. He said hearing Park share her story gave him perspective.
“Americans take everything for granted,” Hochderffer said. “So what we think is so tough … it’s not. We have a lack of major perspective on justice, and we’re way out of balance.
“It saddens me, but at the same time, she offers hope — my God, to do what her mother and what she did — I can’t imagine, we can’t imagine the kind of courage it would take to go through all that,” he said. “Even the idea of escaping would be insane.”
