Yeonmi Park, a North Korean Dissident, Defects to the American Right

“The first thing my mom taught me as a young girl living in North Korea was don’t even whisper, because birds and mice could hear me,” Yeonmi Park told the audience that had come to hear her speak in Queens.

“This is what dictators do: they plant a spike everywhere, a distrust between people, a distrust between family, even. The teachers tell their children,” she went on, “‘If your parents say one wrong thing, come to tell the teacher.’”

It was a story that Ms. Park has told often, on television sets and conference stages and in a best-selling memoir, over the decade she has spent as one of the world’s most famous defectors from the Kim family’s isolated totalitarian state.

But in recent years, she has added a new postscript.

“And now,” she told the crowd in Long Island City last weekend, “I see the same thing in America.”

Conservative pundits and politicians have long warned that liberal economics and cultural politics would set the United States on the road to leftist authoritarianism. But until two years ago, they had never had an ally quite like Ms. Park. A refugee from the world’s most infamous surviving Stalinist state, Ms. Park, 29, claims to back up those worst fears with firsthand experience: comparing calls to dismantle racism in math instruction, for instance, with lessons she received as a child in North Korean schools.

Describing her own recent experience as an undergraduate at Columbia University, Ms. Park told the Fox News host Mark Levin in an interview last month that the school’s pedagogy “is exactly what the North Korean regime used to brainwash people.” Left-wing indoctrination in American educational institutions, she said, “is, I think, the biggest threat that our nation, and our civilization is facing.”

She now denounces Hillary Clinton, with whom she once shared a conference stage, as an “absolute faker and liar,” and rails against transgender-oriented marketing campaigns: “Political correctness has erased women,” she wrote recently on Facebook.

Underscoring it all is the warning that these complaints add up to something vastly more sinister than the sum of their Fox News chyrons. “I think so many people in America think that somehow America is immune to tyranny, and somehow a dictatorship begins like North Korea,” she said at the Queens event, hosted by the conservative organization Turning Point USA. “It didn’t begin there. It began with amazing promises of equity. They promised a socialist paradise to us.”

“And with that promise,” she added, “they took everything, one by one, from us.” The crowd gave her two standing ovations.

Ms. Park’s transformation from celebrity defector to loud critic of liberal identity politics is extraordinarily rare. Very few of the tens of thousands of people who have fled North Korea wade into domestic politics in the countries where they have taken refuge.

But in an American political climate that rewards hyperbole and alarm, Ms. Park, who became a U.S. citizen in 2021, has found a lucrative niche.

Her second book, “While Time Remains,” a self-described “warning for Americans” published in February, has already outpaced the hardcover sales of her best-selling 2015 memoir. She is a regular guest on popular right-leaning TV networks and podcasts, and speaker at conservative universities and think tanks.

This spring, she became a contributor to Turning Point USA, appearing at its conferences alongside figures like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and James O’Keefe, the right-wing activist recently ousted from Project Veritas.

Her recent trajectory has drawn winces from some past allies and supporters, who worry about the toll that her dive into the American culture wars may take on her effectiveness as a human rights advocate. And some observers of her career, noting her history of reinvention and questions raised about the accuracy of her account, have lifted an eyebrow at her latest act.

“She’s an amazing entertainer,” said Jay Song, a professor of Korean studies at the Asia Institute of the University of Melbourne in Australia, who studies the experiences of North Korean defectors. “She’s very smart. She’s always picking up on keywords.”

A Celebrity Defector

In a recent interview, Ms. Park, who now lives in New York, described her own politics as less strident than they often appear in her media appearances. “I support gay marriage, I’m very socially liberal,” she said. “I never thought I was a conservative.” Asked whether she identifies as such now, she said no.

She likened the initial idea for her second book to Alexis de Tocqueville. “He comes from France to America — to American democracy,” she said. “So, like, what if a North Korean sees America and analyzes America?”

Ms. Park has lived most of her adult life in the glare of media scrutiny, in one form or another. Five years after escaping North Korea with her mother in 2007, at age 13, she was cast on “Now On My Way to Meet You,” a popular variety show on South Korean television starring young women who had defected.

The program, which premiered in 2011, made North Koreans newly visible in South Korean popular culture. Ms. Park was one of its biggest stars, an effervescent personality who described her North Korean family as relatively affluent and was nicknamed “the Paris Hilton of North Korea.”

“I think a lot of South Koreans learned a lot from that show,” said Jean H. Lee, a journalist who reported from both North and South Korea for The Associated Press. “But it also created the celebrity defector culture.”

In 2014, Ms. Park was invited to speak at the One Young World conference in Dublin, where she revealed a far darker story of her life in North Korea and of her escape.

Amid sobs, she said her mother had been raped by the human trafficker who brought them across the border into China, and described a flight on foot across the Gobi Desert into Mongolia. Later, she would say that she herself had been sold as a teenager to a Chinese husband. She had to work in an adult online chat room, she said, before she and her mother escaped from China.

A video of her short speech — a horrific story delivered by a slight 21-year-old woman, wearing a traditional hanbok dress and trembling with emotion — went viral, making Ms. Park an international humanitarian celebrity. Within months she had a book deal with Penguin Random House for a memoir written with Maryanne Vollers, Hillary Clinton’s ghostwriter.

There were some noted inconsistencies among the stories Ms. Park had told to her South Korean audience and the ones she now told. Mary Ann Jolley, an Australian journalist, published a detailed account of conflicting and implausible details, from the government atrocities she described to the geographical details of her escape, her father’s death in China and her experience in detention in Mongolia.

Ms. Park has disputed some of Ms. Jolley’s criticisms but acknowledged others. Some were a result of language difficulties, she said, or the effects of trauma. She said others stemmed from liberties producers took with her identity on the show in South Korea.

“It was not a documentary,” she said. “It was an entertainment show.”

Ms. Park also said she resisted for years publicly divulging her full experience in China because of the stigma attached to it in conservative South Korea. “If I say I was a slave for two years as a kid, there’s no respected family that would take me as their daughter,” she said.

North Korea experts are quick to point out that Ms. Park’s inconsistencies, while prominent, were not wholly unique. Ms. Song, who has interviewed numerous North Korean defectors, noted that the country’s refugees are often unreliable narrators of their own experiences. Inside the country, she said, many learned to say whatever they needed to say to survive — “whatever works for them to find a safe haven,” she said.

But Ms. Lee said that the early questions surrounding Ms. Park’s account of her escape, as well as her history of self-promotion, limited her impact in North Korea policy circles.

“It’s a shame, because she has important things to say about what life is like in North Korea,” she said. “But I think it’s been clouded by a desire for attention or a platform.”

Disenchanted With the Gala Circuit

When she wrote her first book, Ms. Park and her publisher were mindful of the skepticism Ms. Jolley’s article generated, she said. Both she and Ms. Vollers have said they corroborated as much of the story as possible with interviews with family members and fellow defectors.

“In Order to Live” has sold more than 130,000 copies in hardcover and paperback combined, according to Circana BookScan. Ms. Park was showered with media attention, and she fielded invitations to private retreats hosted by Jeff Bezos and took selfies with Scarlett Johansson. She attended the Met Gala with Joe Gebbia, an Airbnb founder, and shared a speaking stage (at an event in partnership with The New York Times) with Mrs. Clinton, who looked her in the eye after her speech and “promised she would do everything in her power to help the women of North Korea,” Ms. Park later wrote. (Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, said neither Mrs. Clinton nor her staff who were present at the time recalled Mrs. Clinton saying that.)

In her new book, however, Ms. Park writes about being disenchanted by her brush with elites. They were more interested in emotional gratification than in action, she came to believe.

She began studying at Columbia University in 2016 and majored in human rights, in hopes of becoming a professional advocate. But some people who encountered her at the time recalled that she seemed to struggle with the transition from celebrity dissident to more policy-focused activism.

She tried to lend her star power to a group called Freedom for North Korea, which raised money for a sister organization in South Korea that rescued North Korean refugees from China — her personal passion. But Jin Park, a former human rights activist who worked with her in the group at the time, said Ms. Park was unsuccessful in the role and soon moved on.

“We thought that she could be a good fund-raiser because of her connections and networks,” he said. “I think she tried, but getting people’s money is not as easy as it sounds.” (Ms. Park says she quickly learned she was too busy for the role at the time.)

Peter Rosenblum, a professor of human rights law who taught Ms. Park in her senior seminar, recalled being unimpressed by her as a student. But he said he was sympathetic to her situation, as someone who seemed to be trapped by the persona that she had been cast in at a very young age.

“In the human rights world, you spend a career studying how people deploy victims’ stories, and the degrading effect of having to be a professional victim,” Mr. Rosenblum said. “I saw her very much as that person: the celebrity victim who was going to get her degree but hadn’t had the time and space to become a real student.”

By the end of her time at Columbia, Ms. Park says, she was disengaged from school and barely there, commuting to her classes from Chicago, where she was living with her then-husband — an American trading firm executive whom she has since divorced — and young son.

And at Columbia, she now says, she was quickly put off by a campus culture she describes as obsessed with safe spaces and pronouns.

“My classmates were almost like giant adult babies,” she said.

In her book, she writes that she was criticized for her enjoyment of Jane Austen novels and Western classical music. She describes the First Amendment as “a law Columbia teaches its students to hate” — though she does not mention that she studied at Columbia with Lee Bollinger, the university president and a prominent First Amendment scholar known for his expansive view of freedom of speech and for defending conservative and far-right speakers’ prerogative to appear on campus. Ms. Park declined to comment on the contents of the class. Columbia declined to comment.

Shortly after graduating in 2020, Ms. Park was assaulted and robbed of her wallet while out walking with her son in Chicago. As she used her cellphone to record her assailant, a Black woman, she said another woman shouted at her for doing so and called her a racist. (The assailant was later arrested and pleaded guilty to unlawful restraint, according to court records.)

The incident, she wrote, was a turning point in her own politics, “a sign of how far advanced the woke disease really was in America by that point, and how inhumane it was making otherwise normal people.” She began to seek out allies who felt similarly.

After reading a book by Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist and popular conservative media personality, she sought out his daughter, Mikhaila, a podcaster and social-media lifestyle influencer, who invited her on her podcast. Hearing that Mr. Peterson was a collector of Soviet art, Ms. Park sent him a North Korean postcard she had saved.

Mr. Peterson invited her on his podcast, where she described her experience at Columbia. The interview led to a flurry of conservative media attention and, shortly thereafter, a $500,000 book deal with Threshold Editions, Simon & Schuster’s conservative imprint. Mr. Peterson wrote the book’s foreword.

‘It’s a Free Society’

Ms. Park maintains that her recent outspokenness has cost, not made, her money. The advance for “While Time Remains,” while significant, was well short of the $1.1 million she received for her previous book. Invitations for well-paying corporate speaking events that used to make up much of her income have slowed to a trickle, she said.

She now earns $6,600 a month from Turning Point USA, she said, and maintains a busy itinerary of talks before other conservative audiences who are more eager to hear her warnings about “cancel culture” and “woke” identity politics. After a recent talk in Brookfield, Wis., a suburb of Milwaukee, a local school board member, Sam Hughes, posted on Facebook about the power of Ms. Park’s presentation.

“The North Korean regime created schools not to teach children how to think, but what to believe,” Mr. Hughes wrote, warning about the dangers “groupthink and collectivism.” Considering his district’s equity programs, “North Korea’s example should come to mind,” he wrote.

Jihyun Park, a North Korean defector and a Conservative Party politician in Britain, who knows Ms. Park, said that Ms. Park’s trajectory rang true to her. North Koreans have particularly important insights into the perils of taking Western liberal democracy for granted, she said.

“The U.K. teaches me English and their culture, I’ve taught them freedom and democracy,” she said. In the United States, “Yeonmi also does this,” she said.

Ms. Song is more skeptical. She described Ms. Park as a perceptive reader, and reflector, of cultural and political expectations. “Her story in South Korea was a mirror of what South Korea was back then,” Ms. Song said. “Now,” she said, “it’s a mirror of the contemporary U.S. politics, U.S. society.”

Ms. Park, for her part, suggested that her latest turn might not be her last.

“I might write a completely different book in five years,” she said. “I might say everything that I wrote in the second book was dumb. But that’s O.K.”

She laughed. “It’s a free society,” she said.