Yeonmi Park Jordan B Peterson Popular Books

Yeonmi Park Jordan B Peterson Biography & Facts

Yeonmi Park (Korean: 박연미; born 4 October 1993) is a North Korean defector, YouTuber, author, and American conservative activist, described as "one of the most famous North Korean defectors in the world". She fled from North Korea to China in 2007 at age 13 before moving to South Korea, then to the United States. Park made her media debut in 2011 on the show Now On My Way to Meet You, where she was dubbed "Paris Hilton" due to her stories of her family's wealthy lifestyle. She came to wider global attention after her speech at the 2014 One Young World Summit in Dublin, Ireland. Park's memoir, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom, was published in 2015, and as of 2023 has sold over 100,000 copies. During the 2020s, she became a voice for American conservatism with speeches, podcasts and the 2023 publication of her second book, While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America. The authenticity of Park's claims about life in North Korea – many of which have contradicted her earlier stories and those of both her mother and fellow defectors from North Korea – have been the subject of widespread skepticism. Political commentators, journalists and professors of Korean studies have criticized Park's accounts of life in North Korea for inconsistencies, contradictory claims, and exaggerations. Other North Korean defectors, including those from the same city as Park, have expressed concern that the tendency for "celebrity defectors" to exaggerate about life in North Korea will produce skepticism about their stories. In 2014, The Diplomat published an investigation by journalist Mary Ann Jolley, who had previously worked with Park, documenting numerous inconsistencies in Park's memories and descriptions of life in Korea. In July 2023, a Washington Post investigation found there was little truth to Park's claims about life in North Korea. Park attributed the discrepancies to her imperfect memory and language skills, and her autobiography's coauthor, Maryanne Vollers, said Park was the victim of a North Korean smear campaign. Park runs the YouTube channel "Voice of North Korea by Yeonmi Park", which as of July 2023 has over one million subscribers. Her political views have been called "American conservative", and she has criticized the concepts of political correctness and woke culture in the U.S., drawing parallels between political correctness in the U.S. and North Korea. Early life North Korea (1993–2007) Park was born on 4 October 1993 in Hyesan, Ryanggang, North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of Korea – DPRK); her father was Park Jin-Sik and her mother was Byeon Keum-sook. Her older sister, Eun-mi, was born in 1991. Her childhood was during the North Korean famine. Park's father was a civil servant who worked at the Hyesan town hall as a member of the ruling Workers' Party of Korea and supplemented his income by smuggling goods from China. Journalists have said that Park's memories and descriptions of her early life are often contradictory and at odds with her mother's, as well as with other defectors' descriptions of life in North Korea, and that her story has changed depending upon the audience. During a speech at the Oslo Freedom Forum, Park said that her childhood views of the ruling Kim family changed after watching a VHS copy of the 1997 film Titanic, which caused her to realize as a teen the North Korean government's "oppressive nature". She said the movie taught her the true meaning of love and gave her "a taste of freedom". Leaving North Korea for China (2007) Park left North Korea in 2007, when she was 13. According to her account published in The Telegraph in 2014, after her father "bribe[d] his way out of jail", the family began to plan their escape to China, but Park's older sister Eunmi left for China early without notifying them. The family feared that they would be punished for Eunmi's escape, so Yeonmi and her mother left North Korea by traveling through China with the help of brokers who smuggle North Koreans into China. They escaped by crossing the border into Changbai Korean Autonomous County, Jilin, China, on 30 March 2007. Park and her mother found a Christian shelter headed by Chinese and South Korean missionaries in Qingdao. Due to the city's large ethnic Korean population, they were able to evade the attention of authorities. With the missionaries' help, they fled to South Korea through Mongolia. Park's father and the family's defection Park has given three separate and vastly different accounts of her father's and the family's defection from North Korea, claiming that her father chose to stay in North Korea because he believed his illness would slow them down, claiming that she defected alongside him and buried his corpse after he died from illness during their defection, and also claiming to have left him behind in North Korea having never told him the family planned to defect. According to the 2014 Telegraph account and an account published in 2015 by The Guardian, Park's father was sick and stayed behind in North Korea, thinking his illness would slow them down. Other statements by Park in the same time frame suggested that her father had joined them in crossing to China. After crossing the border, Park and her mother headed for Jilin. They unsuccessfully tried to find Park's sister, Eunmi, asking the traffickers about her whereabouts. Park and her mother assumed that Eunmi had died. Park's and her mother's accounts of her father's death differ. In a third version of the story, Park claims that she and her family left their father behind in North Korea without telling him they had left. Claiming asylum in Mongolia Park says that in February 2009, after spending two days at a Christian shelter in Qingdao, she and her mother traveled through the Gobi Desert to Mongolia to seek asylum from South Korean diplomats. Park claims that they reached the Mongolian border and that the General Authority for Border Protection guards stopped them and threatened to deport them back to China. Park recalls that at this point she and her mother pledged to kill themselves with their razors, adding: "I thought it was the end of my life. We were saying goodbye to one another." Their actions persuaded the guards to let them through, but Park says they were placed under arrest and kept in custody at a detention center at Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia's capital. Park later said in an interview with Jordan Peterson that she believed the guards were toying with them since Mongolia's official policy on North Korean refugees is to deport them to South Korea. On 1 April 2009, Park and her mother were sent to Ulaanbaatar's Chinggis Khaan Airport to be flown to Seoul Incheon International Airport. She later told The Telegraph that she felt relieved when Mongolian customs officials waved her through. Many years later, the South Korean National Intelligence Service informed Park that her sister, Eunmi, had escaped to Sout.... Discover the Yeonmi Park Jordan B Peterson popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Yeonmi Park Jordan B Peterson books.