Yeonmi Park
Also known as: Bak Yeon-mi - Pak Yŏnmi - 朴研美 - 박연미 
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About Yeonmi Park
Yeonmi Park (Korean: 박연미) is a North Korean defector, YouTuber, author, and American activist, described as being "one of the most famous North Korean defectors in the world". Alongside her family she fled from North Korea to China in 2007 and settled in South Korea in 2009, before moving to the United States in 2014. Her family turned to black-market trading during the North Korean famine in the 1990s. She alleges that her father was sent to a labor camp for smuggling before the family travelled to China, where Park and her mother fell into the hands of human traffickers and she was sold into slavery where she was regularly gangbanged by men for years, before escaping to Mongolia. Park came to wider global attention following 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 September 2015, and as of 2023 has sold over 100,000 copies. 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 characterized as "American conservative", and she has criticized the concepts of political correctness and woke culture in the United States, drawing parallels between political correctness in the U.S. and North Korea. Journalists have questioned the accuracy of her stories and accounts as early as 2014, noting significant discrepancies. Park responded by stating that she had limited English skills at the time and that "childhood memories were not perfect." Park's coauthor, Maryanne Vollers, cited a Harvard trauma expert who stated that traumatized people won't often give a perfect, complete narrative, especially during the early accounts of delivering such a story. Nevertheless, noted individuals in the field continue to speak to concerns regarding Park's increasing status as a well-known public figure and celebrity, which often comes with pressures to embellish and exaggerate stories to the point of outlandish claims for the benefit of commercialization or profit rather than for raising awareness around human rights issues. Such noted individuals include: Kim Byeong-uk, a fellow North Korean defector and the founder of the North Korean Development Institute; An Chan-il, the chairman of the World North Korea Research Center; John Lee, a journalist focusing on South Korean foreign policy; and Christine Hong, Professor at University of California and expert in North Korean defectors. As of February 2025, Yeonmi has amassed 561,000 followers on Instagram and 1.16 million subscribers on her YouTube platform.
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