User:Vipul/Yeonmi Park

Yeon-mi Park is a North Korean defector currently in South Korea, as well as a speaker and activist for the cause of North Korean refugees.

Personal life
Yeon-mi Park was born in 1993 in North Korea. At the age of four, she learned from her mother the importance of hiding her feelings to avoid getting in trouble with the North Korean authorities. She watched a bootlegged copy of the Titanic and was struck by its contrast with the themes in North Korean life and public education. At the age of nine, she saw her friend's mother executed by the regime for selling bootlegged DVDs. Around that time, her father was arrested for illegal trading of gold and silver. In 2007, her sister smuggled her and her mother out of North Korea into China, where her mother allowed herself to be raped by the local authorities in order to protect Yeonmi. After two years living in the shadows in China, they were able to escape to Mongolia, from where they were taken to South Korea.

Influences and views
Park has cited three influences to her thinking:


 * The Titanic, that sparked her curiosity and started making her question the ideology of devotion to the Kim family.
 * The black market, which taught her the value of trading and of thinking for oneself.
 * Animal Farm, a book by George Orwell that she read after her arrival in South Korea. The book helped her overcome the brainwashing by the Kim regime, some of which she had still not gotten over even after physically escaping the country.

Activism
Park has written and spoken publicly about her life in North Korea. She has written for the Washington Post, spoken at the Oslo Freedom Forum, and been interviewed by the BBC and The Guardian. She is a media fellow at Freedom Factory Co, a free market think tank in South Korea. Park, Joseph Kim, and Jao Yang are participants in the Jangmadang Tour organized by Liberty in North Korea over the time period September 25 - December 9, 2014.

Criticism
Park has been criticized on two fronts. Some people, including Swiss-born businessman Felix Abt, who has lived and worked in North Korea for seven years, have questioned the veracity of her account of life, claiming it to be highly exaggerated. Park responded by claiming that the statements that Abt took issue with occurred as the result of a misunderstanding by a journalist of what she said.

Michael Bassett, who spent several years stationed at the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, claimed that Park was simply a spokesperson being fed a narrative meant to bolster the case for H. R. 1771, a law that would impose sanctions against the Kim regime, and that she had not thought through the contradiction between supporting sanctions and making life better for the people of North Korea. Park responded by calling Bassett childish and impossible to engage in productive conversation.