In her new book, “While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector’s Search for Freedom in America,” Yeonmi Park issues an ominous warning about what the future may hold for America if the present course is not reversed.
Park was born in North Korea and endured a horrible existence in her early years, which she wrote about in her first book, “In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom.” As a young teenager, she decided to escape to China. She contemplated suicide on the way if she was caught.
Even after she successfully made it to China, she was forced to suffer terrible psychological and physical hardship before she finally made her way to Seoul, South Korea, and to freedom. Eventually, she entered the United States and became a U.S. citizen.
When Park arrived in America, she grappled with the huge differences. Times Square in New York for her was awe-inspiring. She noticed immediately the idea of choice, as in North Korea everything had been decided for her. She was fascinated by the diversity of New York and the friendliness of different groups. Food was readily available. This was so unlike the stultifying homogeneity of North Korea.
A Brutal State
She told the story about how she had been taught in North Korea that if you combined one drop of water with another drop of water, you don’t get two drops of water; you get one big drop—a mathematics that could be equally applied to anything, be it sticks or society. She wondered if this was any more insane than what they teach 18-year-olds in the Ivy League, and sadly reminiscent of an incident in George Orwell’s “1984,” where it’s declared that “2+2=5.”Park also noticed how different marriage and courtship is in the United States compared to North Korea. In North Korea, marriage with a non-Korean is illegal. Multiracial babies are often killed, and pregnant women are forced into getting abortions if the unborn child is not a “pureblood.” North Koreans use brutal methods to forcibly abort the pregnancy. They will inject a pregnant woman with saltwater, kick her stomach repeatedly, or place a long wooden board on the woman’s belly and have young children jump on the board. If by some miracle the child is born, officials may seal the child in a box to die.
She thought about the strict caste system in North Korea called “songbun,” which prohibits class intermarriage, or even friendly association among classes. This is in part designed to prevent upward mobility. If a member of a lower caste does marry someone from a higher caste, the member of the higher caste gets demoted to the lower caste.
Most marriages in North Korea are arranged between families or assigned by the government. The concept of dating has slowly begun to penetrate the younger strata of Korean society, as more young people have been exposed to smuggled South Korean television dramas. But when it comes to marriage, the young remain wary of ever doing anything that might bring down their family’s status.
Influential people have invited Park to speak about North Korea at several conferences. She was eager to do so because she thought that the international community had neglected to do anything for the North Korean people, since they didn’t know what was going on there. But she found, to her dismay, there was no real interest in her information.
Issues to Consider
Today, Park, who is 29 and living in the United States as a divorced mother to a young son, has arrived at some ideas that are very relevant in 2023.Firstly, freedom of expression. Park takes issue with certain “rights” that people expect today: the right to not feel offended, the right to be protected from unpleasant realities and difficult ideas, and the right to feel safe from people who disagree with you.
Park says that these are not rights at all, but they have supplanted the legal rights enshrined in the First Amendment. She is concerned that there is a large segment of American society that now believes that free speech is a public and private threat. She points out that our forefathers were willing to undergo extreme conditions and risk grave danger for the sake of freedom of speech.
Secondly, capitalism. Park sees capitalism as the best way to identify human needs and figure out how to meet them. With capitalism, people have choice in what they buy. In a socialist system, even if you don’t support slave labor, inhumane working conditions, or unfair pay for working people, well, tough luck, because that’s the way it is.
Thirdly, traditional values. Park feels the loss of the importance of the family as more opportunities arise for government to take its place. She believes that meritocracy, the hiring and promoting of the best individuals based on their talents, is crucial to national survival and prosperity. “While leftists in America routinely criticize merit itself as being somehow synonymous with racial privilege, even the Chinese Communist Party has embraced it with open arms.”
Fourthly, crime. She recalls an incident of being mugged while she was living in Chicago. There were bystanders, but none thought to defend a young Asian mother being assaulted in the street in front of her son. Her takeaway was that the woke movement has reduced human beings to the color of their skin to determine whether or not they’re deserving of help, dignity, or physical safety.
I highly recommend reading this book. Park’s wisdom is desperately needed. She has a unique way of seeing the systematic destruction of America that is now happening.
