Yeonmi Park

About Yeonmi Park

Yeonmi Park (Korean: 박연미) is a North Korean defector, author, YouTuber, and American conservative activist, once described as "one of the most famous North Korean defectors in the world". Her family turned to black-market trading during North Korea's 1990s famine, and she alleges her father was sent to a labor camp for smuggling. In 2007, 13-year-old Park and her mother fled to China, where they fell into the hands of human traffickers; her mother was raped and later sold as a bride to a Chinese farmer, while Park says she was coerced into becoming her trafficker's mistress. Aided by missionaries, they crossed into Mongolia and reached South Korea in 2009, where Park was granted citizenship. Her 2011 appearance on the reality show Now On My Way to Meet You launched her public profile, a show that has been credited for launching her career as a public figure.

Park drew wider global attention after her 2014 speech at the One Young World Summit in Dublin, then moved to the United States to write her memoir, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom (2015). She attended Barnard College and Columbia University's School of General Studies, graduating in 2020, and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2021. Her second book, While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America, followed in 2023.

Since the early 2020s, Park has built a career as a conservative commentator, appearing on Fox News and the Joe Rogan Experience, speaking to conservative audiences including Turning Point USA, and criticizing political correctness and "woke culture" in the U.S. by drawing parallels to North Korea.

Her account has also faced sustained journalistic scrutiny: reporters have documented inconsistencies across her retellings since a 2014 investigative report, and in 2023 students at Syracuse University tore down posters advertising a speech by Park and accused her of lying, while University of Iowa students similarly questioned the validity of her stories. Clips from her Rogan appearance also went viral that year, with critics accusing her of exaggeration.

As of 2023, her memoir had sold over 100,000 copies, and her YouTube channel, "Voice of North Korea by Yeonmi Park," had passed one million subscribers, growing to 1,160,000 subscribers by late 2025. As of February 2026, Park has amassed 1.2 million subscribers on her YouTube platform.