Yeonmi Park

About Yeonmi Park

Yeonmi Park (Korean: 박연미) is a North Korean defector, YouTuber, author, and American conservative 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 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.

In 2021, Park was a guest on the "Joe Rogan Experience".

As of March 2024, she has amassed 565,000 followers on Instagram and 1.14 million subscribers on her YouTube platform.