Human rights activist Yeonmi Park, who fled North Korea at age 13, announced her upcoming book for the first time on this week’s episode of The Daily Wire’s “Candace.”
Park, 28, sat for an in-depth interview with Daily Wire host Candace Owens, recounting her harrowing escape from North Korea and into sex slavery under a Chinese smuggler, then to South Korea and, eventually, the United States. Park also discussed the increasing restriction of freedom that has taken place in the United States in the past decade, drawing parallels to her experiences under the authoritarian North Korean regime. At the end of the interview, the in-studio audience rewarded a visibly moved Park with a standing ovation.
Park is the author of one book already, “In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom,” about her escape from the tyrannical North Korean regime. Park’s next book, which she announced on “Candace,” is titled “While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector’s Warning to America” and details alarming trends she has seen develop in the United States over the past decade such as wokeism, identity politics, and cancel culture. Park’s latest book is expected to be published in the fall of 2022.
Park was born in the city of Hyesan, which sits on North Korea’s northern border with China. Her father provided for the family by smuggling Chinese goods such as clothes, food, and cigarettes into North Korea to sell on the black market. At one point her father was arrested and forced into a labor camp. Her mother was subject to numerous interrogations by Chinese authorities.
In 2007, Park’s elder sister Eunmi, who was 16 at the time, fled North Korea into China. Park and her mother followed Eunmi soon after but ended up living among smugglers who used them as sex objects for months.
After Park’s mother was sold as a bride to a Chinese farmer, Park arranged to become the mistress of a smuggler if he would reunite her with her parents. Park was repeatedly raped while the smuggler brought Park’s father out of North Korea and bought back her mother.
Park’s father died tragically from cancer a short time after reuniting with her in China. Park and her mother, guided by Christian missionaries, eventually escaped to South Korea in 2009 after an arduous journey that took them through Mongolia and the Gobi Desert.
Park moved to New York in 2014 after studying in Seoul. She enrolled in classes at Barnard College before eventually applying for and getting accepted into Columbia University’s School of General Studies.
Park has recently shared harsh words about her time at Columbia, specifically slamming the word-policing around pronoun use and overwrought complaints about oppression in the United States. She also said that many of the professors and students shared anti-American sentiments, in common with North Korea.
“I expected that I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy, to learn how to think. But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think,” Park said in June. “I realized, wow, this is insane. I thought America was different but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying.”