While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America

by Yeonmi Park

It was strange to notice that my new friends and colleagues living in conditions of “overabundance” also seemed to have their own versions of “trauma,” for which many of them were receiving help from a doctor licensed in therapy. It was so strange, in fact, that I figured I must be in an incredibly good place, being someone who clearly didn’t need therapy. Even if I was “traumatized,” what would be the point of having survived it only to have to pay someone else to complain to about it, rather than turn it into something positive?

Are we doing the trauma Olympics now? This is such an incredibly harsh take. If Park were instead to want therapy, would she welcome people deciding whether or not she would qualify? People seeking help that they feel they need is a good thing.

I had no clue about the various racial and cultural stereotypes ascribed to the members of each group, no understanding of the nuances within different ethnicities and the historical context for the existence of each. Looking back on it, I was an interesting social science experiment—what happens if you take a twenty-one-year-old blank slate, to whom all concepts of race and racism are completely foreign, and drop her in New York City?

And she refuses to listen to anyone or take their histories seriously. No we have plenty of those already so, not really an experiment.

At a certain point, Americans with disabilities and elderly infirmities took it upon themselves to develop civic associations, lobby their elected representatives, and convince their fellow citizens to set aside hard-earned tax revenue to make life easier on those who have a harder time getting around. They did it, and from what I can tell, it is now a completely uncontroversial decision. It was simply amazing. This one, narrow area of life—accommodations for people with disabilities—came to represent everything that I was learning to love about America: democracy, self-determination, civic participation, entrepreneurship, solidarity, and compassion. It was everything that my teachers and peers at Columbia would spend the next four years trying to convince me were lies.

Completely uncontroversial?? Spoken like someone who has never had to ask for ANYTHING the ADA supposedly guarantees. Not to mention complete ignorance of the whole “lobby and convince” part- people literally DIED for the ADA, chained their wheelchairs together around the capitol, were gassed and beaten and jailed, not to mention that deinstitutionalization of people with various differences JUST started in the 1980s!! Glossing over all this in service of her trite anecdote is actually insulting to everyone involved in disability justice.

During the first day of orientation, an instructor from the general studies department asked a group of freshmen and transfer students if any of us had read and liked Jane Austen. I raised my hand eagerly, and said in my still somewhat broken English that I found her characters—created two centuries earlier—to be instantly relatable. “Wrong,” the instructor said. “Those books promote female oppression, racism, colonialism, and white supremacy.” I

LOL prove that someone said this. In freshman orientation at Columbia, “WRONG!” 😂😂😂 okay then.

She continued by informing us that Austen, like all white writers during the colonial era, supported white supremacy and racism. She ended with a line I’ll never forget: “This is how we look for hidden systemic racism and oppression.” As a student in Hyesan, our teachers often reminded us that we must vigilantly look for hidden signs of infiltration by our enemies—American Bastards causing, stoking, and lurking behind all of our problems.

Again, in *orientation*?? Forgive my skepticism but if you want to sell this you’re going to need to paint a more complete picture bc this conversation just does not make any sense in context. And if the specter of a boogeyman is going to prevent you from assessing systemic causes to anything forevermore then…good luck to you I guess? Some real things are actually systemic and have far reaching effects, sorry to break it to you but that doesn’t make Columbia University North Korea.

I ventured to say that I thought it was okay to call them Western musicians if that’s how they thought of themselves at the time, and in any case, we could maybe also learn about their musical genius in addition to whatever troubled times they lived in and the complicated lives they led. The professor responded to this benign statement made in broken English by a young girl who was clearly a recent immigrant by telling me, in front of all my new classmates, that I had likely been “brainwashed.” I wanted to cry—not out of sadness or fear or even embarrassment, but from frustration.

Up until that point, I’d only used my own eyes and common sense to conclude that, by and large, men and women are equal but dissimilar: that men were better at carrying heavy things, better at spending time alone, and more interested in ideas; that women were better at multitasking, better at working in teams, and more interested in people. Many exceptions of course exist, but studies generally show that women are in fact better than men, by and large, at verbal fluency, perceptual speed, accuracy, and fine motor skills, while men outperform women in spatial awareness, working memory, and mathematical skills.

Which men are better at carrying heavy things? Which women are more interested in people than ideas? Park constantly speaks in these (often insulting) vague generalizations, and explains any objection away with the idea these are self-evident truths and anyway she acknowledges that "exceptions" exist. Why wander into this weird sexist morass at all? Adding nothing to the discourse.

The professor asked me where I learned that I couldn’t carry as many bricks as a man. I said I weighed eighty pounds, which I did, and left it at that.

I guess you've never met a man who weighs less than that, or is injured, or old, or not fit, or in an iron lung or

professors in the humanities frequently challenged us to demonstrate how woke we were. We had to be diligent in being woke—learning to locate the white male Bastards behind every crime, beneath every problem, in the air we breathed—otherwise we were no better than those who intentionally perpetuate social injustices.

The crucial difference here is that the "American Bastards" you were told were behind literally every corner ruining your everyday life were *not real* vs the very real extended history of whiteness and colonialism very literally founding and shaping every system that we live in today. Right bastards, (somewhat) wrong place and time.

that Christianity, a religion born in the Middle Eastern desert, was the religion of white people, used for no other purpose than to indoctrinate the indigenous tribes they conquered through the use of technology (in the truest sign of stupidity, smallpox wasn’t mentioned).

Again, history-? Not sure anyone said there was *no* other purpose but ya gotta admit, pretty adept at that one, eh?

It was all shaping up to be a pretty disappointing experience, to say the least. How could one of the leading universities in the greatest country in the world teach its students to hate their fellow countrymen?

citation needed.

The contemporary classroom is a product of a bygone era, when the primary purpose of education was to prepare children and teens for adult life in an industrial society. Dozens of students, often uninformed, seated at identical desks, placed at equal distances, and all facing the same direction in order to receive the same instruction from the same individual at the same times every day: This wildly unnatural arrangement made sense in the early part of the twentieth century because young people really did need to be shaped for entrance into a mass, commercial society and for jobs in factories or in clerical work.

Just, what? Is she mad they weren't having casual classroom picnics outside at Columbia-? Do we not still have a commercial society with jobs in factories and clerical work-?? What is the meaning of this lol

many schools have started to cancel appearances by guest speakers and lecturers for fear of safety and security breaches—a development that smacks of the Dark Ages.

You really don't have to reach all the way back to the...Dark Ages? for examples of this. Are we actually advancing a theory that America is headed for a new Dark Ages? Would be interested to hear it but alas she abandons the allusion immediately. Drive-by alluding.

People my age and literally double my size, who appeared to be incredibly fit and well-fed, were sometimes reduced to tears discussing feelings they harbored that appeared to have no possible connection to anything we were supposed to be learning about.

...Sorry you witnessed tears? Guess we're supposed to intuit that showing emotion is for the WEAK and definitely the LEFTISTS are behind such a horrible lapse in decorum. Was the usual "snowflake" just too obvious here?

to invert the phrase popularized by Ben Shapiro—feelings don’t care about your facts.

'Just a little more right-wing coattailling so you know how legit I am even though I can't possibly understand why people claim I'm brainwashed by the right I think both parties are the exact same'

But my South Korean tutors were apparently quite backward, employing English grammatical rules that merely existed from about 1450 to 2014, and hadn’t gotten the memo: There are, in fact, seventy-eight gender pronouns.

Ugh again *so sorry* you arrived at a time when we as a culture were going through some stuff and took a minute to work through it. TL;DR: all people are valid regardless of what they look like, and one very simple easy free way you can acknowledge that is to call them what they like to be called. We've mostly settled now on the very simple they/them, which you WELL KNOW bc you live in Chicago, USA, but very cute harking back to this time like it's still a big issue for everyone.

As if these dynamics weren’t confusing enough, these pronouns could not even be guessed at simply by observing the phenotypic appearance of my classmates.

'Changing gender roles gives me a BIG SAD but I would never cry about it bc I'm better than those Columbia students.'

I mean it when I say that all I felt for this person was compassion, empathy, and understanding. I couldn’t blame them for being so severed from reality that they felt entitled to talk to me as if I were a bigot, when I was just a very recent immigrant who made a mistake that, according to what I’d been taught, wasn’t actually a mistake. This person was simply lost, completely untethered from life, with no sense whatsoever of what either justice or injustice meant or looked like. And it probably wasn’t even their fault.

SEVERED, UNTETHERED, NO SENSE gee I am at a loss as to why you didn't get a good reaction from this person even tho you're just a poor defenseless recent immigrant who didn't even make a mistake. Shades of narcissistic injury here...

Tyrannical regimes understand the confusion of life under VUCA. Their first task is to simplify life for their subjects, often through a fictional narrative.

Columbia professors seemed to be primarily engaged in their own version of autocratic simplification: Feel tired, stressed, and a little frightened of the future? It’s because the system is rigged against you. It was built by white men in order to subjugate you. Only by destroying that system will you finally find peace, security, and confidence.

This is the beginning of a very confusing contradiction, in which Park repeatedly characterizes any suggested change to either government or culture (even one as innocuous as pronouns) as DESTROYING EVERYTHING yet also exhorts people to 'take personal responsibility' by getting involved at state and local levels.

it was—if there was any point at all—to passionately discuss the suffering of women in America. The word oppression here was defined to mean things like making ninety cents on the dollar compared with men, or being only the vice president of a Fortune 500 company rather than the CEO, or how male-dominated office culture doesn’t make it safe for women to cry.

Resorting to hyperbole and distortions only undermines an argument rather than strengthening it. It's not and never has been 90 cents on the dollar...the dearth of female ceos is a real thing even if you aren't concerned about it-? and I doubt any vice presidents were present for this discussion...being able to CRY at WORK has never been on the list of concerns and that's not even current- the 80s called and they want their stupid sexist stand up comic joke back.

It was not the education I received at Columbia, or following the American press, that helped me finally break out of this habit. It was reading old books. Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy was one; George Orwell’s collected writings were another.

Tell us again tho how white men really aren't behind absolutely everything.

connect instead with the great minds of the past, who know all of our problems better than we do ourselves.

Sure, Jan. LOL

the mere acknowledgment of what was happening to my people in China by someone like Bezos might have a ripple effect, convincing other American investors to put pressure on Beijing to reduce its support for Pyongyang.

I mean, I genuinely feel bad for Park if she actually thought she just lucked into an audience with Bezos and was about to change everything. This as much as anything else in this book points to, probably too naive to know you're being used as part of an agenda. Sadly.

people with excess cash could, if they wanted, quite literally buy the freedom of their fellow human beings. But here we were, at a buffet moving 600 miles per hour at 30,000 feet in the air, lighting that cash on fire as we prepared to debate how to “do good” in the world.

Fully expected this to be the turning point for name dropping in this book but weirdly, it was not.

The people who only a moment before had looked at me pleadingly for advice on how they could help people like my mother still stuck on the other side of the Pacific now looked at me again like I’d come from another galaxy, or else like a naive little girl who didn’t understand the complexity or importance of China to their livelihoods.

Which is honestly, awful.

For the next four years, many of the people who appeared to listen intently as I told them what they could do to make a difference in the world instead spent their time warning the nation incessantly about fascists in the White House, of Russian puppets in the Oval Office, of white nationalists putting babies in cages. They advocated against truth in media and the neutral application of laws, which they no longer regarded as democratic norms but as unaffordable luxuries in the face of an existential threat: a president they didn’t vote for. Almost in unison, they started advocating for critical race theory and “antiracism,” which more than anything else I’d encountered in America reminded me of Juche, the North Korean version of Marxism-Leninism, with its arcane vocabulary and impenetrable set of ideas that pretend to serve political change but really just sort ordinary people into different identity categories that keep them as separate as possible from the elite.

Who advocated against truth in media? WHO advocated against the neutral application of laws?? You're dog whistling and those of us outside your target demographic can't hear it. No one was "advocating" for CRT, that's something the right plucked out of *academia* and made into the next big existential threat. That more than ANYTHING remided you of JUCHE?? This strains credibility which was already extremely thin on the ground.

In post-2016 America, it started to become possible for a white magazine editor or white film producer or white tech CEO to lecture a Black construction worker or Latino small business owner who voted for Trump for his “self-hatred” or “internalized racism.”

Who are you talking about here? Is this just a hypothetical? Bc it was always "possible", you're talking about privileged, rich people talking down to marginalized, lower middle class people. This happens every day and always has.

And then there was lust. Many of my girlfriends in New York were in the habit of voluntarily pursuing one-night stands on many weekends, which only seemed to subject them to a broader sense of regret and loneliness.

Wouldn't be the Right's Greatest Hits without a little tradwife, "lusty women are immoral" moment.

I was filled with joy to find that Dr. King’s dream was a reality—that nearly all Americans seemed ready to judge me not by the color of my skin, but by the content of my character.

Dr King's dream is a reality everyone! We can all go home now. Huge relief.

“toxic masculinity” and “mansplaining,” declaring that the idea of a “protector” or “provider” is sexist, that marriage is outdated, and that children rob you of your freedom, no one seemed to stop and wonder if they might be personally responsible for their own unhappiness.

No one stopped to wonder bc that's what we've been fed for eons upon eons, 'things are the way they are and if you're not ok with it then: hysterical uterus/burned at the stake/institutionalized/medicated into oblivion'. But do go on, you were saying women should just choose happiness?

As overwhelming as it was to prepare for childbirth, I couldn’t help but admire the wonders of the free market and the entrepreneurialism that went into the medical care, child care, and parenting products that American parents were expected to take advantage of,

Yes, what every new mother daydreams about, capitalism. So so normal.

But as every parent knows, as you send your children out into society—even one as admirable, just, and free as America’s—it’s hard not to worry about the examples they’ll absorb and the teachers they’ll meet out there in the world. And for my son, I worry.

I'm sorry to bring this up again, but this whole book has been a series of comparisons between North Korea and America, it feels *just* a little disingenuous to make this statement given the alternative. The specter of Park's own upbringing looms over this narrative, and it's hard not to picture her child being born in NK as she was, or China where she had to escape, yet she's worried about...American teachers he'll meet? Okay.

THE CANADIAN psychologist and author Jordan Peterson is fond of pointing out that “suffering is an integral part of existence.”

A lot of philosophers point this out but let's not miss another chance to mention Peterson.

elements of America’s own political culture, which remind me of the totalitarian tendencies I know so well from my early life. The attacks and accusations are never totally monolithic, but they do tend to come from one political camp in particular: Americans who consider themselves Marxist, Leninist, Maoist, Communist, Socialist, Democratic Socialist, or more broadly, of “the Left.”

The proportion of people on the left who identify with any of these titles compared to regular everyday people who just believe in civil rights and social liberalism is just- you live in Chicago, you know it's vanishingly small. Such a ridiculous game to play. And the interest in any of these philosophies is *in context*, looking for ways to modify the things *the vast majority of Americans* acknowledge are not working about capitalism. This is a baby/bathwater scenario you're trying to trump up into the BURN IT ALL DOWN thing you mentioned earlier.

It is, of course, their right to believe in and advocate for whatever kind of nonsense suits them—that’s

How high-minded of you. This certainly comes across as thoughtful, fair, and unbiased.

they are committed to supporting an ideology that bears a close resemblance to the one from which I barely escaped: leftism.

You barely escaped leftism? Come right the f on, many many many citations needed if you want us to conflate a ruthless dictatorship which *you yourself described* with an american political movement *you yourself described* as virtually indistiguishable from its counterpart. This again smacks of narcissism, the way that simply throwing out statements should be enough to make them true. It's not.

Liberalism has its foundation in liberty and individual rights: freedom of speech, of the press, of religion, and of the market. Leftism has its foundation in the centralization of these rights not in the individual but in groups organized and directed by the state. Liberalism values color blindness—that the color of one’s skin determines and should determine nothing. Leftists believe that almost everything in society can and should be determined by race alone. Liberalism promotes racial integration and inclusivity; leftism promotes increased racial segregation and exclusion.

What are you talking about, centralizing rights in groups?? This is a nonsensical statement, backed up by nothing. And again, you're mischaracterizing: many people believe the color of your skin nor any other personal trait *should* affect your treatment/rights/opportunities, but a huge number *acknowledge* that it does. "Leftists believe everything should be determined by race"?? Prove it. Again, the ridiculous hyperbole and gross generalization stand in for any actual considered argument. This is an ivy league grad?

For liberals, capitalism is the only proven method of bringing the greatest number of people possible out of poverty. For leftists, capitalism is the cause of, rather than the solution to, poverty, and must be extinguished through the elimination of free markets and the greater centralization of state power over the economy and individual decision-making. As for nationalism and patriotism, liberals believe in the necessity of nation-states that have borders, citizenship, and sovereignty, while leftists believe only in open borders and that all human beings should be “citizens of the world.”

Literally no one ever says this. it is SO DISHONEST to misquote your opponents in order to dunk on them. No one ever says ELIMINATE free markets or borders, my god. Do people sincerely believe this stuff? Horribly irresponsible to pander to a right wing audience with these kinds of credentials; people will see the Columbia degree and think you know what you're talking about, and then you're throwing around this outrageous inflammatory rhetoric. Shame on you.

Hence, a distant descendant of nineteenth-century African slaves who works at Goldman Sachs or studies at Harvard is a victim. The first-generation immigrant child of a twenty-first-century Chinese slave who goes to public school is not.

Who do you know who thinks like this? Show your work. Anyone can invent a character, slap a label on them, and blame them for anything under the sun. It also shows a ridiculous lack of critical thinking not to notice that a person can be "successful" in one area while also being "a victim" in another- or more to the point, successful *despite* arrayed disadvantages, not in refutation of their existence. But by your own warped logic, you yourself shouldn't be considered to have any disadvantage from your traumatic upbringing, since you have all the trappings of wealth and success now; yet you continuously try to tug at heart strings in this book as to your poor treatment and various misunderstandings when you were just a poor 'recent immigrant' whose english 'wasn't very good'. So which is it??

Kim Il Sung, rose to power on the premise not only of being a great leader, but of being a god. He did so in part by promising to solve all forms of inequality and injustice, which he explained were simple and unnecessary problems that required simple, obvious solutions. The root cause of both inequality and injustice, he explained, was a capitalist conspiracy to make everyone pay money for essential services that they should be getting for free: education, health care, housing, food—everything people need to survive and thrive. And in order to make these services and resources free and accessible to everyone, all forms of private ownership had to be abolished: “Capitalists” (which is to say, ordinary citizens) were henceforth no longer allowed to own their own schools, or hospitals, or houses, or farms. The state (which is to say, those with military and police power) confiscated them. Needless to say, the results were catastrophic—just

Embarrassed to have to explain this to an ivy league grad but, this is a logical fallacy. Even though putting the basics for human life behind a paywall is indeed a grotesque perversion of the capitalist drive, the conclusions and consequences dreamed up by one of the worst dictators in history don't necessarily follow as logical inevitabilities. People and indeed even other modern governments have and continue to devise alternate solutions to these issues that venture beyond this false dichotomy you are bent on painting.

education, health care, housing, and food security in America, and about the dire need to reform and improve them. But the leftist insistence on nationalizing these services and resources in order to make them free—as if the various failings in these sectors can be attributed to the mere existence and legality of private ownership—contains dangerous echoes of the North Korean model. Again, to believe that the answers to social problems lie not in innovation, creativity, and a certain measure of personal and communal responsibility, but rather in the centralization of state power and the eradication of private ownership, is just a variation on the leftist theme of victimhood and oppression, which really only serves to mask the emergence and power of an oligarchy.

This problem that you and the right insist is utterly unsolvable is of your own making. The fact is *unfettered* capitalism does not work, but the right has done nothing but fight every regulation, check and balance that's ever been devised. So when anyone looks around and notices the obvious, that the market really doesn't work without them, then you start screaming that opponents want to "do away with" capitalism or "make everything free". The system needs regulation, and in refusing to allow that it is you who is creating the problem.

it was the simple theft of those resources by the supporters and enforcers of the regime. This process didn’t just enrich the regime itself, it created an elite class of mid-level officials, bureaucrats, managers, and military officers who very much enjoy the spoils of wealth, property, and inequality, while continuing to advocate for socialist revolution. (I hope this is starting to sound familiar.)

It's not-? The proliferation of middle managers and leeches on the system is rampant under capitalism too, and corruption erodes all systems; it's not like capitalism is so great that it's somehow immune to spoil due to corruption. And the "advocating for a socialist revolution" by North Korean bureaucrats is just, as you've outlined yourself, not sincere, so this isn't a rebuke of socialism but rather totalitarianism, which can lie with impenetrable impunity. Whether or not socialism is a workable system is not what's being tested in NK since that's demonstrably not the system they have, though they may call it by that name.

divide the people arbitrarily between oppressors and oppressed, which determines who is deserving of education, who of medical care, who of housing, and who of food (which simply masks the reality that there is not enough of any of these things to go around).

Is this not what captialism does too? Are we fooled by the interim designation of affordability? Ultimately it's arbitrary who has and has not, so putting absolutely everything required for life behind a paywall accomplishes the same end: scarcity, and an arbitrary distinction between who receives and who doesn't based on who can pay.

So does that mean that today’s descendants of the first several waves of Asian immigration are considered to have the “blood” of the oppressed?

Yes?? Not sure how your weird argument about blood fits in here, unless you're dog whistling about racial purity which is super gross, but yes it does make perfect sense to acknowledge the systemic disadvantage those first several waves were subject to, and examine how that disadvantage might echo into the lives of descendants today-? It would be weird if we didn't??

In 2020, during the furor over Asian American quotas in elite universities, Kendi claimed, “Standardized tests have become the most effective racist weapon ever devised to objectively degrade Black and Brown minds and legally exclude their bodies from prestigious schools.” Asians benefit from standardized tests, standardized tests are weapons of racism, therefore, Asians are racist oppressors. Get it?

This is leaping to a conclusion not borne out by the quote you chose, which literally doesn't even mention Asians at all. This is intellectually dishonest. Whether or not Kendi went on to draw this conclusion I don't know so I'm not defending him, but it's sus af for you to connect these two things without showing your work, which leads me to believe he actually didn't say this at all, otherwise you gleefully would have quoted it. So where does this libelous argument even get you??

if antiracism and CRT are correct about contemporary America—the United States in 2023—how do we explain the fact that the supporters and propagators of these ideologies have chosen to stay here? That there isn’t a mass exodus of Americans with “oppressed blood” to foreign countries? And that the champions of these ideologies tend to be disproportionately represented in media, universities, NGOs, and other elite, high-paying institutions?

Two separate questions. The former: economic oppression, which you know. Not everyone who wants to leave can afford to. And not everyone wants to leave their entire family/friends/livelihood/way of life rather than changing a system that, according to the very principles of democracy, they should be able to favorably change! The latter: you have not shown that they're "disproportionately" represented, maybe they're proportionately represented bc there are just more of them on the whole. The fact that the Republican party is VASTLY outnumbered in the US, yet wields *actually disproportionate* power due to gerrymandering and the electoral college is probably what makes you think these ideologies are disproportionately represented. (Also see: CRT is not an ideology, but I'm not going into that here.)

To this day, the North Korean government retains full UN membership, meaning its vote in the General Assembly is worth the same as America’s. It has been allowed to vote on human rights resolutions and chair committees on nuclear disarmament! Since 2005, the General Assembly has adopted a resolution every year to condemn the human rights situation in North Korea, but of course this has meant exactly nothing.

Anyone wondering about the utter strangeness of mainstream media coverage during this period need only have looked at my mother’s face. As she saw images of buildings burning, windows being smashed, and merchandise being looted, I would translate the broadcast for her: “The nationwide protests for racial justice have been mostly peaceful, with the exception of a few bad apples and isolated incidents.”

under such circumstances, truth in reporting was no longer seen as a democratic norm. As the Hunter Biden laptop episode proved, it was regarded as an unaffordable luxury in the face of an existential threat. The ruling elite of nearly every national institution—the press and universities, major corporations and tech companies, the civil service and national security agencies, NGOs and philanthropic foundations—saw the abandonment of such norms not only as justifiable, but as a patriotic duty.

Literally what? Hunter Biden's laptop was in no way a real issue and in any case, to what are you referring in re: media coverage? This is a clear attempt to dogwhistle the idea that ofc we "all" saw that as a gross miscarriage of justice perpetrated by the media, without having to produce a shred of evidence or even real opinion. How exactly was truth in reporting treated as an "unaffordable luxury"? Honestly, if Jordan Peterson himself didn't write this I'll eat my hat. It's an in-group allusion to some weird frame of shared reference that no one outside of Newsmax even recognizes. Seems like Park escaped one insulated propaganda echo chamber just to make herself at home in another, which is sad.