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

by Yeonmi Park

There is no one more annoying to the ideological activists of the radical Left than a minority woman who doesn’t know her proper political place; no one more irritating than someone whom, according to the dictates of that God-forsaken jargon-ridden conceptual scheme, has “internalized their oppression,” and who therefore stands up for the hypothetical enemy, which must always and invariably be, by the standards of the pseudo-illuminated puritans in question, the West, the West, the West.

“Right wing” is one of those terms of abuse I understood only after a number of my fellow Americans used it in a concerted and sometimes successful attempt to harass and censor me. In this context at least, I’ve learned that it does not refer to a set of social and economic preferences on the spectrum of American political possibilities. It means “disloyal”—disloyal to the tastes, opinions, values, and preferences of the financial, political, and cultural elite. The disloyalty of the lower and working classes to the ruling class.

Without words to describe an emotion or phenomenon, I discovered, it is easy enough to live your life not even knowing they exist. Totalitarian regimes understand this fact quite well.

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.

IN THE four years I ended up spending at Columbia, 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. Luckily for receptive students, it was easy work. The questions were always predictable, the answers always prefabricated. Students were expected to repeat teachings, not to explain material. We were to memorize and recite, not to grapple or understand. The difference between a passing grade and a stellar one was not accuracy or creativity, but passion and intensity.

The Dear Leader’s harrowing insight has two points. The first is to teach children early on to accept something so obviously idiotic and untrue as nevertheless being a fact. (Not even a child can be convinced that the sum of two sticks is just a big stick, but you can frighten her into shutting up about it.) The second is to teach children that they are not individuals. One person plus one person does not equal two people; 21 million people do not make a society. In North Korea, the only number is one: one leader, followed by one people.

Students are expected to receive ideas, not to wrestle or come up with them, and to internalize what they learn there for the remainder of their adult lives.

Above all, like Plato and Socrates, they valued intellectual exchange, in which all views—even those of the so-called authorities—were subjected to serious analysis and painstaking, critical interrogation. They believed that only through such rigorous questioning could ideas with merit surface, and the flaws be uncovered for all to see.

In many American schools and universities, it is no longer acceptable to allow different ideas to compete with or openly challenge one another. Disfavored speakers are often haggled, ridiculed, and silenced during educational events, to the point that 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.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The threat of emotional harm was referred to by multiple instructors in order to implicitly explain—in so many words—why classrooms at Columbia do not allow the Socratic method.

Columbia’s Code of Conduct reminded me of the seven commandments in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, which the animals would recite mindlessly, not knowing what they meant exactly or what the consequences would be: Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend. No animal shall wear clothes. No animal shall sleep in a bed. No animal shall drink alcohol. No animal shall kill any other animal. All animals are equal.

Whatever disagrees, or is silent, is an enemy. Whatever agrees is a friend. No student shall speak offenses. No student shall touch another student. No student shall make another student feel unsafe. No student shall speak well of America. Only white men are free.

In the months I spent studying criminal justice in South Korea, I never learned that injustices could be fought by spinning new ones out of thin air. In reality, of course, Columbia’s “safe space” was elite code language for restrictions on ideological heterogeneity.

Instead, it meant a place where—to invert the phrase popularized by Ben Shapiro—feelings don’t care about your facts. I started to despair that my new institutional home would not be a vehicle to search for truth, but the opposite: a cult.

That’s why the subversion of critical thinking is so dangerous. It is the mechanism by which humans lose their faculties as individuals and succumb to groupthink, which is a precondition for every totalitarian society on Earth, and which ultimately felled my father.

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 University’s motto is “In Lumine Tuo Videbimus Lumen”; it is a Latin phrase borrowed from the book of Psalms (36:9) meaning, “In Thy light shall we see light.” But the Columbia I knew saw no light at all, in the world or in people. It saw only darkness, which I knew to be a lie.

There is a reason why the great books of Western civilization are all banned in dictatorships.

I remember him telling me then that the benefit of reading books, if you could find them, was that you could learn common sense, which you don’t get taught in classrooms, because they are filled with propaganda.

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. And like the elite in North Korea, the American elite used their new ideology to cancel and de-platform political and ideological dissidents.

What I love most about the United States of America, both in theory and in practice, is its commitment to each individual’s unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It’s difficult to communicate to Americans who were born here just how unusual that last right is as a value, let alone a value held by the state. Most countries are committed to either abstract ideas like the “glory” or “majesty” or “destiny” of a people or government, or to something ruthlessly practical, like its own security or survival. But America is dedicated to the right of each inhabitant to try his or her best to be happy.

But America is founded on the idea that no person or group of people or institution should be allowed to obstruct anyone else’s freedom to attempt to be happy.

It is a difficult right to sustain unless the people themselves are committed to civic duty, individual responsibility, hard work, and a certain degree of personal virtue.

It is about starting your own business, owning your own property, raising your own family, and participating in your own community in whatever way you see fit, within the bounds of the law and respect for the rights of others.

In North Korea, a man’s primary responsibility to women is to protect and provide for them. Perhaps that is far too narrow and suffocating of a gender dynamic, but I started to realize that I at least preferred it to the modern Western dynamic in which men are apparently encouraged to feel no responsibility whatsoever for the women they court.

From then on, whenever a man I was interested in asked me out on a date, I told him that I only dated exclusively, and only with the intention of eventually getting married.

In any case, I wasn’t afraid of being single, which to me was infinitely better than being with the wrong person, or being in a relationship for the wrong reasons.

I’ve been the target of attacks and accusations of being “right wing” or “far right,” almost exclusively for what I’ve said in public about the Chinese and North Korean regimes—both of which the U.S. government itself, under different administrations, has labeled enemies or competitors. But such attempts at cancellation have also been motivated by my criticisms of 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.”

I’ve noticed that these fellow Americans of mine seem to work mostly in schools, universities, media, large corporations, NGOs, foundations, activist organizations, and government bureaucracies. They tend not to be first-generation immigrants, but people who were born in America, and thus people who have never actually lived under the kind of political and social system they believe to be superior to America’s capitalist democracy.

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. Leftists and liberals differ on their attitude toward capitalism, too. 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.

(I’d like to invite leftists to experience their world citizenship from the comfort of North Korea—enjoy!)

Leftists, on the other hand, believe America is uniquely racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, and imperialist.

The conflation of leftism with liberalism is what allows many American leftists to advocate for the superiority of an authoritarian social and political system without ever having to actually live under or suffer the consequences of it. They therefore continue to enjoy the fruits of democratic capitalism—wealth, social mobility, freedom of speech and association, property ownership—while advocating for its destruction.

For someone like New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, the more personal success she accumulates—the more profitably she uses American democratic capitalism to achieve her personal, professional, reputational, and financial ambitions—the more she feels obligated to perform her own imagined victimization, her own uncontrollable suffering, and her own supposed opposition to the very system she so effectively utilizes.

The fact that leftists tend to benefit so greatly from American democratic capitalism while rhetorically advocating for its destruction also helps explain why they are so much less focused on the future than on the past.

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 utter nonsense about genetic complicity in what the regime considers to be capitalist crimes allows it to 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). Conveniently enough, every member of the ruling elite in North Korea happens to have untainted blood; every prisoner, laborer, slave, and victim of starvation happens to have the blood of an oppressor. Funny how that works.

IN THE last few years, I’ve taken a particular interest in attempts to divide Americans into oppressors and oppressed because I’ve found myself—and my son will find himself—on a side of the divide I didn’t exactly expect.

Besides performing too well on standardized tests and being targeted for violent attacks by members of the wrong ethnic groups, today’s Asian Americans have committed the additional and especially unforgivable infraction of being too happy and patriotic.

This is also sometimes called “voting with your feet”—people who truly are oppressed (rather than just claim to feel oppressed) tend to move somewhere else where they are freer.

But I’m heartened by the example set by Virginia and San Francisco parents, who not only saw past the fraudulence of the American version of leftism, but demonstrated their continued faith in democracy itself, by showing up at the ballot box and taking personal responsibility for the direction of their communities. They were not satisfied with convenient explanations that some forces beyond their control were oppressing or victimizing them. They realized their own mistakes, took responsibility for them, and decided to make improvements.

Consider what might be called the politics of emergency. Ever since the days of Kim Il Sung, the regime in Pyongyang has used the threat of internal and external enemies to justify the suspension of rights and the criminalization of dissent. In North Korea’s revolutionary war for survival, free inquiry (or “counterrevolutionary thought”) is not just unhelpful and irritating; as far as the government is concerned, it is seditious. A perpetual state of existential danger has meant that certain pillars of civilization—a free press, for instance, or the equal application of laws—must be understood instead as weapons that could harm the regime in its fight against American and Japanese imperialists.

How did American elites behave during the election of 2020, an emergency if there ever was one? It was the final opportunity, as I recall, to remove the fascists in the White House, the Russian puppets in the Oval Office, the white nationalists putting babies in cages. And 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. Because of the danger posed by a second Trump term, the effort to defeat him demanded loyalty and unanimity. The American elite believed they were summoned to act as guardians of the Republic, righting the course of history.

As with North Korea’s politics of national emergency, the anti-Trump movement in the United States offered no real alternative to the threat it claimed to fight, it merely created an echo chamber in which the ruling class confirmed its fears of internal and external subversion. Russiagate in particular served a medicinal purpose, allowing the governing elite to blame a foreign enemy for their own incompetence and callousness, which had left them vulnerable to electoral defeat by a political novice. The eternal threat of American subversion, Japanese colonization, and a treasonous fifth column serves a similar function for the North Korean regime, which of course assumes no responsibility for the many horrors it causes.

And if the “emergency” in North Korea can never be allowed to subside—lest the state lose its justifications for the permanent suspension of liberty—the American ruling class is...

Along these lines, “wokeness” now appears to be just an obnoxious rhetorical style that helps cover for something else: a coercive system administered by governing elites that demands adherence to an ever-expanding corpus of basically random sets of laws and regulations designed to keep the lower classes in check. If that doesn’t remind you of the communist dictatorship in North Korea, I don’t know what would.

This is the only contribution of the woke movement to American life: to reduce human beings to the color of their skin and determine whether or not they’re deserving of help, dignity, or physical safety on that basis. It would make the American heroes of the Civil Rights Movement turn in their graves. It’s why I wrote this book.

I’ve come to believe that only through capitalism can we establish a more just and humane society. If more people choose to buy meat from animals that were treated humanely, for example, or products free from the use of modern-day slaves in the supply chain, we can actually make the world a better place through small, individual decisions that amount to massive reform. This is the beauty of capitalism, and no other social or economic system can claim it—including (and often especially) socialism.

Still, I learned something important from my short time as a market vendor: Once you start trading for yourself, you start thinking for yourself. And that is why capitalism is so inimical to authoritarianism. Self-professed enemies of capitalism claim that their opposition is to inequality, or to injustice, or to exploitation—all of which of course are worse in socialist systems than in capitalist ones. But the true aim of anticapitalism is not justice or social betterment—it is to narrow the boundaries within which people are capable of thinking for themselves. The freedom that capitalism grants to individual human beings to think and act for themselves, thereby accumulating wealth, is the reason it is under increasing suspicion in America today.