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

by Yeonmi Park

Yeonmi-ya, tigers leave behind a coat, and men leave behind a name; make yours good and lasting. —MY FATHER

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: another woman, another immigrant, a victim of female genital mutilation; someone whom, with extraordinary bravery, dared to face down the authoritarian religious hypocrites who wished to doom her to a life of unquestioning subordination and obedience. Her reward? She was, not least, identified as an “anti-Muslim extremist” by the Field Guide to such individuals published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an appallingly self-righteous and utterly hypocritical leftist organization—a

However, because Ali had the gall not to toe the party line and trumpet the evils of the capitalist West (quite the contrary: she regards the West as exceptionally admirable, particularly in comparative terms), she is persona non grata on the Left.

Ms. Park has been subject to treatment very similar to that which befell Ali, although arguably even more extensively. She employed her YouTube channel to draw attention to the plight of the North Koreans, particularly the women who experienced the same horrors that befell her and her mother.

North Korea’s military is the fourth largest in the world and is nuclear armed. Furthermore, as Ms. Park points out, the anti-American rhetoric employed by the Kim family’s nest of devils is ultimately inflammatory, in the most atomic of manners: North Korean schoolchildren are taught that the total destruction of American cities by the very weapons just described is something not only fully justified but to be devoutly desired. YouTube’s response? The demonetization of Yeonmi’s channel—not once, but repeatedly, with no explanation.

Yeonmi Park grew up in a totalitarian nightmare. As a child, she roasted and consumed insects to survive, when she could find them. As someone from a poor family (and that genuinely meant poor in North Korea) she had to bring five rabbit pelts to class and hand them over to maintain any social standing whatsoever with the propagandists who passed as teachers. She grew up among people whose dying wish was meat stew and rice.

She came to the US, miraculously, and encountered fools dallying with the same ideas that had made her life something almost unbelievably harsh—certainly that, by Western standards. She attempted with all her heart, as she is doing in the present volume, to warn us here in our luxury and comfort not to fall prey to the same ideological temptations that doomed the Soviet Union and all its satellites and that still possess the billion-plus people in China, much to the detriment of that country’s beleaguered citizens and the rest of the world.

“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.

The possibility of redemption is at the center of all great religions and societies. In North Korea, as in all communist dictatorships, it is inconceivable.

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.

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.

In reality, of course, Columbia’s “safe space” was elite code language for restrictions on ideological heterogeneity.

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.

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

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.

The dirty secret about left-wing attacks on capitalism, the family, and meritocracy in America is that they’re regarded as quite the hilarious joke in China—which is happy to watch Americans devalue and degrade every source of strength they have.

And as the generation of the Great Depression and the world wars passes on, so does the memory of what it took to build the system of abundance that we enjoy today. As America becomes predominantly made up of people who didn’t have a hand in building the system in the first place, it is producing more and more people who want to destroy the system because they don’t understand it. They don’t appreciate how fragile their freedom is, how precious their system of government, how rare their way of life. And so they entertain fantasies of tearing it down. In some cases, those fantasies are becoming reality.

When a people become untethered from history, when they become unshackled from reality, when they lose the ability to understand cause and effect, they become ripe for exploitation from those who hold real power.

Ronald Reagan said it best: “Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance, it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. And those in world history who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again.”

What is this freedom that we need to preserve? Dear reader, it’s right there in the Bill of Rights: freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition; the right to bear arms; freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures; the right to due process of law, freedom from self-incrimination, and the rights of accused persons; freedom from cruel and unusual punishments; the freedom of cities and states to make laws for themselves independently of the federal government.

We sacrifice our “pluripotentiality,” to use the technical jargon, in order to become mission-oriented and develop skills that are world-class in one particular area. While choosing your own sacrifice is hard, and in some ways sad, it is also what allows us to eventually generate the greatest amount of value for our families and our communities. And using your own talents and achievements to benefit others is one of the hallmarks of living a good, responsible, and rewarding life.

“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times” was the bit of wisdom he shared with me (from the novel Those Who Remain, by G. Michael Hopf).

I remember sitting there, an immigrant from North Korea with a thick accent, next to Candace Owens, a young Black woman, and watching the diverse audience applaud and smile. This, I thought to myself, is America.