Park Yeon-mi

Early life North Korea (1993–2007)

Park was born on October 4, 1993, in Hyesan, Ryanggang Province, North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of Korea – DPRK); Her older sister, Eun-mi, was born in 1991. Her childhood was during the 1990s North Korean famine.

Leaving North Korea for China (2007) Park left North Korea in 2007, when she was 13. The family feared that they would be punished for Eunmi's escape, so Yeonmi and her mother left North Korea by traveling through China with the help of brokers who smuggle North Koreans into China. She states: "I saw my mother raped. The rapist was a Chinese broker. I will never forget his face. ... I was only 13 years old."

Park and her mother found a Christian shelter headed by Chinese and South Korean missionaries in Qingdao. Due to the city's large ethnic Korean population, they were able to evade the attention of authorities. With the missionaries' help, they fled to South Korea through Mongolia.

Claiming asylum in Mongolia

Park says that in February 2009, after spending two days at a Christian shelter in Qingdao, she and her mother traveled through the Gobi Desert to Mongolia to seek asylum from South Korean diplomats.

On April 1, 2009, Park and her mother were sent to Ulaanbaatar's Chinggis Khaan Airport to be flown to Seoul Incheon International Airport. She later told The Telegraph that she felt relieved when Mongolian customs officials waved her through.

After receiving training at the South Korean Ministry of Unification's Hanawon Resettlement Center, Park and her mother settled in Asan. They had difficulty adjusting to life in South Korea, but found jobs as shop assistants and waitresses. Despite arriving in South Korea with only a second-grade education, Park achieved her high school equivalency in 18 months.

Now On My Way to Meet You (2011)

In 2011, Yeonmi Park participated as Yeju Park in the South Korean reality television program Now On My Way to Meet You, a show that has been credited for launching her career as a public figure. According to media academic Richard Murray, Park's ability to speak English, coupled with her being a young, attractive woman, contributed to her rise in popularity with journalists.

Park became known as "the Paris Hilton of North Korea" due to her relatively privileged upbringing in North Korea compared to her co-stars; her family had access to numerous luxury goods. She moved to New York City in 2014 to complete her memoir while continuing to work as an activist. She graduated from Columbia in 2020. Columbia declined to comment on this anecdote.

After her memoir's publication, Park "began presenting a far more harrowing description of life in North Korea than she had shared with South Korean TV fans", according to The Washington Post. John Lee, a journalist focusing on South Korean foreign policy and relations with the U.S., criticized Park in an opinion piece in NK News for "muddl[ing] her message with ... nakedly partisan punditry" in favor of conservative causes and media in the U.S. and South Korea.

Political writer A.B. Abrams, while accusing Park of fabricating her stories of life in North Korea, compared Park's life story to both the Nayirah testimony and Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations Security Council. Michael Bassett, who spent several years in the demilitarized zone as a member of the U.S. military, accused Park of fabricating her stories about North Korea, criticized her use of the word "holocaust" to describe the situation in North Korea, and accused her of working on behalf of free-market think tanks to support economic sanctions against North Korea. Park's mother said he was initially sentenced to one year that was extended to ten. They told journalists that they had never heard of any North Korean defectors being stripped naked in Mongolia. According to Yu, "In the past, the South Korean government has sent counselors over to Mongolia to help North Korean defectors in detention ... so how can defectors be stripped naked every day?" Park also said that during her life in North Korea she had never witnessed romantic love in fiction; this was contradicted by her earlier interviews in which she said she had watched romantic movies featuring Cinderella and Snow White and said that watching Titanic caused her to question the North Korean government. Park's claims that human corpses commonly float down North Korean rivers were criticized by Swiss businessman Felix Abt, who lived and worked in the DPRK for seven years.

According to the National Review, Park presumes that "the regime adjusts, as the Chinese Communists and the Vietnamese Communists have done. That would allow the North Korean Communists to hang on for untold years longer." She considers Kim Jong Un to be a "cruel" leader.

Park is outspoken against tourism to North Korea, as visitors are encouraged to bow to statues of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung, which she sees as "[aiding] the regime's propaganda by allowing themselves to be portrayed as if they too love and obey the leader".

Park believes that left-wing political ideologies are the dominant ideologies in American society.

Park is a Christian, and has attributed South Korea's economic success to its adoption of Christianity. She said, "I don't know what the connection is, but South Korea became very blessed when they embraced Christianity". Christianity is the most popular religion in South Korea, although the majority of South Koreans identify as irreligious.

Israel–Gaza war Following the October 7 attacks in Southern Israel, Park posted "We stand with Israel, show no mercy to terror" on X (Twitter).

During the Gaza war, Park defended Israel by comparing their bombing of Gaza to the American bombing of Japan and Germany during WWII, telling the audience that "freedom does have a price." She also said she is considerate of both sides of the war.

Media, speaking and internet presence Park has written and spoken publicly about her life in North Korea, has written for The Washington Post, and has been interviewed by The Guardian and for the Australian public affairs show Dateline. Park has told the story of her defection at several well-known events, including TEDx in Bath, the One Young World summit in Dublin,

At a speaking engagement at Texas Tech University in April 2021, Park claimed that speech criticizing the North Korean Supreme Leader had become a crime in South Korea, possibly referring to South Korea's passing of an amendment to the "Inter-Korean Relations Development Act" prohibiting South Koreans from sending, amongst other things, anti-Pyongyang leaflets, auxiliary storage devices (for example, USB drives), and money or other monetary benefits to North Korea. In 2021, she was a guest on the podcast of YouTuber Tim Pool, on the Joe Rogan podcast, and made an appearance as a guest on a talk show belonging to American conservative Candace Owens. She appeared on a February 2023 podcast of Fox News presenter Megyn Kelly, who acknowledged that many aspects of Park's stories had shifted, before telling her audiences that she had verified Park's stories about Korea. In the same month Park also spoke at the University of Iowa, where many of the students were also reported to have questioned the validity of her stories. Park's book deal with Penguin Publishing for her first book was reported to have been worth $1.1 million.