Ep 111 | Refugee: 'American Wokeism Worse Than North Korea' | Yeonmi Park | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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There is a place called Peace Village.

It's a cardboard city on the North Korean side of the demilitarized zone.

It's a facade.

It's a lie.

Propaganda meant to convince the world that North Korea is a legitimate force to be reckoned with and not some fledgling dictatorship that is slowly starving its own people to death because

the actual state never stood a chance to begin with.

Today's guest on our podcast knows all about the sophistication and brutality that goes into maintaining this illusion.

You are about to hear an incredible story.

It is the story of true freedom.

It's right there in the midst of the title of her memoir, In Order to Live, a North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom.

North Korean state media has referred to her as a poisonous mushroom and a human rights propaganda puppet.

She has since become part of what she calls the black market generation, young North Koreans that risked their lives to smuggle Western culture into the oppressive regime.

It is something that,

unfortunately, not enough Americans know about.

The North Korean desire for freedom, anything,

any desire is banned.

Things like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, even freedom of movement are pipe dreams.

They're delusions.

And when you are confined to absolute oppression, actual oppression, basic humanity seems like an unattainable dream.

For North Koreans,

the freedom or the ability to even watch a movie made in the West is unthinkable.

The stakes are so high.

If North Koreans are caught with media or

unregistered devices from South Korea, you can go to 15 years hard labor in a prison camp for that.

If the media is from America or Japan, the punishment can be death.

Let me say that another way.

North Koreans can and have been executed for watching American Idol.

It's not an exaggeration.

Today's guest had a friend of the family killed for the crime of watching a movie from Hollywood.

I don't care how much you might like Titanic, but your enthusiasm pales in comparison to the

The liberating enthusiasm today's guest experienced when she watched a DVD of Titanic Titanic that was smuggled into North Korea at the risk of death.

Titanic changed her life.

It took her years to escape from freedom and now she lives in America, 27 years old, but she is starting to have nightmares by the familiar authoritarianism that is now

no longer even creeping.

It is marching in the streets in our own country.

Today, I want you to welcome Yanmi Park.

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Yanmi,

what a privilege and honor to talk to you.

Welcome.

Thank you so much for having me.

I cannot believe I'm actually talking to you right now.

Thank you.

So, Yanmi,

for people who haven't heard your story yet,

can we start at the beginning?

Because

we must seem so grotesque to you as a society

the way we look at freedom

so casually tell me what life was like in North Korea growing up

yeah I think

so I was born in North Korea at the end of 1993 That was right after, few years after Soviet Union collapsed.

And North Korea is a central governed economy.

So it's a socialist.

There's no private property.

And of course, you know, the regime tells you what to do, what to see.

Literally they decide how much individuals should be fed based on your songbun, which is a birth class.

So even though North Korea began as a communist country, the interesting thing is that they made

a country into the most inequal society by dividing classes.

So, based on what your great-grandfather did during the revolution or during the Korean War,

that your birth status determined.

So, there's a big three categories of classes, and within three categories, they divided into 50 different classes in socialist North Korea.

So, before I was born.

Is there any way to break out of those classes?

I mean, can you

advance at all ever as a family?

No, because when

your great-great-grandfather does something, which means your blood is tainted.

So therefore, in North Korea, this thing called guilt by association.

So you by being associated to that person, you are just guilty.

And that's how they prevent people to rise up.

And also, I mean, so

there isn't such a thing called marrying up.

If women is coming from high class and men is from bottom class, when they marry, women go down with the men.

That's how they prevent mixing with a class.

So they really do everything they can to try to not mix them together.

And people stay in their class forever for the rest of their lives.

So where does, honestly, where does hope come from when you are when you are a slave to what your great-great-grandparent did?

Well, there's no hope.

There is no forgiveness.

There's no mercy.

There is no moving forward.

You are forever doomed.

But the thing is, the country brainwashed the citizens to the point that we don't even know that we are slaves to the dictator.

We don't even know

that we are isolated.

No,

we don't even have the word for oppression.

We do not have a vocabulary for freedom.

It's like Georgia was 1984.

Why do they create this double speak?

Who controls the language language gonna control their brain, their thinking?

So the regime purposely eliminates this concept.

Like even depression, say, how can you depress in the past, I mean, in the socialist paradise?

Therefore, people are not allowed to even know what depression is.

And that's how we don't even know what I...

What did you think the world was like?

Growing up?

What did you think the outside world was like?

So North Koreans still do not not know the existence of internet.

They don't even know what internet is.

And not to mention that they don't even have 24 hours electricity and nobody can go into North Korea and nobody can get out.

And therefore I never even seen the map of the world.

I knew Americans, I knew Japanese and Chinese, but that's all about, I think maybe Russia as well, like four countries.

And they didn't tell us even that I was Asian.

That was the thing that they said that I was was Kim Mir-song race, the

leader's race.

And North Korean calendar doesn't begin when Jesus Christ was born.

It begins when the first Kim was born.

And they do not teach us anything before Kim's.

And history doesn't exist in North Korea.

So what when

you

Because I know Titanic played a huge role in

getting you out and giving you the desire to see things.

So when you saw Titanic, that must have seemed like some sort of a fantasy

because

you didn't know that existed at all.

Yeah, it was a...

So in North Korea, there's no romantic love.

I mean, recently, 2017, North Korea even banned the Mother's Day because he was afraid that people's their love for the mother gonna interfere with the love for the party and the dear leader.

So they do not allow the normal people love other than dear leader and the Communist Party.

And therefore like watching Titanic and seeing a guy dying for a woman, I mean my entire life I was very much to believe that you gotta die for the revolution and the party and the leader.

And someone making out of a movie such a shameful story because love is such a shameful thing that we don't even know the the word for it and i think that's when i was it was like really first time tasting some humanity how did you get to watch the titanic i mean that's a prison sentence yeah i mean even mr ni kim jong declared the war against the western uh media uh but however north koreans are extremely curious about the outside world So there is a border between China and North Korea and there are smugglers.

So So these are bullet DVDs.

And I think our uncle got the back then it was a tape.

It wasn't even the DVD.

So that's how we got it.

But if you get caught or distributed, it can be even execution.

So, you know.

I mean

that

I've never watched a movie where I could be executed for it.

Was this a regular thing?

Or was this something that you could so so you

it wasn't like watching it um fearfully

it was i mean you know the risk

and but the thing is you are so curious and and but the thing is even in north korea watching a movie like something like titanic that is three hours long can take months because we don't have 24 hours electricity electric electricity comes once in a while especially summertime they come because the dam, the water is full in the dam.

Winter time you never see the light.

So it takes a while to watch a movie.

Right, and I said I heard that you said at one point that

when you had a day of electricity, it was like a holiday.

It was a big, big deal.

Yeah, it was it wasn't even a calm for like sometimes comes one minute, five minutes.

Even an hour is a long time to come, but when it comes, the power is so low, you can like sometimes

vaguely see a line or like bird, you know, light burp.

Wow, and so, yeah.

So, how long did it take you to watch Titanic?

That's three hours.

Exactly.

I think it took a while.

I don't know exactly how long it took, but it was like little segments of something over a period of time.

It was like we were sitting and watching an entire movie at one sitting.

That's a complete privilege.

Yeah, that's unbelievable.

Okay, so you watch the movie and you realize that really everything that you think you know is wrong.

And no, not to that point.

No.

Because I was so brainwashed to know even what

brainwashing is, right?

But it just made me feel really weird, like why

there's no political message.

why there's no propaganda and I was wondering maybe somebody died after this movie, but it wasn't wasn't to the point though, you know, what the regime is saying is a lie.

You know, double think that you can have two contradicting thoughts at the same time.

And North Koreans are the masters at this.

Literally, during the day, you sing songs like Nothing to Envy because of the great party that we have nothing to envy in this world.

That is a literally song that we must sing every single day.

But in reality, you see that the bodies on the streets every single day out of starvation so humans are able to hold these two contradicting thoughts at the same time and that's what i think georgia always talking about the double think right

um

i can't i just can't imagine what your childhood was was like and we

we here think that

you know our founding documents we hold these truths to be self-evident and i used to think that you could go to somebody in North Korea or China and say, the government shouldn't have this kind of control and you should be free, right?

And they would say, yes, thank God.

But that's not true, is it?

It's not self-evident to people who have been raised in

an authoritarian regime like that.

Yeah, I mean, that is the thing.

Like when we born, a lot of people here, like, they think humans know what freedom is what human rights is right I remember going to South Korea for the first time hearing about animals rights

and I was like what do you mean animals have rights you know I did not know I had a rights as a human being

so of course even people in North Korea do not even know what human rights is so these things are is a convention.

I mean even founding fathers, it's not like they knew when they were born.

And that's why the civilization is important.

We keep evolving, right?

We are.

This is the inventions of humanity.

It's not something

when you came to this earth, we just knew right away.

Right.

So what is the

after the Titanic?

You watch this, you see love

between a man and a woman.

You have not seen that in your own home with your mom and dad?

No.

No.

They never even told us they loved us because there is no word for love in North Korea.

And the romance is something shameful thing.

The only reason people marry and meet the other person is because they want to be royal to the party for the revolution.

Individuals exist because we are the revolutionaries.

And the worst thing that you can be in North Korea is being individualistic.

I mean in North Korea we cannot even say I.

When I say I, I have to say we.

We love red color because the regime says red is a revolutionary color.

You know, we love our country, so there's no word for I in that country.

That's how they control our, you know, our minds through

words.

I don't think most people even

comprehend that.

That

actually, that kind of stuff actually exists and goes on.

All right, so

what happens after you watch the Titanic and you're starting to have these thoughts?

What happens next?

Well, I mean, I watched it and then other thing is, you know, the regime make us starved on purpose.

It's a man-made famine.

So the regime knows...

At North Korea, right now, if I'm there, if I find something to eat for the breakfast, right?

Then I'm going to worry about what am I going to eat, like, for lunch.

If I make it to lunch, I'm gonna make worry about dinner.

Once I make the dinner, I'm gonna think, okay, I made one day on earth.

How am I gonna live tomorrow?

How am I gonna find food to survive tomorrow, right?

Every single hour is a survivor.

And that's it's a hunger games.

It's a North Korea.

I mean Hunger Games copy North Korea basically they there is a CAPTAR

they divide districts.

Hunger Games 13 districts, right?

North Korea is more eight districts.

And only the people in CAPTAR get everything they want.

And outside of CapTar, people are starved on purpose.

So people don't think about the meaning of life.

We don't think about

what is art, what is philosophy.

All we thinking about is how am I going to make a next meal?

How am I going to make it until tomorrow?

So that is, you know, so even after watching the movie, it wasn't a thing in my mind.

Like, what was that?

It just was weird why something like that exists.

But I had no time to to thinking about those things.

It was a survival how I'm gonna find food and so to get

out of North Korea.

How did this how did this happen?

Where did that idea even come from?

Yeah, so there's no internet.

I never even seen the map of the world.

You never saw a map?

No, I didn't even know what the race was.

I told you I did not even know that I was Asian.

I thought I was Kimer-sung race.

So, you know, I had no clue there's like Arab, black, white, you know,

Indians, like all these races.

I did not even know that.

But luckily, I was living in the border town of North Korea.

But if you see the satellite photos of North Korea at night time, it is literally the darkest place on earth because they don't have lights at night.

So I was able to see lights coming from China at night.

And then I was wondering, maybe if I go where the lights were, I might be able to find a bowl of rice.

And that's how I decided to risk my life and cross that frozen river.

So it wasn't a political move.

It wasn't, let's get out of here.

It's just, where can I find food?

Yeah.

Maybe the lights were.

Did you even...

So

you didn't really understand the country of China or anything.

It was just.

None.

I mean, I didn't not know what free was.

Like, so what freedom is, you know, how do I how do you uh escape for freedom when you don't even know what escape is and like freedom is?

Right, literally for me was, okay, seems like there's some bright lights coming from China.

And when if I go where they are, maybe I can find some food.

Right, that's but when you are so desperate, when in front of your death, there's nothing you cannot do.

You do everything.

Did you go to school?

I did go one or two few semesters of school as a child, but even though it's a socialist free education, that teachers demand you to bring bribes and money and supplies.

If you don't, they beat you up.

So I was so poor to bring those things.

I mean, there's no child rights either.

There's no concept of minors.

They beat kids.

Humans' lives are less valuable than cow and animals in North Korea.

They literally, one of the execution that my mom saw was this young man who had turpulos, like TB.

He was very malnourished.

So he ate a cow in the farm, that collective farm.

And then regime executed this young man.

So, you know, that's how North Korea.

So when you you say your your parents never said, I love you, you never, I mean, that's so foreign to me, it seems like that is something that you just feel that you would fall in love with somebody you would feel something different and you would feel that to your parents so when

a child dies in a family is it the same as it is here I don't mean to be insulting I've just never even I've never even heard of anything like this

well I mean that's the thing if the child dies um

if it's a boy I'm sure fathers would cry.

But if it's a girl, uh girls' life a lot less valuable than boys, so they don't really cry.

And

and it's not like also the love.

I don't know how to describe the feelings you fear, but it is definitely some types of love.

But we just don't know how to express it and it's not screaming that not like cold blood do not feel emotions.

But then we are not just allowed to name the feeling that we fear, and that's how regime makes us keep ignorant.

You feel maybe it's just you

that feels this way.

It must make you feel very different and awkward if nobody's talking about those feelings being natural.

No,

nobody thinks that something should be talked about, even.

Okay, so you go to look for food, and does your mother go with you, or or you yeah okay so the two of you go to look for food

so in 2007 i was i was 13 years old i had a older sister who was 16 years old we were going to escape together but she i got really really sick and my sister went with her friend instead however she left me a note and then told me where do I go find a person to help me to go to China.

So when I found a note,

I asked my mom to come with me.

And then when I met the lady, she said, okay, oh, of course I can help you to go to China.

And that's when I told my mom, can you come with me?

And the same day, this lady was helping us to go to China, but

I didn't even ask why she was helping me.

We were so desperate, it doesn't matter why they are helping you, you know.

If you stay there, you're dying anyway, right?

Why does that even matter?

she was not a good person

it's hard to say so yeah basically she was a human trafficker she sold me to chinese people but the thing is that the life is that things are not that simple if she didn't sell me i would be dead since 2007

because she sold me that i'm here today i'm alive And you were sold, and there's your life is, I mean, there's, it's conflicting stories, even the the death of your father.

So

I don't know what's right and what's not.

But I have read that

you were a slave, sold into slavery, if you will.

Was it sex slavery?

Because I've read someplace that you were selling for $260 and your mother was sold for $65.

Was that a sex slavery thing or was it just slavery?

It was

so China had a one-child policy under the the Communist Party.

And during the one-child policy, they killed a lot of girls, aborted girls, and then most of them kept the boys, especially in the countryside.

Therefore, right now, there are more than 30 million Chinese men who are eligible for marriage cannot find women.

So this is where human trafficking happens when North Koreans go across the border to interchange.

Chinese authority catches us and sends us back to North Korea to get killed.

So then we are so vulnerable we gotta hide from the Chinese authority.

Then who's gonna hide us?

That's human traffickers come in.

So as soon as I was crossing the frozen river with my mom, the first thing this guy saying I wanna have a sex with you.

And I'm 13, I never even seen, I never even knew what sex was.

There's no sex education in North Korea.

I never even seen people kissing on TV.

So, and then my mother offered herself, but afterwards, they told us that if we want to live in China, we have to be sold as sex slaves.

And they sold my mom away from me for, I think it's over $65.

And they sold me for less than $300

because I was virgin and that's somehow expensive in China.

And that's how I got separated from everyone that I knew.

So how long did that last?

It took several months and I was bought by another human trafficker.

So in China there's a lot of human trafficker ring with a gang almost ring mafia ring.

So one human trafficker says me make a margin send me to another human trafficker and that trafficker was a Han Chinese who bought me

I was going to kill myself and then he said if I become his mistress he was going to help me to bring my family to me So I did become his mistress at 13 and he brought my mom back from a farmer that he sold and he brought my sick father from North Korea and that's how I saw my parents again.

So how do you feel about him?

I mean because he was helping you but he was also

using you.

That's the thing I I forgave him a long time ago.

There is a in a lot of times I'm grateful because without him I would not have saved my parents.

So, you know, it's always that I know at this point is that through my journey, most of the things I learned is what it really means to be a human being.

Nobody is pure evil, right?

Nobody is pure evil.

Even this guy who was so heartless, raping 13 years old, still has somehow heart helping me to get my family.

So,

you know, that's the thing that's a hat.

That's why all I can be is grateful.

I cannot hate that lady who sold me in the Chinese because if she didn't serve me, I would not be here today.

You are

stuck with this guy and you meet Christian missionaries?

Yeah, after

almost two years in China,

I met through

another notion de facto

missionaries and she told me

these missionaries would help us to go to South Korea and be free.

And that's when the first time time I heard free and I remember I was asking her, I was 15 years old at the time, I was like, what do you mean?

What do you mean like I'm gonna be free in South Korea?

And for us that freedom meant was wearing jeans, watching TVs,

and nobody gonna arrest you for that.

I did not think freedom meant like freedom of speech or like all these things.

Freedom meant watching TV and wearing jeans.

To wear jeans.

Yeah, because in North Korea you get punished for that.

You do not have freedom to even what kind of haircut you got.

It was a joke for Western, but that's how little freedom North Koreans have.

We don't even have a freedom to have a haircut that we want to.

Every single close, the song that you listen to, how you dance, what you watch,

what you read, what you say, where you go, where you live, everything

decided by the regime for us.

And you didn't have internet, you didn't really

didn't understand freedom of

speech at all.

Were there, when you have the classes, did you know that all of that or some of that stuff existed in capital city?

Did you

were or were you so separated from any kind of knowledge that you didn't know life was different even in your own country?

I had also, so my father was a

DDY, he was a party member when I was younger until he was sent.

So when he was in the party member, because he was engaging in the black market trading.

And in North Korea, black market means selling rice, dried fish, sugar, and clocks.

Because in socialist system, you cannot trade.

Governments control the means of production and who gets what.

So, but the thing is, after 90s, after Soviet Union collapsed, the regime

decided not to feed the people, not to give us public rations.

But then instead they start still banning the trading.

So all we were left to do was dying.

That's why in the 90s more than three million North Koreans died from starvation when I was a child.

And that's why if North Koreans were forced to engage in the black market, and I think that's why you're saying that I was a black market generation, that regime just decided not to feed us.

And the only thing could feed us was through the black market, through trading.

And that's how he was forced to join the market.

And he got caught because he was selling copper later, silver, like knicker.

And then they

ended in prison camp.

And that's how my blood was tainted.

I was a prisoner's daughter.

And yeah, our life became miserable.

Wow.

Okay, so the missionaries, and I don't think people understand

that there are these Christian, almost underground railroads

that are happening in North Korea,

and they're heroic people, heroic people.

What is the risk for them, and

how do they get you out of North Korea and China?

So there are many, many, many pastors, missionaries got stopped by North Korean agents in China, got murdered, got life sentenced into Chinese prison camps for helping North Korean defectors.

So there's many nameless people who have done that.

These are hidden heroes.

So one of these missionaries helped us was

helping, putting us in a shelter and taught us Bible.

Several months of Bible studying, they told us they could not literally go into desert with us, right?

Only way for us to go to South Korea was getting out of China.

But then we don't have ID or passport to get out of China and cross the border, which means then we had to walk across the frozen Gobi Desert from China to Mongolia.

Most likely you might not make it.

The chance of making it is like 1 or 2%.

1 or 2%.

Yeah,

and it was also minus 40 degrees in 2009 in February.

So if you don't move in in that desert for even 10 seconds, you are gonna frozen to death.

If the guards don't shoot you, your next chance of getting killed is also just being frozen there

and all the wire fences

electrified like wire fences you get electrified

and that's why now nobody really crossing the goby desert anymore i think you were the one of the last few people tried that path to escape um so they set you out with food and a map no i mean everything gets frozen right i mean

everything gets frozen in that so we didn't even have much gear we didn't even have gloves or scarves.

We just had some like light jackets.

My mind was forty below temperatures?

Yeah.

It was

it was cold.

I remember I never been cold like that in my life.

But you know, it's but they gave us compass and then said go north and west direction the meet between the north and west direction, follow this path.

And if you cross eight wire fences, that should be Mongolia.

And then we crossed, I think,

for in my memory, there's over like 16 wire fences.

Some people remember 12 wire fences, depending on how we thought about.

But eventually, we got into Mongolia, we got caught by Mongolian soldiers, and they helped us to go to South Korea.

So they were friendly, they helped you.

The Mongolian soldiers weren't.

So they, when we got caught by them, they were trying to send us back to China.

So Chinese would send us back to North Korea to be executed.

So we have brought these like poisons and lasers with us because going back to North Korea, get tortured and executed is a very painful process and it's killing yourself right there.

So we all ready to die when that happens.

So when these Mongolian soldiers were trying to send us back, we all got out the like laser and poisons.

And then that's, they was like, okay, we cannot let all these eight people die.

And they decided to reach out to South Korean embassy instead of the Chinese one.

God was with you.

All right.

Yeah.

So you get to South Korea.

Take me now how you got to America.

Yeah, so I was in South Korea for five years.

I was catching up with education.

Wait, wait, wait, wait.

I've heard you say this before, that you were catching up with education, but that's not the same as,

you know, we would think, oh, well, you had some elementary school and now you're just catching up.

You knew nothing of the world.

So how did you get in five years

caught up?

What was that like?

It was, so when I got there and I was like 17 years old, South Korean age, which means kids are in high schools, right?

And then they did a placement test on me, and they were like, you need to go to school with a six, seven years old.

Because I never even knew what the plus or addition or division or never even seen the map of the world.

I don't even know what continents are.

Not even mentioned the countries.

So, and of course, I was not gonna go to elementary school.

So, I took GED.

I crammed up from

elementary, middle, and high school education 12 years into one year, and I taught myself.

And I took GED, I got a high school diploma, and then after I arrived in South Korea one year after, I went to university.

I mean, that is remarkable in and of itself.

You come to America.

Well, before I get there,

tell me what the experience, I mean, I remember when I was, I'm a self-educated man,

and at 30, I really realized I was a dope and I didn't know anything.

And so I really went and applied myself.

And it was such a great period of my life of seeking answers, you know, not just going through life and having to go to school, but actually wanting to know.

And the things that I learned at that time period, it was a really special time in my life.

I got to imagine it was the same for you.

What were the things that you learned that you sat back and just thought this is incredible

yeah I think that was the thing so after going through all of that arriving in South Korea they were saying oh you know what that Americans are not bastards and South Korea is free and they are not colonized by America and Korean were started by Kim I sum not Americans And by the way, Kims were not gods, they were like dictators.

So everything that you believed was a lie.

And for me, it's like, so if everything that I believed was a lie, how do I know that what you're telling me is not a lie?

That I did not know how to trust again.

It was, it was like, I don't know what you're telling me is a lie or not, right?

But what helped me was when I was reading this book called Animal Farm.

Called what?

Animal Farm.

Okay.

Oh, Animal Farm by George Orwell.

Okay, yes.

That book really explained to me what happened to my country.

I could see in that young little animals comes out later, right?

They have even no clue what the life looked like before the revolution.

That's like those

little young animals comes in.

They don't even know the time before that everything happened.

And the people, because they were scared.

And the price of silence is that what we get.

And I was thinking, my grandma knew, she lived before Kim's.

And she knew the before Kim Communist Party came in.

I had no clue.

And I think that's when I realized, oh, this is what happened to my country.

And that's also when I was really thinking I had to speak.

Okay, so when you come to the United States,

you know, there's a...

There's a

TV series called John Adams about one of the founding fathers of America.

And he is over in France.

Have you watched that?

I have watched the first four of them.

Okay.

So have you gotten to the part where he's in France?

I'm not sure.

Okay.

Well,

watch it.

It's an amazing thing.

He's sitting over there, and they are just a decadent society.

And America has nothing, and they're struggling for freedom.

And

they're all painted up like they used to be in France.

And

it's the kings and all of the wealth.

And I saw that and I thought, I think that's the way at some point we are going to be perceived as we have all this wealth and we're just squandering our time and we don't really appreciate

what we have, but more importantly, we don't even understand what freedom really is because we've had it for so long.

That must have been your experience

when you saw America and you started to see how we are treating our own freedom.

What was that like?

It broke my heart.

So after five years in South Korea, I came to America to write my book.

And then I was attending Columbia University in New York.

And this is when I was actually starting to feel what's going on right at Colombia

it was almost like North Korea in some sense I mean even North Korea wasn't that crazy compared to America's wokeism it's uh

wait wait wait wait wait hold it just

even North Korea was not as crazy as American wokeism is that what you just said yeah

because I mean the punishment of course in North Korea is gonna be three generations execution but the thing is

I mean in Colombia they teach you sensitivity training, right?

It's mandatory.

How can you be, how you should be so sensitive to every oppression, every injustice that you see.

And then of course in North Korea we don't have 90 different pronouns.

Right, like instead of like in in for before the every lecture, especially thinking about this big lecture, like over 100 students are there and you survey class.

everybody is like before their name major they go talk about their pronouns and then some of them are gender fluid so they might feel like a boy in the morning and go like afternoon how they supposed to know that

so instead of me trying to understand who they are as a person as a character and their contents i am obsessed memorizing their pronouns so i don't look like a bigot

I mean what a waste of time, what a waste of energy.

And then of course when you go there, like they all they talk is that there's no place for hate speech here.

But like how do you define hate speech?

And these people are obsessed with feelings.

They're like, I feel like I'm oppressed.

It's not different.

It's different like being actually oppressed and you feel like oppressed.

People in North Korea don't know even they're oppressed.

That's actually what oppression looks like.

I mean the fact that you know you're oppressed, that is not right.

You don't even know the definition of oppression.

So did you express any of this when you were first sitting in class at Columbia University in America?

What was the first thing that jumped out at you and you thought, oh my gosh, I've seen this before?

So it was like that.

I remember at the this orientation before leaving classes, at the students' mandatory orientation before your courses begin.

And the first person comes in and then she was asking, oh, who, you know, this like oppression, this infiltration of this hatred is everywhere, embedded in our constitution, embedded in every system that we see.

But for example, who likes to read Jane Austen?

And me is like, I love reading and in North Korea there's even no love stories.

I love to read things that was before Kim's, right?

And I was like, yeah, me, I love Jane Austen.

And again, she was almost saying, oh, this is the kind of example that you don't notice.

She was saying Jane Austen had a colonial mindset she would benefit

from colonialism and she believed in white supremacy and racism therefore by reading her work you are subconsciously becoming racist and you're being brainwashed by her and this is how you need to watch out and be sensitive to every single thing that might you know has an injustice and that's why North Korea and regime

you don't know how many layers of enemy influencer infiltration in our country

and That was like my first orientation did you say anything

No, because everybody was looking at me and then few times I tried to speak up I remember in this class like Western civilization music and before even the class starts the professor asking your pronouns blah and then they were saying who has a problem studying Western civilization music and everybody raised their hands.

The reason is why they have a problem with studying Western civilization music is that because white men who silenced and killed all minority groups because of their aggression now we have to study these bigots who are like Mozart and Beethoven and it's a shame that we are not studying some guy from China or like somewhere in Africa.

And I was saying like

I mean as a Korean we would not say studying somebody Korean musician, right?

I mean after all, this is the West.

And after all, they did so much for the humanity and advancement of music.

And they were like, oh, you are brainwashed to think it's okay to study Western men's achievements.

What is.

What is going through your mind when you're sitting in there?

What were you thinking?

It was scary to see that group dink again.

It was quite scary.

Wait, wait, wait, wait.

I want to make sure I understood you.

It was scary to sit and see that group think again?

Yeah.

Because it's

in that scenario where like

you,

majority can be very stupid, we know that.

And especially when people do this thing, group think.

As a group collectively, we're going to process this information.

They all usually tend to be not creative and they do make a lot of biases.

So at Columbia, everybody is echoing with each other, right?

It's like an echo chamber.

And if the people like me who were thinking differently, we are just too afraid.

Because we are paying so much money to go to this school.

If we cannot afford not to pass the class or graduate, and almost even expelled from the school.

Because they are saying how you say, what you say, how you look,

whatever you do can cause someone's uncomfortableness, it can be a reason for the university to expel you.

So now, it seems like everything can be offensive.

It's like you are walking on this ice, you know, like a little shit, like you don't know when it's gonna break.

It's like every single thing can be offensive and all it matters for them is how you fear.

And I was like, why Americans are so obsessed with your feelings?

It's all about how I feel.

I feel like I'm a slave, I feel like I'm oppressed.

Then there must be something wrong with the system.

That's how they go for it, right?

It's just their interpretation so simple.

So, the reason why I said good for you earlier when you talked about how the woman who smuggled you into China and you said, I am grateful for her, and I don't think she's necessarily bad,

because, and it wasn't a bad thing because I'm here now.

I got out.

And

that was a lesson I learned from my father early on.

He taught me, he said,

there is no bad.

There's no bad things that happen to you.

It's

how you define it and what you use it for, you know, what you learn from it and what you use it for.

And I think when you I've been trying to figure out what is wrong with my fellow countrymen.

And I think the biggest thing that we have lost is gratitude.

We are not seemingly grateful for anything.

Everything is a problem.

Everything is holding you back.

Everything is an excuse.

And when you lose that,

nothing is worth anything.

No, I think that's the thing.

It's like seeing that America is a type of meritocracy.

Like what ha what have the Western civilization?

That was merits, competition, like the ideas compete, made people to overcome their challenges and their limits.

And humans can overcome so much.

I mean look at the sports players, right?

What humans can do.

And now the fact like Asians study hard is a sign of uh white supremacy, sign of privilege.

And

the fact that that you are really want to do work well is it's almost oppression for them

and that's like in North Korea like you

how much you want to work hard it doesn't matter because there's no incentive like it's just what kind of

family and bloodline did you born with and here in America it's like the same thing like what the heck is a white privilege what the heck is like a white girl nobody today was born on any slaves

And it's exactly the same thing.

Like, I was not participating during the Korean War.

I don't even know what the time looked like.

It was my decision that I did not fight on the right side of the war.

And but you are forever doomed, forever punished.

This is the thing that really

strikes me

as

so important to your story: the idea that not only if you commit a crime, does your whole family pay for it in North Korea, but your great-great-grandfather committed a crime and forever there is no forgiveness.

And that is the world we are headed towards right now.

Tell me,

explain to people who are on that bandwagon why that is a bad idea.

It's not just a bad idea.

that's not just.

Nobody, I mean, when we are born, we are like very independent individuals.

We are not a lineage of something, anything, right?

And

it just is not justice, that's not right, that's not fair.

And it's like they're saying blaming these white people for slavery is the same thing we are blaming these little young kids who were born in Japan for Pearl Harbor.

Who does that?

Nobody is responsible for that crime at this point.

And in america i see this punishment and never letting ever go right even though this country did so much to fix it and evolve and making things better and it proved to us that this country is so flexible that wants to fix things and making things better

But no, no, no, what they want is because this country has done things bad, therefore only way to almost do that is of tearing down this country.

Tearing down the U.S.

Constitution.

That's like what every single class talking about Colombia is like that is the only way we are going to actually bring real justice.

It's the only way we can do that is by tearing down everything that this country has built.

You are

when you are

looking at people and you say, well, this is, you know, they're part good.

They're, you know,

you know, they're not all bad.

They're not all bad.

Even though they did bad things, the guy who

was having sex with you at 13, yet he saved your family.

There is this thing in

people, whether they are actively engaging in what I would call evil acts, unknowingly, or if they just didn't know any better.

You can't judge the person just for justice.

You have to look at the entire person.

And we are throwing out the

majority of what the West has done

because we made mistakes.

Well, everybody makes mistakes and you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Exactly.

I completely agree with that.

It's like whenever I look at this man, right, he was also a gang member as a child.

He's coming from a very poor family in the countryside.

He didn't even have elementary school education.

All he saw was violence.

He never learned how to treat people better.

And he never even learned how the world works.

And if he wasn't born in that Chinese commons,

oppressive country, he was born in somewhere like nice in European country or America, he might become a completely different person.

His environment was so harsh and different.

And that's the thing even though America has a very, very dark history at some part, is that the judging it from our current perspective

is not the way to look at problems.

And, right, and these people in America, there's no mercy.

If you make a mistake, if you make a stupid chewy like 10 years ago, they might can bring that back to you and then cancel you.

And that's what communists do.

There's no forgiveness, there's no moving forwards.

They are gonna forever, forever

punish you for that

and you can never make it up

let me ask you a couple of questions here and just just to get your point of view when you see the push now to silence voices

and to the white house calls it flagging for misinformation but you can be banned from all platforms is what they're pushing for.

What does that say to you?

so this is why speech is so important

the unique thing about humans right that is I think Jordan Peterson talk about in his book that humans why do we go to therapy because we think by talking

so when you make people stop talking means you're going to make them stop thinking if the population stop thinks it's a lot easier for the authoritarians to rule the country and control the population.

That is why whenever there's authoritarian voices, the first thing they go after is freedom of speech.

Because that's how you control people's minds.

That's how important it is for us to keep talking.

That's how we only pursue and think and find truth.

And this country now, it's almost like I think, you know, fishes in the water never know that they are in the water because they were just born with it.

And for Americans, the same thing, they're born with the freedom, so they don't even know what life would be like without freedom because they just never experienced it.

So, they are like so naively because I think majority people are good, not the extreme on the left, not the extreme on the like right, those few really bad people.

I think majority people have good intentions, and these people now is like, oh, because we don't want Nazis to speak, we don't want the racists to speak, so I don't mind giving up a little bit of my liberty and then silence those people and let government decide who is racist.

But where is the guarantee that that government is not gonna corrupt?

Because nothing is harmful to individuals than the government.

Nobody, even this pandemic didn't kill as much as I mean Stalin or Mao killed human beings.

The government is the most dangerous thing to humanity.

And the fact that we are gonna give this like rights to, I mean, that is the thing people don't understand.

That is the price of freedom.

That we have to listen to some people that we don't like.

But the thing is, there's a difference between action and

speech.

This is mere talking and ideas, and the people here have no resilience.

They are what is thinking called triggered, right?

All about safe space.

If you hear something that you don't like, these people like popping into tears and they break down.

And

this is so, so sad.

What happened to these people?

Well, I do know education,

bad education.

When you said

when you lose the freedom of speech, you lose everything else.

Can I just go through just a couple of amendments that we are constantly violating now in our Constitution?

The first one is freedom of the press, which includes the freedom to question your own country and say, what are you doing?

We have a right to petition our own government.

We have a right to gather on the streets and

freedom of association without fear of the government.

And the freedom to

not just speak out, but the freedom of the press to question the government and even get it wrong sometimes.

But they have a right to do that.

Those are all things that you never grew up with.

Never even heard of.

Never even heard of.

Tell me about your thoughts on the Second Amendment, which is the right to keep and bear arms.

How would that have changed things for you?

Well, I talked about it on my YouTube channel.

Of course, that video got flagged.

So last time, a few years ago in Hong Kong, we all know that with the Chinese Communist Party taking over Hong Kong, 75% of the Hong Kongers went on the street and demanded freedom and independence from the central government.

But Chinese regime still took it over.

Nobody,

without even taking the tanks, because nobody in Hong Kong had the guns.

Imagine those 75% of people had guns.

Chinese government could not take them over like that.

And right now, under Kim Jong-un, if the people, not even like 100% of the population, just even 40 or even 20, 30% of the population had guns in their hand,

the regime cannot do that to the people.

And of course, they can say like, yeah, yeah, then the government has a nuclear bomb, they can bomb you guys.

But the thing is, the regime is going to kill your oil population, but then who they are going to rule over?

Nobody.

Right?

That is unthinkable.

And the thing is,

even if you say government gonna get rid of 80%

of the population and 20% leaves but that 20% is so the bloodshed of 80% of their population not gonna be slave to the regime they're gonna fight to their death so it's impossible for enslaving people like that like North Korea if the population owns the you know right to guard themselves and defend themselves from the government

And the thing is like it's about like even capitalism and you know a defense is that even money itself isn't bad.

It can cure diseases.

It can feed a hungry child.

Now there is so much attack on capitalism and the thing is nothing lifted human beings from poverty more than capitalism did.

And poverty sucks.

It kills people.

And really nothing is worse than poverty.

And people in America almost they think this inequality is the same thing as poverty.

They are so hating inequality that therefore they want to get rid of everywhere and let's be poor.

Older dirty people like North Korea.

Well people here in America think that they are poor.

I mean the poorest people in America are better off than

some countries where you're rich.

I would imagine that even the poorest among us here are far better off than those except for the very elite in North Korea.

Even very elite is not going to have 24 hours electricity, so you guys are way better off.

I've been to homeless shelter.

I've been working at the homeless shelter and feeding them cleaning their bag at the homeland shelter they had this fridge filled with soda that was working 24 hours four hours they had a heating

in north even elites in pyongyang don't have a heating

so that's the thing like inequality does not mean poverty and of course inequality exists and look at north korea there's a one guy is a god and 25 million people are slaves so do we want that instead

people here here will say, well, that's just that's just

communism gone awry and that's not what we're looking for.

We just are going to do it right this time.

How do you respond to that?

People have tried.

Every single time it failed.

And whenever the government decides the means of production, because, I mean, people as a human being, I don't even know what I want all the time.

How do you think government is going to know what is best for every individual?

That's just impossible.

That's not even rational, right?

So the fact that you believe somehow government is going to have the best interest for you as an individual, that's an impossibility.

And that's why they make mistakes.

And

these people have no real education.

They don't know what it has done to humans whenever we pursue the paradise.

Whenever you pursue this paradise perfection where nobody suffers, everything is equal, everything is the same,

it brought us hell.

When you hear people people here in America talk about China

and make excuses for it, say that, you know,

our own capitalists here say that China is the model for the future for the West.

And the fact that we are buying and in bed with the Communist Party and we are using and accepting the use of slavery to make our products cheaper.

What do you say about that?

This is a complete hypocrisy of America's mainstream corporation and Hollywood and media.

It's sickening.

Do you know that why North Korea exists?

I mean, the United Nations in 2014 with their COI report called what is happening to the North Korean people right now.

The only resemblance that we can find in the human history is the Holocaust.

So UN said Holocaust is happening again.

And here in America, we are denying again.

Why are we denying again?

Because North Korea is funded, sponsored by the Chinese Communist Party.

Michelle Obama has no problem for the standing up for the girls who were captured by Boko Haram and ISIS.

Every Hollywood

celebrity, no problem standing up for all these causes, but nobody wants to standing up for the North Korean girls who are being raped and sold in China.

Right now, slavery is happening, and these people have no problem talking about the slavery that happened in this country hundreds of years ago, but they do not want to talk about that slavery is happening why not under Communist Chinese Party.

Right now, there are almost like 300,000 North Korean girls in China are being sold and killed and raped every single day.

Not even one single corporation standing up for that.

Why do they talk about slavery?

I mean look at LeBron James.

Look at Jung Xina, all these people bowing to Chinese Communist Party.

And this is why it scares that there's no motor, the chaos immorality, there's no value.

And

they sold their souls to the Chinese Communist Party.

And it's an invisible world that we are in with the Chinese Communist Party.

And I don't think people know how serious this can be.

If you look at

what we have here as far as tech,

you must, it must, the internet and everything must be almost miraculous to you.

I mean, 12 years ago,

you were being raped

every night by a man

and really didn't know about all this technology.

Now that we have it and you see it,

the way it's being used by Silicon Valley in China and the way we are beginning to use it, is it a blessing or a curse what's coming our way?

i think it's like that tech itself is a very neutral thing right as long as we use in the right way it can help us immensely and it has when it comes to medicines education right

it's like exactly like that it's like the gun there are good people can use it to kill enemies bad people and bad people use it to kill good good people

What concerns with Chinese technology, especially facial recognition, is to know who is committing crime and they give social credit scores.

So if your social credit was low, that you cannot even buy a bus ticket to to go see your parents.

That's what Chinese regime does right now.

And I thought that was only happening under the authoritarian Communist Party in China.

But it is seems like happening in America.

Right now, I mean, government, US government, I was recently hearing that they decided what is fact and not and gonna let Facebook know.

So Facebook knows knows which one to blog and which one is not.

So they are basically working for the government.

And

this is

the thing is, I'm not an anarchist.

I think we need the government to break down these tech monopolies, right?

Like this is not something like a small individual company does something and it's not like some cake shop who wants to follow their religious belief.

That is okay, but when it comes to scale of Google, Facebook, Twitter, this is the biggest monopolies in the world.

And if they set the narrative and tell us what is true and not, then are we really free now?

So I do think we are,

it's unbelievable how fast, fast this erosion of Americans' freedom is going away.

I could talk to you all day long, and I know I've taken up too much of your time already, but let me just ask you two more questions.

The role of

God

and

faith,

you had no hope.

Your God

was the Kim family.

How important is that for a free people to have

a God that is a God of love and harmony and peace?

I think that's

that, I mean, after North Korea, right?

And I was so hated that something is not verifiable.

What scared me about North Korean regime is that when it's you're being God,

you don't have to be logical.

You don't have to bring evidence to show you to believe, because now Kim says I'm a god.

So therefore, even you suffer, you can die for me.

And I don't even have to explain it to you because it's a faith.

That's a different thing.

So I do not deny that there are some religions are bad, very harmful, and there's a lot of extremists.

We know that.

And that's why I cannot fully support any kind of faith.

But the thing is,

when

I mean, we don't even have little do we understand about science, right?

The things are that's about humble.

The humility is what's lacking in here in America.

When you go like talking to social justice warriors on campus, they know every single truth, they know every single fact, they know how to solve the world.

And they do not understand the complexity and the difficulty of knowing how things actually work.

And that a little bit of humility would really work and they calm them down a little bit.

But to me, as I'm getting older, I became a mom last few years ago, and I do send my son to church.

It's for me, it's more like that.

It's important to hear what is good and what is bad.

Because Korean society now is almost like, yeah, if you identify yourself as a unicorn, it's okay.

Go, be a unicorn, be a BVM vampire, right?

There's people not even identifying themselves, not just a different gender, even different animals.

and different ways.

This British guy saying, now I identify myself as a Korean, right?

There's a complete moral chaos.

And I think this is like what's the scary thing about without God is when you don't have a God, people is willing to believe in anything.

That anything is scary, isn't it?

You sound like Nietzsche.

Why did you come here?

Why did you come to the West?

You could have lived anywhere and

you know,

speaking Korean, it would have been easy for you just to

stay in South Korea.

Well, there are a few reasons.

South Korea, I'm on the target list of Kim Jong-un.

I mean, Kim Jong-un assassinates a half-brother, right, in Malaysia a few years ago.

Kim Jong-un do not allow people to challenge him, even after they escape.

So, I've been warned by intelligence that I'm on the killing list, so I don't know when I'm gonna be poisoned or killed.

And geographically, getting away from Gim Zone was a good idea.

But not only that, why did I not go to UK or other European country and came to America?

Is that

because simply this is the greatest country in human history?

Like how can we deny that?

Despite all the problems this country had and has, still this is the best human experience we've ever ever done.

And

I believe in the possibility of this country.

And I apply to become a citizen this year and if the country grants me I will fight for this country like I'm fighting for North Skype people.

How worried are you that we're on the wrong path?

Pretty worried.

Pretty worried.

Last summer in Chicago I was robbed by these three black young women and

bystanders on the street, like these white people on the Mission Avenue, were calling me a racist while I'm being beaten by these three black.

It was during the ruling ruling too, during the BLM protest.

And that was the first time I was judged by my skin color in my life.

I lived in China, Mongolia, South Korea, in many countries.

First time I would discriminate for my skin color was in America.

Now almost like not single color became a discrimination.

This country is regressing, right?

We know that.

It's destroying that everything that civil even movement has built.

What Martin Luther King Jr.

fought for, they are destroying that terror part.

We cannot lose hope.

You are, you are, you, I think you give a lot of people hope.

You are a remarkable individual.

The accomplishments that you have achieved, the education, I mean, you haven't hesitated on anything

that I have thrown your way.

And to think 15 years ago,

you knew nothing.

You are truly a remarkable human being, and it's an honor to talk to you.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

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