Just another example of the breakdown of civil society in major U.S. cities:
Park, 27, recalled the incident in a new interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, which tackled her experiences as a child in North Korea and as a defector in the U.S. She said it occurred during lootings across the city last summer. Park was out with her baby and a nanny when three Black women allegedly robbed her near Saks Fifth Avenue on Michigan Avenue.
The suspects tried to flee but she managed to grab the woman who took her wallet. Park held onto the woman and attempted to call the police. At this point, the woman allegedly started accusing her of racism and punching her in the chest. “You’re a racist! The color of my skin doesn’t make me a thief,” she recalled the woman as saying. The situation became more difficult for Park as bystanders — whom she identified as white people — gathered around the scene and allegedly prevented her from phoning law enforcement. She said they also let the suspects go.
Yahoo News
You can read more at the link, but police through video and tracking the spending on Park’s stolen credit cards was able to arrest a suspect.
Yeonmi Park has an interesting take on her time at Columbia University:
One of several hundred North Korean defectors settled in the United States, Park, 27, transferred to Columbia University from a South Korean university in 2016 and was deeply disturbed by what she found.
“I expected that I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy, to learn how to think. But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think,” Park said in an interview with Fox News. “I realized, wow, this is insane. I thought America was different but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying.”
Those similarities include anti-Western sentiment, collective guilt and suffocating political correctness.
Yeonmi saw red flags immediately upon arriving at the school.
During orientation, she was scolded by a university staff member for admitting she enjoyed classic literature such as Jane Austen.
“I said ‘I love those books.’ I thought it was a good thing,” recalled Park.
“Then she said, ‘Did you know those writers had a colonial mindset? They were racists and bigots and are subconsciously brainwashing you.’”
It only got worse from there as Yeonmi realized that every one of her classes at the Ivy League school was infected with what she saw as anti-American propaganda, reminiscent to the sort she had grown up with. (…….)
“Even North Korea is not this nuts,” she admitted. “North Korea was pretty crazy, but not this crazy.”
Fox News via a reader tip
Here is how she wraps up the article:
“North Koreans, we don’t have Internet, we don’t have access to any of these great thinkers, we don’t know anything. But here, while having everything, people choose to be brainwashed. And they deny it.”
Having come to America with high hopes and expectations, Yeonmi expressed her disappointment.
“You guys have lost common sense to degree that I as a North Korean cannot even comprehend,” she said.
“Where are we going from here?” she wondered. “There’s no rule of law, no morality, nothing is good or bad anymore, it’s complete chaos.”
“I guess that’s what they want, to destroy every single thing and rebuild into a Communist paradise.”
A pretty interesting perspective on the direction of America from Yeonmi Park.
Legitimizing and praising a dictator does not give us a real and permanent peace. It’s a delusional and fake peace that Trump wants us to believe. We must hold North Korea’s murderous Kim dictator accountable. We must fight for a world where justice… https://t.co/S44Xcp3Jvq
— Yeonmi Park (박연미) (@YeonmiParkNK) June 21, 2018
— Yeonmi, Park. ( 박연미) (@YeonmiParkNK) March 23, 2017
Yeonmi Park who is a well known North Korean human rights activist has recently just published a book about her experiences growing up in North Korea titled In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom
One of the main problems in North Korea was a fertiliser shortage. When the economy collapsed in the 1990s the Soviet Union stopped sending fertiliser to us, and our own factories stopped producing it. This led to crop failures that made the famine even worse.
So the government came up with a campaign to fill the fertiliser gap with a local and renewable source: human and animal waste. Every worker and schoolchild had a quota to fill. You can imagine what kind of problems this created for our families. Every member of the household had a daily assignment, so when we got up in the morning, it was like a war.
My aunts were the most competitive. ‘Remember not to poop in school,’ my aunt in Kowon told me every day. ‘Wait to do it here.’ Whenever my aunt in Songnam-ri travelled away from home and had to poop somewhere else, she loudly complained that she didn’t have a plastic bag with her to save it.
‘Next time I’ll remember,’ she would say. Some people would lock up their outhouses to keep the poop thieves away. At school the teachers would send us out into the streets to find dog mess and carry it back to class. This is not something you see every day in the West. [The Telegraph]
The whole article is worth a read.
It looks like the North Korean defector Yeonmi Park who has made international headlines about her defection from the country has been exaggerating some of the tales she has been telling:
You’d have to have been inhuman not to be moved. But – and you’re going to hear a lot of “buts” – was the story she told of her life in North Korea accurate? The more speeches and interviews I read, watch and hear Park give, the more I become aware of serious inconsistencies in her story that suggest it wasn’t. Whether this matters is up to the reader to decide, but my concern is if someone with such a high profile twists their story to fit the narrative we have come to expect from North Korean defectors, our perspective of the country could become dangerously skewed. We need to have a full and truthful picture of life in North Korea if we are to help those living under its abysmally cruel regime and those who try to flee.
“Celebrity Defector”
I met Yeonmi Park a few months ago when I spent two weeks filming a story about her and her family for Australia’s SBS Dateline. We called the story, “Celebrity Defector.”
Back in South Korea where she now lives, Park is one of the stars of a television program featuring a cast of North Korean women. It’s called “Now On My Way To Meet You” and it daringly satirizes the Kim Dynasty. The women tell personal anecdotes about their lives in North Korea and their journey to the south. A number of the women were introduced to us as having been homeless and starving – the reason they fled.
Buried in the shows archives are some snapshots of Park’s childhood in North Korea that explain why she’s known on the show as the Paris Hilton of North Korea. They’re in sharp contrast to the story she’s now telling her international audience. [The Diplomat]
You can read the rest at the link, but it is a very convincing case that Park has exaggerated circumstances of her defection to possibly help raise awareness and funding for the North Korean human rights organizations she has been working with.
Here is Yeonmi Park’s response to this article:
I want to thank Mary Ann Jolley for caring so much about the terrible situation in North Korea that she would point out any inconsistencies in my quotes and how my story has been reported. Much of the time, there was miscommunication because of a language barrier. I have only learned English in the last year or so, and I’m trying hard to improve every day to be a better advocate for my people. I apologize for any misunderstandings. For example, I never said that I saw executions in Hyesan. My friends’ mother was executed in a small city in central North Korea where my mother still has relatives (which is why I don’t want to name it). And there are mountains you can even see on Google Earth – maybe you call them big hills in English – outside of Hyesan that we crossed to escape. There are many more examples like this.
But one very important thing to correct: I do not have a foundation. The website was a dummy site built by a friend, and it was not supposed to be live. There was no way it could accept money, and I haven’t taken any. I am so sorry for the confusion. The site has been taken down.
Also, I apologize that there have been times when my childhood memories were not perfect, like how long my father was sentenced to prison. Now I am checking with my mom and others to correct everything. I am also writing a book about my life in North Korea, my escape through China and and my work to promote human rights. It is where I will be able to tell my full story.
In the meantime, I thank you all for your patience and kindness to me.
I think most of the inconsistencies are pretty minor that could be explained by poor memory and English language skills other than the story of her mother being raped. If that is not true then that is a flat out lie. The organizations that promote defector testimony like this need to be very careful to not have defectors exaggerate or lie because this just plays into the hands of the Kim regime and its apologists. The truth about North Korea is bad enough, there is no need to lie about it.
