While Time Remains - by Yeonmi Park

Published:

While Time Remains - by Yeonmi Park

Read: 2025-01-28

Recommend: 8/10

Several years ago, I listened to her presentation on TED stage. I appreciate her alternative perspective that diverges from conventional political correctness, on the societal dynamics within the United States. I concur with her critique concerning aspects of hypocrisy. Furthermore, the analogies she established between the United States and North Korea provided a novel perspective that I found intellectually stimulating.

Notes

Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:

  1. Kim regime controls the flow of information in North Korea the way drug lords control the flow of narcotics: systematically eliminating sources of competition, centralizing production, and determining distribution.

  2. It might be difficult for outsiders to grasp, but the life of an ex-offender is exponentially worse than that of an “average” North Korean. There are no reintegration programs, no case managers, no social workers, no employment assistance or opportunities for reentry like in America or Europe. The North Korean ex-con is a pariah, and his family is guilty by association. They are downgraded to the lowest caste and shunned. Their blood is tainted, and all doors to opportunity are closed: No collective farm, factory, military branch, or civil service will take them back.

  3. Looking up at the tapestry of stars, keeping my legs moving so as not to freeze, trying to help the young couple in our group keep their baby warm, I remember looking back on all that my family and I had endured up to that point—how all of it would have been meaningless unless I could find a way to give it meaning. I promised myself that night that if I made it to the other side—if I survived—I would have to find a way to give it all meaning: to Eunmi’s disappearance, to my mother’s abuse, to my father’s imprisonment and death.

  4. In that moment, I felt something inside me begin to thaw. For so many years I’d been forced to harden my emotions, to suppress my feelings, to teach myself to become numb. When I took the stage to give my short speech in front of the 1,300 delegates, guests, and media representatives, I decided not to read from the speech I’d prepared, but to open my heart instead.

  5. The only majesty, the only grandeur, the only symbolism in North Korea is reserved for the cult of a single man: the Supreme Leader. The statues are of him, the monuments are of him, the names of buildings and streets are of him, and the “ideas” or “movements” he sanctioned. Nothing and no one else is allowed to compete for attention, let alone greatness. New York City was the opposite: It was a great game board, where human beings came to compete with each other, each leaving his or her mark in the physical world.

  6. Central Park was at least a very big circle in which people could run. But I discovered that there were small businesses that specialized in providing very small, office-sized circles for people to run in—“gyms.” People would take their hard-earned cash, I learned, and spend it on running very fast in a very small space in order to deplete themselves of calories. If there was one thing I’d learned growing up, it was how to preserve energy. But these Americans were just giving it away, and not even for free—they were paying for it!

  7. I also found ideas of beauty in America to be amusing and interesting. In North Korea, to be overweight and bald with a large belly is considered attractive. In many places in the third world, in fact, obesity is a status symbol; it indicates wealth and abundance. It’s the equivalent of driving a Lamborghini down Park Avenue. But in the United States, everybody wanted to look skinny—like starving North Koreans, I thought. When I saw ads for Victoria’s Secret models, it was hard for me to understand how people could consider them beautiful. They all appeared malnourished, the only difference being that they were apparently very tall. (In North Korea, malnourishment and the attendant lack of vitamins and minerals has resulted in millions of people genetically identical to their South Korean neighbors being significantly shorter on average, by as many as three to five inches.)

  8. It was strange to notice that my new friends and colleagues living in conditions of “overabundance” also seemed to have their own versions of “trauma,” for which many of them were receiving help from a doctor licensed in therapy. It was so strange, in fact, that I figured I must be in an incredibly good place, being someone who clearly didn’t need therapy. Even if I was “traumatized,” what would be the point of having survived it only to have to pay someone else to complain to about it, rather than turn it into something positive? Some of my new American friends caught on to my incomprehension and eventually developed a sense of humor about it, later referring to their issues as “first world problems.”

  9. Not having eyes or ears for the racial tensions I’d later learn about, one thing that stood out to me instead during my early months in America was the compassion and inclusiveness that people showed toward those with disabilities. As a child in rural North Korea, I saw many people who had been exiled from Pyongyang after having suffered debilitating, irreversible injuries while working for the state. The regime shamed these people with the term “sickened-body,” and relegated them to the countryside to starve. The authorities would also regularly detain people with congenital conditions like dwarfism, put them in camps, and sterilize them to filter them out of the gene pool. In America, I noticed that sidewalks were cut to accommodate people in wheelchairs, ramps and elevators accompanied stairs in every building, and special accommodations were built into everything from restrooms to public transportation. I later learned that this was the legacy of the Americans with Disabilities Act, passed by Congress in 1990.

  10. There are many such stories throughout American history, featuring lives full of immense contradiction: misery and triumph, oppression and emancipation, failure and success, evil and good, all existing side by side, in parallel, as they do in every human heart.

  11. In reality, of course, Columbia’s “safe space” was elite code language for restrictions on ideological heterogeneity. I had imagined Columbia to be a marketplace of ideas, where students had unlimited possibilities to think differently and push the boundaries of the status quo, creating a better future. A “safe space” in this context presumably would mean a place where ideas could be expressed without fear of reprisal. 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.

  12. It was not the education I received at Columbia, or following the American press, that helped me finally break out of this habit. It was reading old books. Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy was one; George Orwell’s collected writings were another. I started to believe, as I still do now, that the only way to think for yourself is to ignore the mainstream media, and largely forget the daily news cycle, and connect instead with the great minds of the past, who know all of our problems better than we do ourselves. There is a reason why the great books of Western civilization are all banned in dictatorships.

  13. And now here I was, flying through the air for a price that could have purchased our freedom in an instant, along with that of hundreds if not thousands of other North Korean women and girls in China. And we were on our way to a conference where we were supposed to inspire each other to do amazing things with our lives! No private get-together is needed to figure out how to help people, no think tank or foundation or NGO—people with excess cash could, if they wanted, quite literally buy the freedom of their fellow human beings. But here we were, at a buffet moving 600 miles per hour at 30,000 feet in the air, lighting that cash on fire as we prepared to debate how to “do good” in the world.

  14. “Since I was a child, he taught me that I had to be like a roly-poly toy. He said, ‘Yeonmi-ya, no matter how much life pushes you down, you have to be resilient like the roly-poly doll, and always roll back up and fight again.’ ”

  15. The photographers who followed these celebrities everywhere screamed in a kind of possessed hysteria: “Please look over here, Selena!” and “Turn this way, Kim!” It reminded me of the Kim family’s periodic trips to fake towns, fake factories, and fake stores, where they would pretend to inspect fake products, issue fake instructions, demonstrate fake satisfaction, and give a fake impromptu speech, where everyone present would feign applause or laughter or tears or whatever they felt was required of them in order to avoid being executed. Some sort of similar but entirely voluntary phenomenon seemed to be taking place at the Met Gala.

  16. It was the same sequence of events everywhere I went—lots of tears, lots of embracing and hand-shaking, lots of solicitous empathy and offers to help, all followed by lots of silence. I later became aware that “Silence is violence” was a favorite political and cultural catchphrase of these elites

  17. 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.

  18. All the world’s major religions, whether Abrahamic or Eastern, polytheistic or monotheistic, agree that suffering is essential to human life, including to the good life. Buddhism in particular has this concept at its core, outlined by the Four Noble Truths: The First is that life is suffering. The Second is that the cause of suffering is desire. The Third is that the end of suffering is caused by the end of desire. The Fourth is that suffering and desire can be overcome through the Noble Eightfold Path.

  19. 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. I experienced the consequences of this process firsthand in North Korea. When the regime abolished private ownership and stole everything the people had, the result, of course, was not free and open access to the services and resources on which ordinary people depend—it was the simple theft of those resources by the supporters and enforcers of the regime. This process didn’t just enrich the regime itself, it created an elite class of mid-level officials, bureaucrats, managers, and military officers who very much enjoy the spoils of wealth, property, and inequality, while continuing to advocate for socialist revolution. (I hope this is starting to sound familiar.)

  20. I could no longer understand the UN’s purpose, or even its existence. To this day, the North Korean government retains full UN membership, meaning its vote in the General Assembly is worth the same as America’s. It has been allowed to vote on human rights resolutions and chair committees on nuclear disarmament! Since 2005, the General Assembly has adopted a resolution every year to condemn the human rights situation in North Korea, but of course this has meant exactly nothing. Not a single victim of the Kim dictatorship has ever been helped by one of these meaningless resolutions, whose only purpose is apparently to allow self-admiring diplomats and bureaucrats to congratulate each other for being so virtuous.

  21. 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.

  22. 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.

  23. HERE’S ANOTHER Milton Friedman quote I love: “A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.”

  24. The so-called economic reforms, business regulations, and tax increases that have been passed in the last several years have, from what I can tell, accrued no benefit whatsoever to people who actually depend on social services like public schools, universities, hospitals, parks, and transportation. With every new tax increase, with every new federal regulation, with every new piece of legislation, it seems that bad schools remain bad, unaffordable health care remains unaffordable, and dangerous neighborhoods remain dangerous. This suggests that the priority is never to actually improve the lives of individual people and families, but to simply increase the number of people who depend on new and existing government programs because they have nowhere else to turn. In other words, the solution to a bad hospital isn’t a good hospital, it’s two bad hospitals.

  25. This problem is, unfortunately, most evident in the cities dominated by a Democratic political machine—cities with endemic corruption and that effectively have no political opposition. Less surprisingly, it is most evident in cities with public officials who profess to in some way be socialist or anticapitalist. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, Baltimore—it never quite works out that the bluer the city hall or the bluer the mayor’s mansion, the better the schools or the lower the crime.

  26. But to the Communist Party, competence in public administration is not merely a luxury anymore—it is the means to national prosperity, and thus a strategy for survival. 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.

  27. “Hard censorship”—forcibly depriving someone of their living, or making their creative output disappear without any charge or trial or explanation—was a different matter entirely. It seemed so unthinkable to me that something like this could be possible and so routine in America that I figured I’d accidentally done something illegal, or broken a law without intending to. But only a couple of months later, when the president of the United States was kicked off Twitter and virtually every other social-media platform—even if it was for challenging the results of the election or for appearing to put the peaceful transition of power into question—I knew it probably wasn’t just me.

  28. Far from maintaining an absolutist commitment to the sanctity of freedom of expression, a large segment of American society now believes that free speech is a public and private threat. The right to not feel offended, the right to be protected from unpleasant realities and difficult ideas, the right to feel safe from people who disagree with you—these are of course not rights at all, but they have come to supplant the legal rights enshrined in the First Amendment. And because no American is actually entitled to deny any other American their First Amendment rights under the law, many have come up with an extralegal strategy for suppressing speech they don’t like: what is known as “cancel culture.”

  29. There is a term for making people second-guess every word or gesture for fear of losing their livelihoods. It’s called “dictatorship of the mind.” From its earliest days, the Kim regime understood that ordinary Koreans wouldn’t be able to contextualize or understand their bondage if they were deprived of the language required to describe it. Thus, in official North Korean, there is no word for tyranny, trauma, depression, or love—there are only synonyms for “socialist paradise.” And so millions of North Koreans might be hungry and scared, but they don’t have the vocabulary to articulate or imagine a different way of living.

  30. That’s why. Samsung has a multibillion-dollar investment in China. It was hard for me to avoid the impression that if I were to say out loud in front of their executives that, for instance, my mother and I were enslaved and raped in China, and that the Chinese authorities knew about it—indeed, that they facilitated and condoned it, and that this is happening right now to thousands of other North Korean girls in China—it might reflect badly on Samsung Semiconductor, Inc. Calling me “too political” is like YouTube determining that I’m “racist”—a way to shut down all conversation and label the things I say as beyond the pale. Regardless of the truth.

  31. HAVING SURVIVED various attempts at cancellation myself, I can attest that it is not just a fad or a silly new front in a childish culture war. With the use of modern technologies, cancel culture in America has made a significant amount of progress toward accomplishing what no democratic regime is capable of doing on its own, and what every dictatorial regime in history has mastered: making human beings with unfavorable opinions disappear with the push of a button.

  32. The difference now is that Xi has access to technology that Mao never even dreamed of: Facial recognition, AI surveillance networks, mobile and internet monitoring, and social credit systems are being deployed to turn China, once again—and like every socialist paradise—into a prison. If Chinese citizens before Xi had only some of the freedom and liberties Americans enjoy under the Bill of Rights, they now have none.

  33. The fact is, America’s China policy is not even really made by the American president anymore. It is made by the lobbying and interest groups and oligarchical classes that are dependent on the Chinese market, regardless of the effect on ordinary American workers and consumers. The only hope for countering the spread of Chinese influence is the United States, but American elites are busy dismantling the sources of American economic and military power to the benefit of the Chinese in order to enrich themselves. If this process continues, there will simply be no hope for preventing a Chinese-dominated future for the world. Having come from North Korea, it is difficult to convey how depressing this all is. The horror of North Korea is Exhibit A of what a more Chinese world would look like: more unspeakable crime, more abject human suffering, more terrifying exploitation of innocent people for the benefit of a communist party cadre. Instead of ending the North Korean nightmare, Chinese hegemony promises only to spread the North Korean experience to more people around the world.

  34. This means that one out of every three human beings in North Korea is somehow engaged in the “Korean People’s Army,” a gruesome institution reminiscent of medieval slave armies. Conscription consists of an astonishing ten years of mandatory service for all North Korean men and at least seven years for women. The living and quality-of-life conditions for people in the army are unsurprisingly horrific, and women are sometimes worked so hard that their bodies’ menstrual cycles break down and they stop having periods. Sexual assault of female soldiers is, of course, endemic.

  35. Periodic “collective mobilizations” consist essentially of hard labor, with wake-up calls at 5 a.m. and returning home around 8 p.m. The work itself is back-breaking, mostly digging in coal mines or iron refineries in rural areas. It often involves children as young as ten years old, and there is no retirement age beyond which one is no longer obligated to take part. “We are all revolutionaries,” it is said—in other words, it is a privilege to die for the regime.

  36. People often suspect that I must regret these decisions, and that I should have opted for a life of comfortable anonymity here on the great big American continent. There are certainly times when that sounds nice, but another truth is that I feel I’m living on borrowed time. I’m twenty-nine, but when I look at myself in the mirror and think back on my life so far, I feel that I must be closer to a thousand. These twenty-nine years have been packed with so much life and tumult, so much love and loss, and so many near misses and close brushes with death, that everything from here on out I consider to be a bonus. There’s a certain sadness in that, perhaps, but it’s also liberating. My father died never having spent a single moment of his life knowing what it felt like to be free. That was supposed to be my fate, too. But what he died never having tasted, I’ve been gorging on now for several years. I’m satiated. That’s why I live now only for my son, for love, and for the promotion of human rights.

  37. This is also why my encounter with therapy was relatively brief, and I currently feel no need to return to it. I have no doubt that some amount of therapy can be extraordinarily useful for certain people. But for me, it couldn’t take the place of meaning itself. When I found meaning in my life—in being a mother, and in advocating for human rights—I also found that it didn’t matter what kinds of nightmares I had, or how often I had them. No matter how much trouble I have sleeping, or how awful my dreams, I always have a reason to get out of bed in the morning, to be joyful, and most of all, to be grateful. My American friends and colleagues often speak of the importance of “taking care of yourself” and “putting yourself first,” and I don’t necessarily disagree. But it’s not enough to “do you”—it’s just as important, if not more so, to have purpose, to set an example for your children, and to devote yourself to something bigger. No amount of therapy, dieting, meditation, or “self-care” can do what meaning can do.

  38. In America, however, the people railing against their own country are often overfed, or obsessed with intentionally limiting the amount of food they eat. Often they will “speak out” against American history, society, capitalism, and democracy on an American social-media platform from their American phone or computer, or on the campus of a world-class American university, or on the street with the permission of American government authorities and the protection of American police officers. North Koreans say such things because if they don’t, they’ll be shot. Americans do it because they think it’s fun, or because they want to acquire power and influence over other people.

  39. It’s no wonder, really, that while millions of people around the world continue to face murder, starvation, rape, torture, and enslavement, many Americans who support “social justice” are primarily concerned with the infinite multiplication of ungrammatical gender pronouns and how much “range” to give chickens before they wind up in supermarkets. It’s easy to laugh at this kind of childish, nonsensical behavior

  40. 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 as Americans must fight to preserve these freedoms, because they are never more than a generation away from disappearing.

  41. So go to your city council hearings. Attend your local school board meetings. Get involved in your homeowners association. Join civic groups that convene people with common interests. Raise money to bring artists and performers from around the country to your town. Become a leader in your local house of worship, and give back to the poor and the needy. Coach your children’s sports teams. Talk to them about America and our shared history together at the dinner table. Read books to them at night. Make sure they give back to their communities. Limit your exposure to social media. Constrain your diet of talk radio and cable news. Ignore most of what happens in Washington. Become the master of your domain.

  42. Joe Rogan Experience has been the top podcast in the United States for some time. His appeal lies in being exceptionally thoughtful and curious while remaining unusually humble and open. He doesn’t pretend to know about things he doesn’t, which is why he invites others to come on the show and teach him (and his listeners). That formula sounds so intuitive and obvious that it should also be widespread, but it isn’t. Most media figures see their job as delivering prepackaged opinions to what they think of as highly gullible viewers and listeners; Rogan has more respect for his audience than that. His values are curiosity, humor, heart, and common sense. And lo and behold, the market for that kind of content is world-beating.

  43. “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)