Yeonmi Park

Her older sister, Eun-mi, was born in 1991.

Her childhood was during the North Korean famine.

Park's father was a civil servant who worked at the Hyesan town hall as a member of the ruling Workers' Party of Korea who supplemented his income by smuggling goods from China.

Journalists have stated that Park's memories and descriptions of her early life are often contradictory and at odds with those of her mother, as well as descriptions of life in North Korea by other defectors, and that her story has changed depending upon the audience.

Yeonmi Park (박연미; born 4 October 1993) is a North Korean defector, YouTuber, author, and American conservative activist, described as being "one of the most famous North Korean defectors in the world".

Park was born on 4 October 1993 in Hyesan, Ryanggang, North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of Korea – DPRK); her father was Park Jin-Sik and her mother was Byeon Keum-sook.

During a speech at the Oslo Freedom Forum, Park claimed that her childhood views of the ruling Kim family changed after watching a VHS copy of the 1997 film Titanic, which caused her to realize as a teen the "oppressive nature" of the North Korean government.

She states that the movie taught her the true meaning of love and gave her "a taste of freedom".

She fled from North Korea to China in 2007 at the age of 13 before moving to South Korea, then to the United States.

Park left North Korea in 2007 when she was 13.

They escaped by crossing the border into Changbai Korean Autonomous County, Jilin, China, on the night of 30 March 2007.

Park and her mother found a Christian shelter headed by Chinese and South Korean missionaries in Qingdao.

Due to the city's large ethnic Korean population, they were able to evade the attention of authorities.

With the help of the missionaries, they fled to South Korea through Mongolia.

Park has given three separate and vastly different accounts of her father and the family's defection from North Korea, claiming that her father choose to stay behind in North Korea believing that his illness would slow them down, claiming that she defecting alongside him and buried his corpse after he died from illness during their defection, while also claiming to have left him behind in North Korea having never told him the family planned to defect.

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

Park claims that they reached the Mongolian border and that afterwards the General Authority for Border Protection guards stopped them and threatened to deport the pair back to China.

Park recalls that at this point she and her mother pledged to kill themselves with their own razors, stating, "I thought it was the end of my life. We were saying goodbye to one another."

Their actions persuaded the guards to let them through, but Park says they were placed under arrest and kept in custody at a detention center at Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia.

Park made her media debut in 2011 on the show Now On My Way to Meet You, where she was dubbed "Paris Hilton" due to her stories of her family's wealthy lifestyle.

She came to wider global attention following her speech at the 2014 One Young World Summit in Dublin, Ireland.

In 2014 The Diplomat published an investigation by journalist Mary Ann Jolley who had previously worked with Park, documenting numerous inconsistencies in Park's memories and descriptions of life in Korea.

Later in July 2023, a Washington Post investigation found there was little truth to Park's claims about life in North Korea.

Park attributed her early discrepancies to her imperfect memory and language skills, and the co-author of Park's autobiography, Maryanne Vollers, claimed that Park was the victim of a North Korean smear campaign.

Park runs the YouTube channel "Voice of North Korea by Yeonmi Park", which as of July 2023 has over one million subscribers.

Her political views have been characterized as "American conservative," and she has criticized the concepts of political correctness and woke culture in the United States, drawing parallels between political correctness in the U.S. and North Korea.

According to Park's account published in The Telegraph in 2014, after her father "bribe[d] his way out of jail", the family began to plan their escape to China, but Park's older sister Eunmi left for China early without notifying them.

The family feared that they would be punished for Eunmi's escape, so Yeonmi and her mother left North Korea by traveling through China with the help of brokers who smuggle North Koreans into China.

According to the 2014 Telegraph account, and an account published in 2015 by The Guardian, Park's father was sick and stayed behind in North Korea, thinking his illness would slow them down.

Other statements by Park in the same time frame suggested that her father had joined them in the crossing to China.

After crossing the border, Park and her mother headed for Jilin.

They unsuccessfully tried to find Park's sister, Eunmi, asking the traffickers about her whereabouts.

Park and her mother assumed that Eunmi had died.

Park's and her mother's accounts of her father's death differ.

In a third version of the story, Park claims that she and her family left their father behind in North Korea without telling him they had left.

Park's memoir In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom was published in September 2015, and as of 2023 has sold over 100,000 copies.

During the 2020s, she became a voice for American conservatism with speeches, podcasts and the 2023 publication of her second book, While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America.

The authenticity of Park's claims about life in North Korea – many of which have contradicted her earlier stories and those of both her mother and fellow defectors from North Korea – have been the subject of widespread skepticism.

Political commentators, journalists and professors of Korean studies have criticized Park's accounts of life in North Korea for having various inconsistencies, contradictory claims, and exaggerations.

Other North Korean defectors, including those from the same city as Park, have expressed concern that the tendency for "celebrity defectors" to exaggerate about life in North Korea will bring doubts on their stories.