North Korean defector Yeon-mi Park appealed to Hong Kong’s journalists to report on human rights violations in her native country during a moving speech in Central earlier this week.
The 23-year-old, who rose to international fame after telling the harrowing tale of her escape from North Korea, was speaking at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club on Monday to promote her book, “In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom”. In her biography, Park writes of how she left North Korea as a 13-year-old, only for human traffickers in China to sell her and her mother as slaves.
During Monday’s event, Park urged the audience to “speak up against China”, in order to stop the trafficking and abuse of other defectors, and to support NGOs helping defectors and illicitly supplying information about the outside world to North Koreans. “People in North Korea, they don’t know what they deserve. They don’t know life can be […] free like this.”
“The government told me what to wear, what to sing, what to watch. It’s almost a joke now, people in North Korea get sent to prison camps for watching a movie,” she said.
Speaking of her mission to raise awareness of North Korea’s human rights crisis, Park said, “I’m here today, even though I might get killed by Kim Jong-un because I am on his target list since two years ago. […] The people in North Korea have been forgotten for 70 years. I’m not even asking for you to do something, just, let’s feed them. Why is that so hard?”
Park, whose public speaking has earned her the dubious title of “celebrity defector”, has courted controversy for apparent inconsistencies in her speeches and interviews. After current affairs magazine The Diplomat published an article raising questions over the veracity of Park’s statements, the 23-year-old responded that the “miscommunication” came from a “language barrier”, as she had only begun learning English recently.
