Yeonmi Park (
Korean: 박연미; born 4 October 1993) is a
North Korean defector and activist whose family fled from North Korea to China in 2007 and settled in South Korea in 2009, before moving to the United States in 2014. Her family turned to black-market trading during the
North Korean famine in the 1990s.
[2] She alleges that her father was sent to a
labor camp for smuggling
[3] before the family travelled to China, where Park and her mother fell into the hands of human traffickers and she was sold into slavery before escaping to
Mongolia.
[4] Park came to wider global attention following her speech at the 2014 One Young World Summit in
Dublin,
Ireland.
[5][6] Her speech, about her experience escaping from
North Korea, received 50 million views in two days on YouTube and social media, with a current total of more than 100 million.
[7] Park's memoir
In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom was published in September 2015.
[8]