North Korean defector Yeonmi Park shared her experience living in and escaping North Korea at a Turning Point USA event at UC–Berkeley on Dec. 5.

The activist escaped from the People’s Republic of Korea at just 13 years old and eventually moved to the United States, where she said she’s noticed some Americans taking for granted the freedoms they have and spreading propaganda comparable to that in North Korea.

“What’s happening in America is really resemblant of what was happening in North Korea,” she said in her speech. “There has been a massive brainwashing happening in America, too.”

Park talked about what it was like growing up in a dictatorship. She spoke about how isolated North Korea is and said that she never knew much about the outside world and had never even seen a world map.

“They did not even teach me that I was Asian. They said I was in my dear leader’s place,” she said. “In some sense, it was like living on a different planet.”

Having little to no food growing up, she said she never felt what it was like to be full and was never sure how much a person could eat.

“My dream [when I was] younger was having a big bucket of bread,” she said.

When Park was 13, a lady helped her and her mother escape through the heavily armed North Korean border to China but sold them as sex slaves for $20 and $5, respectively.

After being sold to another trafficker who constantly raped her for two years before setting her free, Park said she was going to kill herself.

“By this point, I thought the world was [a] variation of North Korea and China, full of darkness and full [of] suffering,” she said. “So there’s no point in continuing.”

Park said that upon being told about South Korea, she walked across a desert with her mother to get to Mongolia, and she eventually got to South Korea.

In South Korea, she read books that described the United States in a more positive way than what she was taught in North Korea. She had previously been led to believe that Americans were “big-nosed, green-eyed, cold-blooded monsters.”

“I thought, ah, there’s this country called promised land. It’s a land of opportunity,” she said. “It doesn’t matter where you come from; it doesn’t matter what ancestors you had; it doesn’t matter how you look ... as long as you’re willing to work hard and respect others.”

She moved to the United States and began attending Columbia University in 2016.

However, during her time at Columbia, Park said, she noticed some similarities between U.S. and North Korean ideologies, with some of her professors advocating socialism and abolishing the Constitution.

“My professors were saying the exact same things that my North Korean teachers were,” she said. “Saying that all the problems that we have in the world right now are because of white men and because of capitalism.”

Yeonmi Park speaks to UC Berkeley students during “The Price of Freedom” event by Turning Point USA in Berkeley, Calif., on Dec. 5, 2024. (Kerry Xue/The Epoch Times)

Park said that when her professors said that men can be women, she was thinking: “Even North Korea didn’t go this far. They would call me a woman.”

She said her American classmates took for granted the freedoms they have, such as being able to talk about anything and buy expensive goods, while telling her that life is so difficult and they are oppressed.

“What about America? Is that so oppressive? It’s so bad that you hate it so much that you would burn it to the ground, as they say,” Park said.

She said that while professors are talking about how horrible the United States is, there are 300,000 North Korean women right now in China being sold as sex slaves.

Park said she’s shared her frustrations with influential figures such as Hillary Clinton and Jeff Bezos, trying to raise awareness about human rights and slavery.

“Everybody seems [to be] denouncing slavery. Everybody seems [to be] denouncing oppression. And I told them, can you do something about it? ... Can you raise awareness about it?” she said. “Because they have business interests in China, they say, ‘Please don’t tell people that you met me and you know me.’”

Park said that many institutions in the United States are being controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.

“That’s why I’m here today as a human rights activist,” she said. “We have more than 4 billion people in the world living under dictatorships. ... I hope we can be their voice.”