The Eric Metaxas Show - Yeonmi Park (Encore)

Episode Date: July 25, 2023

Yeonmi Park, author of "In Order to Live" and "While Time Remains," is in the studio to share her harrowing life story, including her dramatic escape from North Korea to another sad life in China.

Folks, welcome to the Eric Mattaxas show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit legacy p.m.investments.com. That's legacy p.m.investments.com. Welcome to the Eric Mataxis show. They say it's a thin line between love and hate, but we're working every day to thicken that line, or at least to make it a double or triple line. Now here's your line jumping host, Eric Mattaxas.

Hey, it folks. Welcome to the Airquem Taxi Show. I'm not here. Chris, I'm not here. It seems like you're here. Well, it seems like I'm here now, but when we air this, I will not be here. I will be away far, far away. I'm going to Ultima Thule.

Do you know where that is? Because I don't, but the captain of the ship knows, and he's taking us to Ultimathul. Wow. Sounds like you made up that name. Is it a real place? I think it's mythical. Yeah. But anyway, no, but we thought we would pre-record

a segment which that's this segment right now because people write us letters and things and I thought some of which we can share some of which we can share so I wanted to read this one uh someone wrote uh well we've got a few here yeah that are kind of cool and so I thought let me let me read them so this one says uh this is from Tori um it's uh well it says hello Eric I read your biography of of Dietrich Bonhoeffer a few years back. It may be one of the most impactful books I've read, and you are in serious company among Thomas Sol, Wendell Berry, and of course, Dostoevsky.

Of course, Dostoevsky. Who wouldn't compare me in my writings to Dostoevsky? But seriously, I read something like this, and I just say, you know, because I joke around and I try to be light, but that really means a lot to me that somebody would read my Bonhofer book and put it in that's high cotton.

For context, this person writes, Tori writes, I was raised in a small town of mostly German Americans in Wisconsin and my high school managed to avoid studying World War II during history classes. Now that is interesting because the shame, it's why I wrote the Bonhofer book. As a German, your shame

for the Holocaust for what happened, and you're trying to process that. And so in a sense, I wrote my book to help Germans and others understand that there were many good Germans. I was going to title the book, actually, The Good German. Because I thought to myself,

nobody really talks about the fact that there were Germans like Bonhofer who stood up in the face of evil, who spoke out for the Jews. It really, I felt it was a story that needed to be told, and that's why I wrote. it, but it's interesting that Tori writes that, you know, growing up in Wisconsin,

among so many German Americans, they didn't even study World War II. She writes, even in the 70s, 1970s, the subject was too raw. In the past few years, I felt a profound sense that Bonhofer's story was pressing on us, on our culture. It felt as if you wrote letter to the American Church, that's the new book, in response to my own yearning. Thank you, and may the peace and power of God's presence be with you always, Tori. So we get a lot of letters, and we don't get to read all of them.

But it just means a lot to me. And I do think that I want to say that letter to the American church, I probably said this before, but when I was writing the Bonhofer book, this is amazing. It's 2008. I had no clue what I would discover. So as I'm writing the story of what happened to Germany, I'm kind of like smelling the future. Like I'm thinking this, I feel like this could happen in America. Because the church during his time, they didn't really respond in a...

Well, they didn't understand what was happening, and therefore they didn't do what could have been done to change things. Right, right. So I kind of felt like I could sort of see this happening in America, and I felt it a little bit when I was writing the book, but in recent years, it's become really clear to me that, oh, yeah, that's exactly what is happening now. People want to know how evil took over in Germany

was because of the silence of the German church. And often it was the German church good people who felt like the smart thing to do is to be silent. And they were wrong, but it doesn't mean that they were evil, but they were complicit with evil. At the end of the day, they were very, very wrong. At the end of the day, they were complicit if they didn't repent. And so I wrote a letter to the American church, kind of like what this woman, Tori, is saying, that it's a – you could feel that the Bonhofer story, was becoming our story in America.

And so I just felt, I talked about on the Jordan Peterson podcast and in many other places, I've never, ever, ever felt God calling me to write a book. Now, to some people that sounds loony, I, you know, I don't know what to tell you, but it does feel to me like I had never felt, I had never felt that feeling before that I've got to write this in obedience to God, because this is happening now and I need to write this and I need to reach the Christians and the Christian leaders that are capable of being reached. Some are not. Some have just somehow tuned this out permanently.

They're doing their own thing. Yeah. We also get a letter which is asking a question. So I'm going to read this if we have the time. This is about the concept of women pastors. It says, Eric, recently the Southern Baptist Convention removed Saddleback Church from fellowship because Rick Warren ordained a woman pastor. Next year, the SBC Convention will move to exclude from fellowship

all Southern Baptist churches that have women pastors. They're using the scripture 1st Timothy Chapter 3 to say that being a pastor is limited to men. It seems to me that God can call whomever to do anything. Paul wrote Timothy within the context of a patriarchal society. What's your position on this issue? Thank you. and I think the name of the person who wrote this is Ivan.

Well, this is a complicated one for me. I don't know what I think about this. I don't have really, really firm views on this subject. When somebody says it seems to me that God can call whomever to do anything, that's really vague. I don't know what that means. You know, God cannot call a man to give birth. There are certain fixities in what we call reality.

so to say that God can call someone to do anything, it's just too vague for me. I don't know what that means. Whether women can be ordained as pastors, I speak at churches where they have the husband and his wife or pastors, so-and-so and so-and-so, and I don't have a particular problem with that, but what I find interesting is the idea where people get upset when somebody does have a view on it,

and they just say, well, that's not right. Like, you should, you should, in other words, if the Southern Baptist Convention has a fixed view on this, you don't need to be a member of the Southern Baptist Convention. But if you want to be a member of the Southern Baptist Convention, you have to go along with their rules and don't be shocked if they say, if you break our rules, you can no longer be a part of the club, because those are the rules of the club. And it's the same thing with the Catholic Church.

You know, you've got people angry about Catholic time. It's like, look, the doctrine is the doctrine. and if you don't like it, you don't have to be a member of that that denomination. So I'm always, because I don't know what I think about this. I mean, I feel like I can see both sides of it. And so I've never really been clear on it. It's not a deal breaker for me.

And I think it all depends on what one means by being a pastor, because obviously women can do ministry. And so what are the limits of that? and how does that work? I don't know. I think some of these churches are just leaning woke. And this is what I talk about in letter to the American church. And so they're using this thing of ordaining women as an excuse to kind of kick out of the Southern Baptist Convention.

But I just think that this church elevate, which is a huge church in Charlotte, I think they're basically going woke. These evangelical churches are leaning woke or they're being silent in the face of evil. They're trying to be hip, trying to go. with the crowd, trying to go with the culture. That's the deeper issue, and they're using the women's ordainment, you know, as an excuse. But the reality is that they kind of want to do their own thing. And I'm not cool with that, man. Dig. Thanks for listening.

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I've told you a little bit about her story, but in case you're just tuning in, she escaped from North Korea. You don't need to say much more than that. I don't think. Yomi Park, welcome to the program. Thank you for having me. It's an amazing thing that this headline that you've escaped from North Korea, you don't really need to say much more than that because this tells its own story. But I think, let's start here, because we were just touching on it a moment ago before the cameras turned on here, that I think in America, and I spoke to about this at Socrates and City the other day, because my mother and father grew up in Europe during the war, because they experienced hunger and danger and tyranny and communism, they helped me to understand those things a little bit. And I said, and I always say, your average American has been so blessed that things like evil and tyranny, they don't seem real.

And so it's important that anyone who's experienced those things talk about those things because those things are real. And in many ways, that's exactly what you have been doing, because you have experienced the darkest evil. on planet Earth today, I think, is North Korea. And so I want you to tell your story and we'll explore. But I think that's at the heart of it, is that you are a witness to evil. And we don't have many of those in America right now, as you've been noticing since you've been here. Yeah, I think it's like, you know, fish in the water to not notice the water, right? Americans were born into freedom.

They have no idea what it means to live life with Africa. them. Thankfully, or not sadly, that pandemic was a great, I think, waking up moment for American people, that they realized a tyranny of big government and how powerless the individuals are in a big country like this. Yeah, for the first time, including myself, I said, I have never in my life seen anything like this. I never, I mean, most people didn't care who's the governor, who's the mayor. And then suddenly with the pandemic, it was shocking. the power that government have, especially what I will call rogue government. In other words, when they overstep their power and that you find even then it's almost

impossible to do anything about it. So this was really the first taste. But I think, and I think that's where you're going with this, that this was a blessing to America to wake some people up. Yeah. I think it was something needed kind of shock to us, that what any government is capable of, It's not... Come closer to the mic because we want to hear every syllable.

Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah, so I think even American government can be capable of becoming like a North Korean government. I mean, the pandemic solution was literally copying CCP's policy. Say that again? What America did was copying China. Oh, the CCP? Yes. Oh, I mean, you're not saying this metaphorically.

I mean, this is exactly what happened. We said to the WHO and to the communist. Chinese, hey, how should we deal with the pandemic? This is naivete. In other words, I know when you say this, you're aware of the true character of the Chinese communist. No one is more aware than you of the evil nature of the Chinese communists. So it must have been difficult for you to see America respond so foolishly and to allow our enemies, the enemy of freedom in the world, to have the upper hand in helping us figure out what's going on? Yeah, I mean, it was shocking to me that Chinese Communist Party, they are a genocidal government. This is a Communist Party that does not

respect human rights. The only thing they care about is their own survivor. However, they were leading the example of how to deal with the pandemic, and America was copying them. I think that's when I was really concerned that how we were like lacking a leadership in America. Well, just so people understand why you have the authority to say the things you say, you made very clear at Socrates and City and in your books, which I want to talk about, that it is only because of the Chinese communist government that the evil of North Korea is allowed to exist. If not for the Chinese government, the evil, and folks I'm not using the word lightly, the satanic evil,

the enslavement of literally 25 million people is only possible because of the Chinese government. So let's talk about both of those things. First of all, let's talk about the evil. tell us a little briefly growing up in North Korea because most people know nothing of what it is to live in what is really a slave state. Yeah, it's a, it's when I often say what North Korea is, like you can, it's more isolated than even other planets so far. You know, we know that literature about North Korea.

It's completely isolated nation. by their own choice, by the leaders in the country, they chose to isolate people. And when I was growing up in North Korea, I had no clue that I was even oppressed. Because the oppression, the vocabulary, was not part of the world that we were allowed to know. The regime controlled us to the point.

They decided what words we can know and what words we cannot know. I see when you say this, it sounds made up. I mean, it sounds like most Americans in high school read 1984 by George Warwell, and you think, oh, this is a dystopian novel, it's a crazy idea. But the fact is, ladies and gentlemen, the fact is that Yonmi lived this. You're not exaggerating. This is true. And while we're sitting here now, it's happening now. Yeah. People don't even know the word love in North Korea.

Again, it sounds like you're making it up. You mean this literally. Yeah. It's the only love, though, we a lot to know is like our love. love towards a dear leader. The dear leader, Kim Jong-moon. Not about like another human being. I tell you, it's silence sometimes is the only response I have to some things you're saying because it's so difficult. We know communism is evil. We know big state authoritarianism is evil.

But it has never been more perfectly accomplished than in the state. in the nation of North Korea, it has never been, there has never been a place in the world so perfectly isolated where the people are enslaved not only physically but mentally and emotionally. Yeah. It's a North Korea has two, they match two types of dictatorship. One is physical dictatorship, and that's a lot of countries try, right? Like even Soviet Union in China, the people are not allowed to move different states.

They don't have freedom of speech. They don't have a freedom of movement. and I have a freedom of religion. The second thing called North Korea coined this term like emotional dictatorship. Nazi Germany had the dictatorship of the mind where you literally

insulate people in their minds and that's a lot of powerful dictatorship and just physical dictatorship. And therefore, when I was living in North Korea, I was even afraid to think because I believed that the dictators could read my mind.

See, this is, we can call it brainwash. and this is so evil. It's just difficult for us. It's why I repeated over and over for people to understand how evil this is. And I mean, it's one thing if you hear a story of some woman is kidnapped, and for some time someone is torturing her or abusing her

or keeping her from ever seeing the outside world, every one of us would say, this is a nightmare. This is what you have described, an entire nation in the world today of 25 million people now. For almost 80 years, now it's been continuing, and it will probably continue if the world should do nothing about it. Well, I want to talk about your story. You grew up in this world. You talk about being literally hungry. And again, when people say hungry, we always say, oh, I'm hungry.

You know that many millions of North Koreans were forcibly starved to death. We are talking about starvation death like in the Ukraine under Stalin. And you and your family were able to survive. But talk about eating bugs and leaves to survive, to put something in your stomach. That's how I survive, you know, eating grasshoppers and dragonflies and eating plants and flowers. But I think I'm a mother myself and thinking about it, North Korea. The regime does not accept formula as aid. Even the international community begging to give the regime formula medical supplies to people,

they say no to the aid because they want us to be starving. They want us to be powerless. and if the mother were so malnourished and cannot make the breast milk and child dies. And for us, that was a norm. Like, we did not know what stroller was or formula was. We'll be back. Long conversation by God's grace with Yomi Park. We'll be right back.

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Enter promo code Eric or call 800 978-3057. 800-978 3057 for this incredible offer. These won't last long. So please order now. Welcome back. I'm talking to Yomi Park, who's the author now at the tender age of 29. of two books. The first one, Yon Me, is your story. It's called In Order to Live a North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom. Of course, I've read it and we discussed it at Socrates in the

city, but I have said many times, and I will continue to say over and over and over and over, that every young American must read this book. It will change America. If ever young American will read your book because this is true. This is not fiction. You lived this. And most Americans cannot comprehend the suffering you and your family went through. So let's talk a little bit more about that. You were literally starving and you were forced to find bugs. It's not just that you ate bugs. You had to go look for bugs or leaves or anything to put in your stomach. How old were you when this happened? I mean, my mom said I ate cockroach even when I was like one. And this was permitted by your family because this was food. So it was like not to the cockroach

to my parents, but they were okay because other kids were eating it. So even when I was growing up, like even five or six, I remember the boys in our neighbor, they would like, you. They would like, you know, catch a cockroach and open up, and inside there it looks like a little grain looking brown kind of green things inside the cockroach, and they said, oh, this is the most delicious part, and they would give it to me. And that's the thing we don't have a snack. We don't have food. And what we could find was rats and cockroaches.

Yeah, this is not just kids having fun because kids do crazy things everywhere, but we're talking about survival. Yeah, because that's the only thing we were allowed to eat. But you talk about going with your sister into the woods to look for insects, to look for leaves to eat. Yeah. It would say it's like a daily life for North Korean people. So for me, it's like, why is this like amusing to you, you know? It's like that's not at all amusing. It's horrifying.

But it's the point is most people would think, oh, you would do this for fun. You would do this because kids do crazy things. but this was literally how you survived as a little girl. Yeah, so when we cook something, we find a little bit of grain, and then we need to amplify the portion, right? Because not everybody able to eat a solid food. So we add enough water into a little grain, and then we got to find enough plants to mix it around,

tree barks to mix it around. So that scavenger job was my job or my sister's job, and my parents would try to find that grain outside, and we had to go look for those subsidizing food. Subsidizing food. So this is, yeah, we would call this scavenging, genuine scavenging, for almost anything to put in your stomach. Yeah.

You talk about many difficult things. There was, again, most of the, of this is incomprehensible to Americans, but when we're talking about a system of total state control, not sort of total state control, any kind of capitalism, trade is illegal. Everything must come from the state. Not most things. Everything is controlled by the dictator and the state. So even to trade or to have a little business is completely illegal and punishable by horrible things. Yeah, killing death. I mean, political prison camps or prison camps. The word profit is banned in North Korea because profit is not a good thing. Okay, so some people are going to be

thinking, what does that mean a word is banned? So what happens? If you use the word like that, what happens? Commoners don't know the word. They don't even know the word. Yeah. So when some foreigners visit North Korea, they tell them, like, don't use the word profit. And So commoners don't even know. That's not even our diction. We don't even talk about profits. But when you talk about, I mean, there are many things that are banned, but you talk what makes it a dictatorship of the mind.

And again, this is so dark, it's difficult for people to process this. But that if you said the wrong thing, your neighbors or your own family will report on you, that this was constant monitoring of everything. every single thing you're saying or doing by people who feel they're loyal to the regime and they must report on you. So whatever comes out of your mouth, including things you're thinking, you're afraid to think things. Yeah. Because what would happen?

In other words, your neighbor would say Yon Mi or Yonmi's mother said this. How does that work? So, I mean, that's the thing. The first thing my mom taught me as a young girl is like, don't even whisper because the birds and mice could hear me. And we were even afraid to be heard by a little buck Because we say that even though this like normal wall has ears The spies were everywhere And even in family the teachers tell you that if you see something that is wrong

You need to report on parents So there's no trust between people including the family members And if you say the one wrong thing of course is not killed up to eight generations of your family. Say that again. If you say one wrong thing, it will affect eight generations of your family.

Yeah, it's like three to eight generations. In other words, they will punish, if your grandfather did something wrong, and you explain this in the book, they will punish your parents and you and your children for what your grandparents did. That's how, deeply sick and controlling they are. I'm talking to Yonmi Park. It's spelled Y-E-O-N-I-M-I-I-M-I-I-M-I-Rq. We'll be right back.

Folks, I'm talking to Yon-Me Park about her life story. The main story is told in the book, In Order to Live a North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom. There's a new book, Wild Time Remains. We'll be talking about that for sure. But just to get back to your story, the fear of saying the wrong thing, the fear, I guess you learn to live with that. You learn to control your thoughts, you control your words. But you said that one time your father, you describe your father in here. Of course, he dies, and it's one of the most moving things in the book. But your father,

and you inherited this from him was very bright, very entrepreneurial, creative thinking, which is not good if you're living in a place like North Korea. In a way, he was able to use this to his advantage to help the family a little bit.

Yeah. Talk a little bit about that. Yeah, so I was born in 1993, and that's when after Soviet Union collapsed. So when, until Soviet Union, collapse, North Korea was doing relatively okay because they were getting heavy subsidy from Soviet Union.

Once they go collapse and they stopped subsidizing North Korea's economy, and that's when millions of dying from starvation. And the regime just decided not to feed people. Not to feed people. Yeah. We have to, again, I know people are annoyed because I'm interrupting,

but I have to just process what you're saying. Millions of people were starving. And dying. Millions of people. of people were starving and dying. So while I'm going about my life in the United States, millions of people are targeted by the regime. They're going to die. We know they're going to die. We don't care. They're going to die. We're glad they're going to die. We're less mouths to

feed. So you grew up at that time in the 90s as a little girl. And you say in the book that your father and others, they found creative ways. And in some ways, because of you could bribe people, it was possible to work around this a little bit, to find ways to get food. Yeah. So North Korea is one of the most corrupt countries in the world. It's very unassuming.

Like, the law is so strict. But that's the thing when you live in a totalitarian government, the officials who are with power, they become unbelievably corrupt. So the people like my father realized that, I mean, if the regime decided not to feed us, how do we learn?

I mean, what do we eat? So they're like, okay, we got to engage in black market trading. We need to sell something and they make a little margin on it. So imagine you buy a fish from Fishtown and then you go to inner lands and then you get a margin on top

a little bit of that and selling the black market. Right? So they started doing that work, and that's how my father fed us through selling dried fish, grains, clocks, clothes, and later metals like copper and silver. Okay, so this was totally illegal, but because the officials were so corrupt, they would get a piece of the action. They would get a bribe, and they made this happen. and when things got very desperate, your father, who just sounds like he was an amazing man, he took dramatic risks and he started trading in metal, which became very, very dangerous, but he was desperate.

Yeah, that was kind of the only way he could feed us, provide for his family. And so you described this, that this is so daring and this is why we have to figure out how to make a movie of your story because it's so extraordinary on every level. But he used

talk about the railway car that he used. Right. So North Korea has a railway system but from one country across another country in South Korea takes like two hours and a half. In North Korea it takes a month because electricity runs out.

A lot of times people have to push the train to move the train. Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, we're not making this up. It is so broken that people literally, in many cases, push the train along the tracks. But this was your father realized. This is high-stakes drama that he can smuggle some metals in the train car belonging to.

to the dictator? Yes, that the one cargo, each train needs to dedicate it to the regime that needs to carry the goods from other provinces, take it to capital. Pyongyang. Yes, to Pyongyang. Where the dictator lives?

Where the dictator lives. And that train cargo, usually even normal police cannot go in and search because of the virus, something they might carry, no people can access that train. So he bribed the guards who were in charge of that cargo

and put a metal inside. Your father bribed the guards in charge of the dictator's train car so that he could smuggle things. I mean, this is so daring, it's unbelievable. Yeah. But he was desperate. Because that was, he took a lot of risk. He knew he was taking that risk.

So eventually he was, caught and taken to where? I heard that he was sent to a, so before they sentenced you, they need to investigate you. And that's where muscle beating and torture begins. So he was sent to a in Pyongyang where the Investigation Center. And I heard that he was so tortured and he got swollen like a balloon. And later he got malnutrition where he lost every hair on his head. And so from that point, I didn't get to hear from him.

And in North Korea, we don't have the working phone calls or mail or writing letter to anybody. And of course, prisoners don't even get that right. Normal people cannot even write a letter to the other person. Nothing works. There's no post office that's that working in the country. Like, nothing works. So we're just hoping that he was alive. Well, most Americans are not familiar with torture

and anybody familiar with Nazi Germany or many of these dark regimes. It's tough for us to comprehend what other human beings suffer. But this is what your father suffered. When we come back, we're talking to Yomi Park. We'll continue the conversation. Yomi, how old were you when your father disappeared when he was taken away?

Between eight and nine. So you remember this, I think, vividly. I do. You do? Yeah. You spoke the other day of witnessing public executions. You were younger, I think, when you witnessed that. I saw multiple.

So when I was really young, I don't remember. My mom said she was like piggybacked me in the back of her, and that's how I saw it. But too little. But later, when I was aware of what was happening, that's what I remember. So you saw many public executions, and the public executions were hangings? Shooting. The one that I saw was with bullets. Yeah.

And this was the mother of your friend. And your friend was with you watching her mother be killed. Yeah. So this is life in North Korea. So when you decided somehow to leave North Korea, and this is really the beginning of many more terrible things, but how old were you at that point? I was 13 years old. 13? Yeah.

You happened to live on the border near the border with China. So you had some awareness that there's a place beyond this border. What did you know about what's beyond the border? So it was very easy. I was living in the border town of North Korea. And at nighttime, I was able to see the electricity lights coming from that side. and that's when we just got a clue. Maybe if we go to China, they might have some food for us.

It was that simple. It was that simple. You're not thinking about freedom. You're thinking about food. I mean, we don't even know the world of freedom that time. We don't even know the concept of freedom. Right. So it was just simply searching for a bottle of rice.

So there's much more, which is in your book, in order to live, which I fully demand everyone listening to this program, buy a copy and pay your children, your spoiled American children to read the book. So when you're 13, your sister, who's a little bit older than you, somehow gets the idea to escape. She escaped. So she and I was going to escape together, but I got horribly sick. So I was hospitalized.

I forgot about this. Tell us this story. What happened to you? So one day, when we were preparing escaping together, walking down, stuff. there's like a horrible stomach ache. So they had to take me to the hospital. And of course in North Carolina, we don't have like emergency cars. You know, we don't have the phones.

How do you even die? You don't have ambulances. You don't have phones. Yes. So my parents just like piggybacked me and walked to the hospital. And a lot of children died that way. Now your father was with you at this time. He was, he got out from prison for sick leave.

So which is like sick leave means he bribed the guards again. And if he wants to recover. However, he had to go back to prison to serve the term. Okay, and I don't want to skip over this. We just have a minute left in this hour. But when your father came home on sick leave from where he was, he was a changed man. Yeah. Because of the torture and the horrors that he had suffered.

And how did you process that? Were you able to process that? What happened to him? I think 1984 by Georgia Ova, that Winston. Whenever I read that book, I see my father in him. You know, it's a, it's not his fault. They broke into his soul and he forever changed afterwards. Yeah, it's when Winston, when they, when Winston Smith says,

I love Big Brother. It's very, very bleak. Well, the book is In Order to Live, a North Korean girl's journey to freedom, mandatory reading.