One grateful American

“Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone,” sang Joni Mitchell in the environmentalist anthem “Big Yellow Taxi.”

When it comes to American liberty and prosperity, Yeonmi Park knows what we’ve got, and she knows what it will be like if we lose it. Park grew up in North Korea amid a destitution so complete that she scrounged for bugs to supplement her diet and a culture of intimidation so intense that she learned to behave as if the Dear Leader could read her mind. She then suffered sexual slavery in China before escaping to freedom in South Korea.

Now a U.S. citizen, Park’s new book While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector’s Search for Freedom in America (Threshold Editions 2023) tells about her shock at finding a powerful “social justice” movement in America that would lead this nation to become like the country of her birth.

Park’s journey led her to Columbia University, where students learned to repeat woke teachings to get good grades. She writes of speaking to elite gatherings where interest in her story quickly waned when she asked attendees to raise awareness about the horrors of North Korea and China. What she learned about America’s schools appalled her: “How did we get to the point where American children and North Korean children are being fed fairly similar propaganda about the United States?”

While Park writes with deep insights, her views are not always Biblical. She writes that it’s important to be “authentically you,” and she thinks “almost all people are truly good at heart,” which, if true, would render unnecessary any separation of powers in government. Despite her experiences on the receiving end of human depravity, she doesn’t seem to think of humans as sinners who need a Savior.

But she writes powerfully about gratitude as a key to happiness, and about how much it is missing among woke activists. They can only see America’s sins (real and imagined) but not its systemic strengths: “They don’t appreciate how fragile their freedom is, how precious their system of government, how rare their way of life.”

Yeonmi Park, however, knows. Her book is an important warning.