North Korea Banned the Word for Famine. Yeonmi Park Still Says It.

Lex Fridman opens with a phrase that sounds almost noble until you learn what it hides. From 1994 to 1998, after Kim Il-sung died and Kim Jong-il took over, North Korea went through a famine in which somewhere between 600,000 and three million people starved. The propaganda machine called it the arduous march, or the march of suffering, and banned words such as famine and hunger because they implied government failure. In 2021, Fridman notes, Kim Jong-un is again telling the country to prepare for another arduous march as the borders close.

The numbers, Fridman says, stay foggy because the dying happened in silence, with almost no information in or out. People survived without electricity, clean water, medical supplies, or sanitation, always on the brink of death; during the 1990s famine, many were driven to cannibalism. He thinks of his grandmother, who survived the Holodomor, the famine Stalin created in Ukraine, where four to ten million people died. He is not sure where to draw the line between good and evil, but he hates men who, in the name of power, will starve children.

Yeonmi Park was born into that country, in the north, to a father in the party and a mother who was a housewife, with one older sister. She did not think she lived in an unusual place. She believed she was in the best country on earth, a socialist paradise, and that the rest of the world worshipped her leader. Looking back, she says the feeling was love more than fear: “For me, it was pure love.” Not knowing the alternative helped her stay sane. North Korea, she notes, is the only country in the twenty-first century with no internet; people do not even know the internet exists, and twenty-four-hour electricity is a luxury. School pride in the greatest nation never quite made her happy. Real happiness, she says, came from laughing with family and friends.

When Park thinks of North Korea, the first thing that comes back is the absence of color. Most of the land was unpaved; trees had been cut down for cooking fuel; even the clothes had no color. There was no word for fashion. It was not in the dictionary. She did not know what a model was, and Victoria’s Secret was a concept from another planet. Asked to describe daily life, she used to blame her English. Then she realized the problem was not vocabulary. Common sense itself was missing: people did not know the concepts of romantic love, human rights, or liberty. She grew up never seeing a map of the world and never knowing she was Asian. The regime told her she was of Kim Il-sung’s race. The calendar did not begin with the birth of Christ; it began with Kim’s birth. History, as she was taught it, started there.

She now talks about that childhood as a past life. After a years-long journey she arrived in South Korea and was told that the Kims were dictators, that Americans were not bastards, and that everything she had believed was propaganda. She was fifteen. The question that followed was brutal: if everything I believed was a lie, how do I know what you are telling me is not a lie? A few years later, in a library, she picked up Animal Farm because it was short. The last chapter, where the animals can no longer tell the pigs from the humans, made her own country suddenly make sense.

Fridman has always felt a kinship with Boxer, the horse who works himself to death for the farm and is sent to the slaughterhouse when he is no longer useful. Park’s anger moved in a different direction. Until the last page she wanted revenge on a dictator. Then she saw that everyone had helped build the dystopia: the animals who watched the first execution, felt fear, and stopped asking questions. Her grandmother had known life could be different and stayed silent. North Koreans, she says, are unusual because many do not know they are oppressed; they have no alternative to compare. The people who knew and were too afraid to speak, and the people who never even knew it could be better: she still does not know which is more terrifying about human nature.

Fridman notices that Park seems calm in public and asks whether, in private, she is angry, afraid, or depressed. She almost laughs. She talks about North Korea every day. She still helps rescue people from China, Russia, and elsewhere; some missions fail, and people are captured and sent back. She still has sources inside the country. Her sister chose not to live this activist life and has forgotten most of it. Park remembers everything. Sometimes that is a blessing, because happiness is relative and the contrast keeps her grateful. She still has days she cannot get out of bed. If Elon Musk’s talk of downloading a brain ever became real, she would, on some days, erase the memories. Her mother would do it a hundred percent. Her sister would. Almost every defector she knows would. She hesitates because she is a witness: if she deletes that part, how real was it? After an intense speech she can be depressed for three weeks.

Fridman brings up Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning: even in starvation, a scrap of bread can be joy, and suffering can sharpen both happiness and empathy. “Love requires hardship,” he says. “I don’t know why that is.” Park’s own education in being human came on the road out. Romantic love was forbidden, along with Shakespeare and love stories; the regime also starved the love between mother and daughter, husband and wife, friend and friend. The only love she was allowed to name was love for the leader. She now thinks people live in order to love, and that it does not have to be romantic. The regime, she and Fridman agree, wanted that deep human current pointed at one man.

Language was the tool. She cites Orwell’s doublethink: who controls language controls thought. Words were eliminated until one official word could stand in for ten meanings. In San Francisco a man hugged her and said he was gay; she had to Google the word in a hotel room. She is sure gay people exist in North Korea. They just have no name for it. Justice and liberty, she argues, are not inborn. Somebody has to teach you the words before you can be curious about the ideas. Her father, tortured in China, still wanted to go home to be executed and buried in his own land. Nationalism, she says, is propaganda, and she still feels it. Her dream is not to run for office. She just wants to go home.

Park had a son at twenty-two, after three rounds of IVF. Malnutrition had left her around seventy-five or eighty pounds, and her body did not behave like other women’s. She wanted a child because she felt guilty that her father had never seen this outside world. In desperation she reached for a Buddhist idea of return and prayed that he would come back as her son so she could take care of him. Doctors had planned for a girl and she had a boy; she gave him her father’s name as a middle name, and jokes that he may be the only American with a North Korean one. That story, she says, is how she makes sense of the loss. The title of her book, In Order to Live, comes from the same place: she had to tell herself stories in order to live.

She escaped at thirteen. Life until then had felt like eternity; life after, even the six months in China from late March to October, felt like a war in which surviving one day was a year. Every night she was grateful she had not been captured. She says she sold her own mother in China to survive. She also describes the woman who sold her: a trafficker with five daughters who sold Park and her mother into China in 2007 as sexual slaves, and who was later executed. Park had been delayed leaving because of a stomachache. North Korean hospitals had no X-rays and little electricity; they used one needle on everyone, operated without painkiller, and people died of infection more often than of cancer. She did not get an infection. Her sister, then sixteen, left a note telling her to follow that woman. Outsiders can call the trafficker heartless. Park is grateful, because the alternative was dying in North Korea.

China taught her not to feel. Numbness, she says, is a bigger torture than fear or sadness. She would leave her body and watch herself being raped and surviving, curious rather than scared. She did not even have the word future. Healing started when she had her son. The warmth of family, she adds, is what kept her going through all of it. She is grateful for that suffering because the other path is nonexistence. “You never knew I existed,” she tells Fridman.

Anger, when it comes, is aimed at heartlessness and ignorance. In South Korea she once saw K-pop stars weeping at a fundraising concert and assumed a national catastrophe. It was an animal-rights campaign for cats and dogs in shelters. People, she says, will give a million dollars to save dolphins and look away from children being raped in China. Elon Musk’s drive to reach Mars fascinates her, but it also stings: the same brilliance is not pointed at a part of Earth you still cannot visit. Biden, Trump, and Obama, she says, all knew. The United Nations has called what happens in North Korea a holocaust happening again. Humans are somehow able to do nothing.

Fridman distinguishes diseases in Africa, which engineers can attack with medicine, from political torture, which we treat as unfixable. Park points to Xinjiang as another twenty-first-century genocide and asks why animal cruelty would trigger a consumer revolt while human cruelty does not. The first thing the West can do, she argues, is speak honestly about China’s role. “This holocaust is funded by the CCP.” Kim Jong-un, she says, cannot last a week without Chinese help. North Korea is in some ways an easy problem: no sectarian war, no religious split, a peaceful population. The problem is a dictator backed by the world’s second-largest economy. Any officer who killed Kim would expect to be killed by China. Western public life, she thinks, refuses to say so, mostly for financial reasons.

Fridman resists turning China into a cartoon devil. Cold War caricatures, he says, did not make Russia or America better; love, not violence, is how you help Chinese people become the best versions of themselves. Park answers with the Sunshine Policy. The fable is the sun and the wind betting who can make a man remove his coat: warmth works, force fails. South Korea tried warmth. Kim Dae-jung won a Nobel Peace Prize. Kim Jong-il used the money to build nuclear weapons. She still hopes the twenty-first century can speak past regimes to people, and China at least has the internet. North Korea, after nearly eighty years, is another case. She has seen China’s underground: a teenager with his intestine hanging from his back, asking only for food. That, she says, is what dying North Koreans demand. Eat.

Fridman asks whether evil lives in a tiny minority or whether systems can recruit much larger parts of a population. Park does not believe anyone is born a saint. A few men at the top wanted power; over time they built a society in which people did not even know the concept of compassion. You feel bad for a sufferer because compassion is in your knowledge. Humans have to learn it. We are the most adaptable species on the planet, which is why we built the internet and also why people in the Holocaust could have been good in another system. Underestimating evil is what scares her. She loves Chinese people and speaks Chinese; it is the system, she says, that promotes evil. Fridman hears an optimistic claim inside that: systems can be fixed. People are harder.

As for nuclear war, she does not expect North Korea to start one as long as the regime can do whatever it wants. The army is not designed to fight a foreign enemy. It is designed to prevent a coup and a revolution. A tiny country, she says, fields 1.6 million troops, the fourth-largest army in the world, aimed at its own citizens. That is what North Korean military power is about: occupying North Koreans.

Kim Il-sung presented himself as a Leninist and a Marxist who would build the most equal society on earth. Then came songbun, a family caste system. Three big baskets, core, wavering, and hostile, split into about fifty subclasses, recorded in secret government files that many people never see. Your life is decided before you are born. The joke writes itself: they dreamed of perfect equality and built one of the most unequal societies in history, with one man at the top become a god. All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. In North Korea the one at the top is not merely more equal. He is divine.

Juche, the ideology of self-reliance and the Great Leader, is more recent than outsiders think. Until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Park says, North Korea was still loyal to Marxist-Leninist paternalism: the state as father, rations, collective farms, a promised paradise, all of it subsidized by Moscow. When the aid stopped, as many as three million people died in the streets. The regime’s idea of success became keeping ten percent of the population alive, in Pyongyang. She calls the rest a Hunger Games: thirteen other districts starved on purpose so rural people would think only about the next meal. The United Nations still begs to send formula, medicine, and food. Kim Jong-un says no. After a flood, South Korea begged to send medicine. No again. He wants to be the only provider. He does not want his people to think the food came from someone else.

That is Juche in practice. Communism had said, give us the power and we will take care of you. In the 1990s the regime said, we will not give you rations, trade is illegal, find your own way to survive, and still give us every right. Be self-reliant. When the leader is a god, none of this has to make sense. God’s ways are mysterious; you cannot falsify them. Famine, Fridman says, is another level of evil. Stalin did it in Ukraine. North Korea is doing it in the twenty-first century, on a planet of seven billion people that already grows enough food for ten billion. Park took a shower that morning and remembered bathing a few times a year in a river, never having known shampoo, while much of the comfortable world obsesses over being vegan. She tries to stay grateful for a meal, for the luxury of a diet, for a mug on the table. Fridman thinks building a better America, even sending rockets to space, can ripple outward by making people dare to solve other problems. Park still thinks you cannot solve North Korea without changing China. Cryptocurrency excites both of them as a way to pull money out of a state’s hands, but North Koreans have no electricity and no internet. Try it in China, she says, or in African dictatorships. North Korea is a different planet.

Fridman asks whether Kim Jong-un is intentionally evil or only mindlessly running an inherited machine. Park gives the grandfather and father more slack. She can believe Kim Il-sung started as a true communist and then decided most people were dumb, so he would decide for them; arrogance, even that, she can almost tolerate. Kim Jong-il grew up inside the system. Kim Jong-un is different. He was educated in Switzerland, “in the heart of democracy,” and as a child he saw how human beings should be treated. Young brains are plastic; every revolution starts by changing the young. Switzerland did not change him. He was obsessed with power and with being a god. That, to her, is what pure evil looks like: a purely selfish being.

From defectors among the elite and from intelligence reporting, she has a picture of the family. They are treated as gods from birth and never acquire the sense that they are human among humans. Other people are tools. When Boxer is used up, you send him to the slaughterhouse and feel no guilt, because ordinary people were never worthy of care. Suffering does not enter Kim’s mind. He does not think about what North Koreans go through. Fridman asks the blunt question: why doesn’t the United States assassinate him? Park says the CIA can know where he is and what he is doing. It does not kill him because it does not care enough about twenty-five million people, and because the bill would come due: money, politics, China’s anger, turmoil, revolution. Early in the Holocaust, she says, America had the same posture. Look away. Let it run.

If he dies, replacement is hard because the Kims are a brand, closer to a god than a president. She calls North Korea the tenth-largest religion in the world and says it copied the Bible. Kim Il-sung’s grandparents were devout Christians; he grew up on verses, then told his people he loved them so much he was giving them his son, whose body would die and whose spirit would remain, and that the suffering would be repaid in paradise. Block every other story and of course people believe it. Kim Jong-un has a first son born in 2009, too young to rule. If the father died now, she expects the sister to hold a temporary place until the boy is old enough. It is a kingdom. China will do everything it can to keep the status quo. North Koreans have no option on the table. Someone with power has to do the right thing. Waiting will not deliver it. China already showed that economic freedom does not automatically bring political freedom. “Freedom is something that has to be fought for. Otherwise you never get it.”

Park says she gets a new definition of freedom every day. It is a relationship that does not end. People can be unfree and still happy. She has seen fat, powerful North Korean elites who had no freedom and looked happier than the investment bankers and consultants she met in Manhattan, seventy percent of whom, she was told, saw therapists. While writing her book in New York, an editor said she was traumatized and needed therapy. She did not know the words. North Korea has no terms for stress or trauma, because how could you be stressed in a socialist paradise? She asked the price: two hundred dollars an hour, at a discount. No thank you.

Freedom, she learned, is not a shortcut to happiness. It is the decision to think for yourself, make mistakes, and live with them. It is fun, and you can suffer more than the people who are not free. Fridman adds the weight: if you succeed it is you, if you fail it is you, and if you do nothing about North Korea it is also you. Living with that burden is a kind of suffering. Park’s friend Michael Malice is an anarchist who wants no centralized force telling people how to transact or live. She has asked him why. The world he describes scares her. She wants law enforcement. Equality, especially equality of outcome, makes no sense to her: people are born with different minds and bodies, and a government that tries to force sameness is how you get a caste system. North Korea is the exhibit.

Governments, she says, are often dumb and cannot know what you want, especially when you do not know yourself. She prefers something closer to Switzerland: push power down to states and let people vote with their feet, the way some Americans choose Texas for the lack of income tax. Let one state try something close to anarchy and another try conservative rules, and let the results compete in real life. What alarms her is a federal government getting bigger and trying to make every state sound the same.

Asked whether she hears North Korea in American culture, she does not hesitate. Meritocracy, she says, is being recast as a white man’s idea, as if competence were only inherited wealth. She points to Asians who arrived with nothing and still reached Harvard Law and medical school. When hard work stops being rewarded, the incentive dies. That is North Korea: you are born into a class, and nothing you do changes it. The cruelty of songbun, she adds, is that you cannot even marry up. If someone from a high class marries down, they only go down. That is how the regime keeps the castes from mixing.

Fridman, thinking about starting a company, wants diversity of backgrounds and minds and does not see that as the enemy of merit. What bothers him is diversity defined by crude buckets of race and gender, which drowns out the rest, and a culture that demonizes the wish to be excellent. Park says celebrating accomplishment is now treated as patriarchy. She has heard calls to abolish the SAT because some children cannot do the math, as if the humane answer were to stop asking anyone to overcome a challenge, then hand them the same jobs as lawyers and doctors. In North Korea, one person’s crime is collective guilt across three generations. In America she sees a cousin of that logic: a great-grandfather who owned slaves makes you guilty now, with no way to change an ancestor and no path to forgiveness.

Columbia is her concrete case. Before class, everyone had to go around and give pronouns. English is her third language, learned as an adult; she still mixes up he and she by accident. A classmate asked to be they, gender-fluid, a girl this hour and a boy the next, and stared if you got it wrong. “This is a regression of civilization,” she says. The Enlightenment made people look forward; this feels like going backward. Fridman hopes it is a pendulum, healthy in moderation, now consuming every meeting. As an engineer he finds the discussions strangely empty: they bully, they do not build systems that fix defined problems. McCarthyism did the same in reverse. Park told Jordan Peterson the university made her dumber and scared. She had to censor herself in America. The first thing her mother taught her in North Korea was not to whisper, because birds and mice could hear. She thought the United States was the place you could say anything, then change your mind. Instead she found a demand to be a perfect version of yourself forever. If you cannot grow, she asks, what is the meaning of life?

Peterson was hurt, Fridman thinks, because he still hopes universities are where ideas get built. Park’s four years were not one bad seminar. She took 126 credits. Peterson asked whether any class lacked the virtue-signaling and the political line. None. She saved art and music for last, expecting the least political course on the list. It opened with a question: who has a problem calling this Western civilization, art and music? Everyone raised a hand. Beethoven, Mozart, white men; everything ruined by white men. She did not raise hers. The room looked at her: you are Asian, how can you not hate this? She used to be more optimistic about America and Europe. Now she thinks the country can go south, and that if the United States, the last country still able to contest the Chinese Communist Party, loses its nerve, humanity may lose the chance to be free.

Censorship on YouTube troubles Fridman; so did banning Donald Trump from Twitter. He found Trump exhausting. The ban still felt like a step toward silencing the next person, and “Jordan Peterson is next.” Park wants freedom of thought and speech even when the speech is ridiculous or dangerous, because the alternative is worse. What she loves in Peterson the psychologist is the claim that humans think by talking. Therapy is speaking, hearing yourself, and only then arriving at an answer. “When they say you cannot talk, that means you cannot think.” Who decides what is hate speech, and what is dangerous? Everyone is imperfect. Today a platform agrees with you; next year it comes back and says you are the problem. What do you do then?

Fridman wants a culture that forgives people for being different year by year, and tools that match that culture. Twitter’s viral move is to pull up an old tweet and freeze someone in it. That is the opposite of the mechanism a growing person needs. Park first saw Peterson by accident in Chicago: a huge theater sold out at 7 p.m., scalpers on the sidewalk, Dave Rubin opening, and she understood little of the English. What she understood was the audience. Thousands of people crying like babies. No jokes, no slides, one man standing in a big theater, talking for a long time. Years later she read 12 Rules for Life. Chapter one, on lobsters, said hierarchy is older than male invention; Columbia had been teaching her the opposite. Chapter five was about socializing children. She felt grateful to be alive at the same time as a thinker she would have paid any amount to have lunch with, the way people talk about Socrates. She reached Mikhaila Peterson on Twitter, then sat with Jordan. She had expected a collector of human suffering, desensitized. Instead he seemed to live through her stories with her.

If Peterson is one of the great thinkers of the moment, Park says the greatest is Michael Malice, who wrote Dear Reader, a book on North Korea told from the Dear Leader’s point of view. Nobody had done that. Humor, in his hands, exposes the absurdity of the state without denying the gravity. He is not the BuzzFeed genre that mocks Kim Jong-un’s haircut. He cares, and then he makes the joke that shows how ridiculous evil is. Kim is so much a caricature that people laugh and decide it cannot be real. “Can you imagine you laugh at the Holocaust? This is that ridiculous.” Laughter, Fridman suggests, is how people escape a cruelty they cannot bear to see straight.

Park’s counter to the cartoon is a people she calls, despite malnutrition, among the highest-IQ populations in the world. Give them electricity and food, she says, and you get a cultural center like South Korea. One peninsula, one language, one set of traditions, two systems: a free democracy became roughly the eleventh-largest economy, a dictatorship became one of the poorest nations on earth. She points to Why Nations Fail. It is not culture, not race, not IQ. It is the system. Prosperity is not proof that you are special. Ancestors built markets, property, and law; North Korea proves that brains are wasted in the wrong machine. People deny that, she thinks, because they want to feel personally awesome. “Without capitalism, how did you come up with this?” Choosing the right system is, in her ranking, the most important decision in a life.

Her advice to the young is not guilt. White guilt, she says, does not do anything. She wants gratitude. Having children is, on a rational ledger, a terrible deal; we are here because people in a savannah hunted and froze for us. Life is bigger than a self. Her father, even in a prison camp, called life a gift and chose the hard work of living over the few minutes it takes to die. At twenty-one, South Korean intelligence told her she was on Kim Jong-un’s killing list. She compares herself to Jamal Khashoggi, murdered after his voice got large, and to Kim Jong-nam, who had been talking to the CIA for a decade and was killed with VX in a Malaysian airport while the CIA, she says, failed to protect him. North Korea tried to crush her book and had already hacked Sony over The Interview; Penguin checked her story with survivors and published anyway. Character assassination, she says, can be worse than the other kind, because the internet treats a blog post as fact. Social media does not protect you. Khashoggi had 1.6 million Twitter followers and the outrage still lasted about a day. South Korean agents call her constantly. American ones, she says, do not. After three or four years of fear she found it almost liberating that her enemy is a nuclear state: if Kim decides, she dies, and it is not up to her.

She still hopes to bring her son to a North Korea that looks different, even like South Korea, which would be paradise. She calls herself a rational optimist: a few people who decide to work on a problem can move a country. Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha mattered because the enlightened man who thought love was primitive is changed when his own son appears. Park had gone bitter, then met people who loved her for being human, including a gay man in San Francisco who wanted nothing from her body. She lives for love now, including love of books and of a fight larger than herself. Nassim Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness taught her not to ask why she learned English fast or loved books. History may not remember her. Her job is smaller: make people know. Once you know and do nothing, something is wrong. North Koreans have been filmed as robots who march and wail on cue; she wants them seen as human. Fridman calls that a small light on a dark part of the world. It might be enough to change an enormous amount of suffering.