#1691 - Yeonmi Park

Yeonmi Park (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan (0:12)

Well, very nice to meet you, first of all.

Thanks for coming here. Is this your first time in Texas?

Yeonmi Park (0:19)

No, I've been here before.

Joe Rogan (0:20)

You've been to Austin before? So for people who don't know your story, I'm just gonna give them a primer, just to sort of establish your history. You were born in North Korea, and you escaped North Korea when you were 13 Is that how old you were? I think we should start off with what it was like living in North Korea.

I saw your interview with Jordan Peterson, and it was incredibly moving, and it was incredibly disturbing and eye-opening, and it's hard to believe for people that don't know what life is like in North Korea, the reality of you growing up in North Korea. But just talking about how you essentially had no food, and you would go looking for bugs to eat. This was the reality of your existence as a child, that there was no protein.

Now that you live here in America and you can eat whatever you want, when you look back on that, what does it seem like to you? Does it seem like reality? Does it seem like a dream? What does your childhood seem like?

Yeonmi Park (1:40)

Sometimes this feels like a dream.

Joe Rogan (1:42)

This feels like a dream?

Yeonmi Park (1:43)

Yeah. So I pinched myself a lot in the beginning, because they say if it's not a dream, it hurts, right? When you pinch yourself. So a lot of times I pinch myself, because sometimes I'm really horrified if I wake up from this, that I'm going to wake up in my living room in North Korea. So it's sometimes that line is very blurry to me.

And because the one common thing that North Koreans all have is actually in our dreams when we sleep, it's back in North Korea. So in our dream, we somehow never able to escape it.

So every day, my mom wakes up, like she tells me about story how she was back in North Korea. And I have the exact the same thing. No matter what, how many years we left afterwards, in our dreams, we are still in that country.

Joe Rogan (2:32)

So that's the nightmare. The nightmare is that you're still trapped in North Korea.

When you lived there, you didn't know that there was another way to live.

Yeonmi Park (2:42)

No, it's like here right now, we cannot imagine a life in some different planet in the universe, right? We just don't know what that life looks like.

Exactly the same thing. I never knew the life in different planet could be like.

Joe Rogan (2:58)

And where you lived in North Korea, there was no internet. There's very little electricity, right?

And how much education did you get?

Yeonmi Park (3:11)

I never even seen the map of the world.

So as an Asian, I did not even know that I was Asian. So the regime told me I was a Kim Il-sung race.

Joe Rogan (3:22)

Kim Il-sung race.

Yeonmi Park (3:23)

Yeah. And then the North Korean calendar begins when Kim Il-sung was born, that's like Juche one, that our history begins. So I don't even know what Jesus Christ is.

And I don't know anything before Kim. So there was everything before Kim, the history was re-raised for us.

But the thing is that we are hungry, we are starving. If you eat breakfast, you worry about lunch. If you make it to dinner, you are not sure if you're going to make it to tomorrow. So in that scenario, who thinks about history? You know, nobody thinks about anything other than surviving. And that is why precisely Kim Jong-un is keeping us starving mode. Even though the UN the international organizations are begging to give food and formula to North Korean people, but Kim Jong-un is just saying no to this food aid because he doesn't want us to be fed.

Joe Rogan (4:18)

So he's purposely starving the people to keep them weak so that all they think about is surviving, so they don't think about revolution.

Yeonmi Park (4:25)

It's Hunger Games. It's like when I was reading this book Hunger Games, I literally like, oh my god, this person copied North Korea. There's a capitar. You divide into 13 different districts. Capitar people have everything they need. And on other provinces, their own purpose, they're being starved.

So only thing you can think of, you're a survivor.

If you are full in your stomach, right, you're going to start thinking about meaning of life, art, what's out there in the universe. You can do all of that higher thinking when you are full in your stomach. But when you're hungry, the only thing that matters is your hunger.