If the Cinderella story had been written by someone much grimmer than the Brothers Grimm, the star could well be the author of the current book. After escaping from the utter prison of North Korea; after surviving the sex slavery imposed on her (and her mother, simultaneously) in China; after educating herself in an absolutely unlikely manner in South Korea, she made her way to the United States, and enrolled in Columbia University, a once-great beacon of Western freedom. To say that this was the dream of a lifetime is to radically overstate the case; this was something undreamed of, something outside the realm of all reasonable possibility. Ms. Park, guided by the spirit of her entrepreneurial father, truly valued education—had endeavoured in all ways to educate herself as thoroughly as possible, in the traditional sense, when she managed to make her way to South Korea, where she pored over, among other works, the books of the great George Orwell, author of Animal Farm and 1984.
And what happened when she entered the hallowed halls of that august institution of higher education?
She encountered the same ideology that had corrupted her homeland and doomed its inhabitants to a life in hell. Of course, it was America: it was Totalitarianism Lite, offered, as all such things are in this over-coddled and narcissistic time, as a convenient fashion statement; a faux identity; a means of parading unearned moral virtue while biding time as an oppressor-in-training—the inevitable and truly desired fate of every virtue-signaling Ivy League graduate. She was upbraided by her pathetic professors for daring to admire Jane Austen, whose books “promote female oppression, racism, colonialism, and white supremacy” and “propagate the idea that women are inferior to men; that only white males are fully evolved and capable of higher-level thinking; that salvation is only achievable through the dogma of Christianity” (of course; or else). And Yeonmi learned that she better think and feel that way—even when listening to “Western” classical music (or else). There was nothing more unacceptable at Columbia than to be a “SIX HIRB”: a sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist bigot.
Yeonmi Park grew up in a totalitarian nightmare. As a child, she roasted and consumed insects to survive, when she could find them. As someone from a poor family (and that genuinely meant poor in North Korea) she had to bring five rabbit pelts to class and hand them over to maintain any social standing whatsoever with the propagandists who passed as teachers. She grew up among people whose dying wish was meat stew and rice. She was subject to the worst dictatorship on the planet—maybe the worst dictatorship ever promulgated, although the competition for that vaunted position is very fierce. She came to the US, miraculously, and encountered fools dallying with the same ideas that had made her life something almost unbelievably harsh—certainly that, by Western standards. She attempted with all her heart, as she is doing in the present volume, to warn us here in our luxury and comfort not to fall prey to the same ideological temptations that doomed the Soviet Union and all its satellites and that still possess the billion-plus people in China, much to the detriment of that country’s beleaguered citizens and the rest of the world. Who led the rush to lockdown? China. Who copied the actions of that terrible state?
The cowardly fools of the West.
Park is warning us not to continue to do so.
Will we listen?
Perhaps.
Perhaps not.
—JORDAN B. PETERSON
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