Defector reclaims agency, hails freedom as a beautiful burden in memoir

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Defector reclaims agency, hails freedom as a beautiful burden in memoir

Published: 26 Jan. 2026, 07:00 Updated: 26 Jan. 2026, 12:41

MICHAEL LEE
[email protected]

Audio report: written by reporters, read by AI

North Korean defector Park Eun-hee speaks at the College Freedom Forum hosted by Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, on April 8, 2024. [PARK EUN-HEE]

By the time North Korean defector Park Eun-hee decided to write her life story, she had already risked death once.

She had done so by crossing the Yalu River into China, driven by what she later called “the courage to die,” which became the title of her self-published memoir. For her, nothing in her repressive homeland — not even the threat of imprisonment or execution — could hold her back from pursuing a better life.

At first glance, little suggests that Park, who bears almost no trace of her native northern accent, might be different from other young women in South Korea struggling to balance personal aspirations with the pressures of work and social expectations.

But behind her decision to release an autobiography in English was a conviction that her countrymen on both sides of the peninsula, and the wider world, should draw lessons about freedom and personal agency from her escape and resettlement.

Released last year, “The Courage to Die: A North Korean Woman’s Escape and Rebirth in Freedom” traces Park’s rocky childhood and early adulthood in the North, her defection in September 2012, and the long, uneven process of rebuilding her life in South Korea and abroad.

Park, who has worked as a public orator and advocate for defectors, wants not only to claim ownership of her narrative but also to challenge the tendency to view North Koreans solely through the lens of victimhood.

“I wanted to show my life as a defector who overcomes, who gets back on her feet time and time again, and who is the main driving force of her own life,” she said in an interview with the Korea JoongAng Daily on Wednesday.

‘Freedom is not free’

Park’s story broadly follows the familiar arc of suffering, escape and post-defection struggle that characterizes other defector narratives. At the same time, her autobiography does not shy away from the pain of family separation and discrimination by South Koreans. In particular, she returns repeatedly to the idea that freedom represents neither a clean break from the past nor a final resolution of hardship.

That realization deepened as she traveled beyond South Korea.

“In Washington, I saw the phrase ‘Freedom is not free’ inscribed on the Korean War Memorial,” she said. “It made me understand that even after gaining freedom, I would have to endure immense pain and effort to protect it.”

Reminders of the cost of her freedom are constant for Park, who left behind her entire family in the North.

“Even simple pleasures, like eating a good meal, weigh heavily on me when I think about how much I want to share them with my loved ones,” she said.

She described her time on a working holiday visa from September 2017 to April 2018 in Australia — which had just legalized same-sex marriage — as another shock to her evolving worldview.

“When I first saw a lesbian couple kissing in a park, and no one reacted at all, I was shocked,” she recalled, noting that she “saw people wearing whatever they wanted with no judgment from others.”

What shook her over time, she said, was not Australia itself, but how much of North Korea still lived inside her.

“I realized how much conservatism I still carried inside me,” she said. “Even in South Korea, people are so attached to the idea that they have to go to university, get a job, marry and have children by a certain age. After living in Australia, I started asking what externally imposed burdens I and other people are carrying inside.”

The paperback cover of North Korean defector Park Eun-hee's self-published autobiography ″Courage to Die: A North Korean Woman’s Escape and Rebirth in Freedom,″ which was released last year. [PARK EUN-HEE]

Overturning the defector archetype

Some of the most painful ordeals of Park’s life, including rape and sexual violence, are described in "Courage to Die" with restraint — a choice she said reflected both internalized shame and a determination not to be pigeonholed as a victim.

“When a broker raped me during my escape, I thought it was something I had to endure to gain freedom,” she said. When she was sexually assaulted while working part-time in South Korea, she likewise believed she was partly to blame.

“There is a saying in North Korea that women ‘shouldn’t shake their skirt hems,’” she explained. “It implies the woman incited the assault.”

According to Park, it took her almost a decade to unlearn “about 90 percent of that way of thinking.”

Still, she resisted making trauma the center of her book.

“If I dwell on just those events, I cannot move forward from being a victim,” she said. “Even though terrible things happened to me, I want to show that a human being can still pursue hope and a better life.”

By deciding to self-publish her autobiography, Park sought to challenge portrayals that reduce North Koreans to a single narrative of despair and injustice.

“There are 25 million North Koreans, but only about 40,000 are free to talk,” she said, referring to the number of people who have managed to escape the North since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War. “Even among us, only a small group speaks publicly.”

She notes that the lack of defector voices is compounded by the tendency of editors to mold memoirs by North Korean defectors into dramatic but one-dimensional stories of suffering and rescue.

“I figured that I would have to sacrifice my narrative autonomy by working with a publisher, who would likely press me for more sensational content to generate publicity and book orders.”

She said she chose to write and self-publish the book to “tell the story of the life exactly as I lived it, not a version that sells,” adding that she worried experiences such as rape “would be used as ‘selling points.’”

North Korean defector Park Eun-hee speaks at the 3rd Future Democracy Conference hosted by Woorion, a South Korean organization focused on supporting North Korean refugees, in Seoul in January 2025. [PARK EUN-HEE]

A nuanced window into North Korean life

While Park does not deny that famine, injustice and general suffering are widespread in the North, she also notes that poverty does not impact all North Koreans in the same way.

“During the so-called Arduous March, many people starved to death,” she said, referring to the famine that swept North Korea in the late 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which had supplied much of the country’s fertilizer and fuel. “But informal markets and private businesses developed as the public distribution system failed, leading to the emergence of a middle class and even an upper class.”

Park recalled that her family and relatives were moderately well-off by North Korean standards despite their low political standing. Although her father was able to put food on the table, she was sent to an orphanage after his remarriage, exposing her to the state’s harsh and unending demands for unpaid labor, even from children. She was later denied admission to her dream college despite stellar grades because her family had not paid bribes, reinforcing her sense of deep injustice under the regime.

She described her hometown of Wonsan in Kangwon Province not as a monochrome landscape of misery, but as a seaside place marked by humor and energy.

“They may not have danced openly, but they had joy. They would play cassette tapes on the beach,” she recalled.

When the North Korean government recently announced the opening of the Wonsan-Kalma coastal resort for foreign visitors, she said she “felt hopeful” that “people living in poorer, rural areas might benefit from tourism.”

However, she noted that going to such resorts for most North Koreans “is like looking at a picture of rice cake,” using a Korean expression for something that is unattainable. “It just costs too much.”

She also worries that tourism will lead to greater control on locals.

“When foreigners come and go, surveillance increases,” she said. “So even if economic figures improve, ordinary people may end up living under an even closer watch.”

North Korean defector Park Eun-hee speaks at an event for foreign charity volunteers in Seoul in August 2025. [PARK EUN-HEE]

Kim Jong-un and indifference

Park laughed when asked whether the regime might be grooming Kim Jong-un’s daughter as his successor.

“The idea that a woman could lead the country still feels absurd,” she said. “Male superiority is deeply rooted in North Korea.”

At the same time, she believes the repeated appearances by Kim’s daughter in state propaganda are deliberate.

“He keeps bringing her into public view and showering her with affection,” she said. “That kind of repetition doesn’t strike me as accidental.”

Park believes that apathy, not resistance, is what concerns the regime most.

“Young people are indifferent to the leadership,” she said. “They watch South Korean dramas. Their parents earn money in the markets. Kim Jong-un doesn’t provide for them, so there’s no attachment.”

That indifference, she added, helps explain the regime’s efforts to soften Kim Jong-un’s image as a paternal figure, though she expressed doubt that such efforts would succeed.

North Korean defector Park Eun-hee, center, makes a heart gesture at a scholarship awards ceremony for children of North Korean escapees hosted by the UniKorea Foundation in Yangpyeong, Gyeonggi, in April 2025. [PARK EUN-HEE]

Beyond escape

Today, Park lives as a digital nomad, teaching the North Korean standard dialect online, delivering lectures and creating digital content focused on everyday North Korean lives.

“I risked my life to defect. Sitting in an office, staring at white walls and a computer screen, felt suffocating,” she explained.

Her long-term goal, she said, is independence — both economic and personal.

“I learned that without capital, you cannot even do good work,” she said. “So I want to become someone who creates capital, and then becomes someone who gives.”

What she hopes readers take from her book is recognition of her not merely as a defector or victim, but as someone who persevered against the odds and is trying to make the most of her hard-won freedom.

“The fight to live freely didn’t end when I crossed the border,” she said. “That was only the beginning.”

BY MICHAEL LEE [[email protected]]