Review of Yeonmi Park While Time Remains
Yeonmi writes "[h]ow could one of the leading universities in the greatest country in the world teach its students to help their fellow countrymen? (Yeonmi 23)
I finished reading the book “While Time Remains” by Yeonmi Park. It took me a month to complete. I started reading the book after hearing her tell her story at a book event, Socrates in the city hosted by Eric Metaxes in May, a friend of mine who I met bought me the book. I won’t explain why he did that but it was out of generosity that he did that. The book was very insightful, and I learned a lot from it. Park details her story about her escape from North Korea, recounting her and her mothers time as sex slaves in China after their escape of North Korea, which is prevalent in China of North Korean women being sold into sex slavery and the government not doing anything about that circumstance, sharing her experience living in South Korea, and her life living in the United States of America. Yeonmi, warns that America is behaving like the authoritarian country, North Korea where she lived until her escape, where there’s no rights and the people are being suppressed there. I enjoyed the fact that Yeonmi spoke against China, today some celebrities and politicians are beholden and enslaved to China, with no back bone they refuse to speak against it. In the book, Park talks about meeting Hillary Clinton at a women’s conference, Park spoke about her abuse in North Korea and the fact that women are still being sex trafficked in China, particularly North Korean defectors without the Chinese regime intervening to stop the sex trafficking, after hearing the speech Clinton promised that she would do something about it. Years later, the self proclaimed feminist, who lets not forget to mention lost several presidential races, did nothing after hearing the story, in fact the Clinton foundation has not donated a single dime to solve the problem- maybe Hillary and Bill are busy hiding the fact that they have so much of their employees dying years later after working for them, and are now trying to censor that from the public, I ask you this why are there so many ex Clinton Employees dying like Mark Middleton? who had a shotgun wound to his chest and was hung his death was ruled a suicide but how that’s possible the Clinton camp has not explained. All we know is that the deaths keep on mounting- but i digress. If I were to rate the book I would give it an 9.5/10. The book did have an impact on me in that it installed more patriotism in me. For example, Park spoke about why we should be appreciative of being Americans because of the individual freedoms we have unlike other countries and that not recognizing that could make us susceptible to reconstructing that idea of Americanism. Park states,
“[a]s America becomes predominantly made up of people who didn’t have a hand in building the system in the first place, (the American system), it is producing more and more people who want to destroy the system because they don’t understand it. They don’t appreciate how fragile their freedom is, how precious their system of government, how rare their way of life. And so they entertain fantasies of tearing it down. (162)
Below are some of my favorite quotes
- Yeonmi states "[t]he reason I wrote this book is because for so long, I never had the language to describe either tyranny or freedom" (156). Before leaving North Korea, Park could not articulate freedom or tyranny because she was so indoctrinated that in North Korea freedom or tyranny was an uncommon word. Instead they were taught to hate America. Also they were taught to deify Kim Jong Un so freedom and tyranny were words not spoken of nor known.
- Yeonmi ponders on Columbia university and writes "[h]ow could one of the leading universities in the greatest country in the world teach its students to help their fellow countrymen? (Yeonmi 23) At Columbia university, the college that once had Christian influence and whose motto still until this day is “[i]n Thy light we shall see light” as a reference to Jesus being the bedrock of truth, taught students that they were oppressed and to hate one another. Yeonmi was startled by that because these students were in America a land of opportunity and freedom and although they might of had their short comings it was still important to remember that they were Americans.
Go purchase the book!