By Casey Lartigue Jr.
North Korean refugee Yeonmi Park did it again, this time she went viral because of her comments about political correctness at Columbia University. While some people honestly analyzed her words, some of her loudest critics inadvertently made her case for her with their vitriolic responses.
As a disclaimer, I first met Yeonmi in 2012, worked closely with her in 2014 when we hosted a podcast together, and I was her mentor for her One Young World speech that got international attention. My opinions obviously here are my own, not hers.
Over the years we have talked about what she was going through at Columbia, and I shared my own experience as a student at Harvard. Several North Korean refugees have told me that they felt liberated to be able to speak their minds after going through round-the-clock brainwashing and self-criticism sessions in North Korea.
When they began sharing their stories as free people, however, it didn't take long them for people to hit them with ad hominem attacks, trifling comments and even death threats. Additionally, North Korean refugee women receive numerous dirty and threatening messages from perverts.
Several of the refugees have asked me why they receive such vitriol from people. My explanation: in North Korea, if others don't like what you say or do, they can report you to the authorities. In the U.S., South Korea and other countries, people are free to blog, gossip and spread rumors, set up YouTube channels, try to "cancel" you, destroy your career or business, and even make death threats, but they usually can't call the police. Dogs rarely bark at parked cars, so one could take the complaints as compliments.
In response to Park saying that classmates and professors had tried to shut down her opinions, those who consider themselves "woke" responded by acting like extremists, trying to shut her down.
I'm not entirely surprised about Park not fitting in with those classmates and professors who are more conformist than curious. She entered Columbia at the age of 22 or 23, but her age should be measured in dog years. Shortly after she had escaped from North Korea at the age of 13 she witnessed her mother being raped by a Chinese broker. Later, they were both later sold to Chinese men.
She was a bestselling author by the age of 21 when many of her college classmates were probably taking the SAT. She was making a trade-off that her classmates may never have. She could have spent the last four years traveling around the world giving speeches and selling her book, rather than studying at Columbia.
She is a striver who barely went to school when she was in North Korea. In South Korea, she mostly studied at libraries and on the internet before she was accepted into college in South Korea, after getting her GED.
Conformity on college campuses is not something that only Park has experienced. I have heard from and about many strivers about their struggles in classrooms with college students more interested in shutting them down rather than in exchanging ideas.
A friend of mine who first entered Harvard at the age of 21 and then returned when he was 25, after serving in the army, often clashed with classmates. He returned later for grad school, and says that things only got worse. There would be a "chill" in the room whenever he disagreed with a classmate or professor. I then characterized it as being like communist party leaders of a purge asking, "Do you have a dissenting thought, comrade?"
Charges of anti-intellectualism aren't new. Thomas Sowell, a high school dropout who later served in the Marines, entered Harvard University at the age of 25. He graduated from Harvard in 1958, then got a master's degree from Columbia in 1959. He has written about Harvard that "smug assumptions were too often treated as substitutes for evidence or logic." He described Columbia as "a sort of watered-down version of Harvard, intellectually."
As a student at Harvard, I often encountered students who were quite tolerant ― until they disagreed with you. The sensitive minority students at the Harvard Graduate School of Education even held at least one meeting trying to figure out what to "do" about me. I informed the intellectual jacket-pulling students and professors trying to slow me down: I was paying and borrowing money to be at Harvard, so I was a student there to learn, not to be a parrot.
Park and other North Korean refugees may have thought they had left conformist comrades and criticism sessions behind when they escaped from North Korea. It turns out that the conformist comrades were also waiting for them in freedom, also asking, "Comrade, do you have a dissenting thought?"
Casey Lartigue Jr., co-founder of Freedom Speakers International (FSI) along with Eunkoo Lee, is the 2017 winner of the "Social Contribution" prize from the Hansarang Rural Cultural Foundation and the 2019 winner of the "Challenge Maker" award from Challenge Korea. He can be reached at CJL@alumni.harvard.edu
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As a disclaimer, I first met Yeonmi in 2012, worked closely with her in 2014 when we hosted a podcast together, and I was her mentor for her One Young World speech that got international attention. My opinions obviously here are my own, not hers.
Over the years we have talked about what she was going through at Columbia, and I shared my own experience as a student at Harvard. Several North Korean refugees have told me that they felt liberated to be able to speak their minds after going through round-the-clock brainwashing and self-criticism sessions in North Korea.
When they began sharing their stories as free people, however, it didn't take long them for people to hit them with ad hominem attacks, trifling comments and even death threats. Additionally, North Korean refugee women receive numerous dirty and threatening messages from perverts.
Several of the refugees have asked me why they receive such vitriol from people. My explanation: in North Korea, if others don't like what you say or do, they can report you to the authorities. In the U.S., South Korea and other countries, people are free to blog, gossip and spread rumors, set up YouTube channels, try to "cancel" you, destroy your career or business, and even make death threats, but they usually can't call the police. Dogs rarely bark at parked cars, so one could take the complaints as compliments.
In response to Park saying that classmates and professors had tried to shut down her opinions, those who consider themselves "woke" responded by acting like extremists, trying to shut her down.
I'm not entirely surprised about Park not fitting in with those classmates and professors who are more conformist than curious. She entered Columbia at the age of 22 or 23, but her age should be measured in dog years. Shortly after she had escaped from North Korea at the age of 13 she witnessed her mother being raped by a Chinese broker. Later, they were both later sold to Chinese men.
She was a bestselling author by the age of 21 when many of her college classmates were probably taking the SAT. She was making a trade-off that her classmates may never have. She could have spent the last four years traveling around the world giving speeches and selling her book, rather than studying at Columbia.
She is a striver who barely went to school when she was in North Korea. In South Korea, she mostly studied at libraries and on the internet before she was accepted into college in South Korea, after getting her GED.
Conformity on college campuses is not something that only Park has experienced. I have heard from and about many strivers about their struggles in classrooms with college students more interested in shutting them down rather than in exchanging ideas.
A friend of mine who first entered Harvard at the age of 21 and then returned when he was 25, after serving in the army, often clashed with classmates. He returned later for grad school, and says that things only got worse. There would be a "chill" in the room whenever he disagreed with a classmate or professor. I then characterized it as being like communist party leaders of a purge asking, "Do you have a dissenting thought, comrade?"
Charges of anti-intellectualism aren't new. Thomas Sowell, a high school dropout who later served in the Marines, entered Harvard University at the age of 25. He graduated from Harvard in 1958, then got a master's degree from Columbia in 1959. He has written about Harvard that "smug assumptions were too often treated as substitutes for evidence or logic." He described Columbia as "a sort of watered-down version of Harvard, intellectually."
As a student at Harvard, I often encountered students who were quite tolerant ― until they disagreed with you. The sensitive minority students at the Harvard Graduate School of Education even held at least one meeting trying to figure out what to "do" about me. I informed the intellectual jacket-pulling students and professors trying to slow me down: I was paying and borrowing money to be at Harvard, so I was a student there to learn, not to be a parrot.
Park and other North Korean refugees may have thought they had left conformist comrades and criticism sessions behind when they escaped from North Korea. It turns out that the conformist comrades were also waiting for them in freedom, also asking, "Comrade, do you have a dissenting thought?"
Casey Lartigue Jr., co-founder of Freedom Speakers International (FSI) along with Eunkoo Lee, is the 2017 winner of the "Social Contribution" prize from the Hansarang Rural Cultural Foundation and the 2019 winner of the "Challenge Maker" award from Challenge Korea. He can be reached at CJL@alumni.harvard.edu
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