Eunhee Park - Leaving the Dear Leader: An Escape from Wonsan, DPRK

Leaving the Dear Leader: An Escape from Wonsan, DPRK

Eunhee is an outlier. In North Korea, a rigid and tightly controlled state of 26 million people, life unfolds under the absolute authority of the “Dear Leader.”

Eunhee was an iconoclast. She yearned for something forbidden—freedom.

Over the past 70 years, only about 34,000 people have defected from the DPRK. Very few have escaped from Eunhee’s hometown of Wonsan, a coastal city far from the Chinese border, where escape routes are scarce and surveillance is unforgiving.

To flee North Korea requires what defectors call “the courage to die”—the willingness to leave behind everything familiar, everyone you love, and step into an uncertain future with no guarantee of survival.

Eunhee will recount a life marked by deprivation and fear inside the DPRK, her harrowing escape through China, Laos, and Thailand, and the often-overlooked aftermath: a lonely, disorienting resettlement in Seoul, where freedom comes with its own profound challenges.