Synopses & Reviews
Yeonmi Park has told the harrowing story of
her escape from North Korea as a child many times, but never before has
she revealed the most intimate and devastating details of the
repressive society she was raised in and the enormous price she paid to
escape.
Park’s family was loving and close-knit, but life in
North Korea was brutal, practically medieval. Park would regularly go
without food and was made to believe that, Kim Jong Il, the country’s
dictator, could read her mind. After her father was imprisoned and
tortured by the regime for trading on the black-market, a risk he took
in order to provide for his wife and two young daughters, Yeonmi and her
family were branded as criminals and forced to the cruel margins of
North Korean society. With thirteen-year-old Park suffering from a
botched appendectomy and weighing a mere sixty pounds, she and her
mother were smuggled across the border into China.
I wasn’t
dreaming of freedom when I escaped from North Korea. I didn’t even know
what it meant to be free. All I knew was that if my family stayed
behind, we would probably die — from starvation, from disease, from the
inhuman conditions of a prison labor camp. The hunger had become
unbearable; I was willing to risk my life for the promise of a bowl of
rice. But there was more to our journey than our own survival. My mother
and I were searching for my older sister, Eunmi, who had left for China
a few days earlier and had not been heard from since.
Park knew the journey would be difficult, but could not have imagined the extent of the hardship to come. Those years in China cost Park her childhood, and nearly her life. By
the time she and her mother made their way to South Korea two years
later, her father was dead and her sister was still missing. Before now,
only her mother knew what really happened between the time they crossed
the Yalu river into China and when they followed the stars through the
frigid Gobi Desert to freedom. As she writes, “I convinced myself that a
lot of what I had experienced never happened. I taught myself to forget
the rest.”
In In Order to Live, Park shines a light not
just into the darkest corners of life in North Korea, describing the
deprivation and deception she endured and which millions of North Korean
people continue to endure to this day, but also onto her own most
painful and difficult memories. She tells with bravery and dignity for
the first time the story of how she and her mother were betrayed and
sold into sexual slavery in China and forced to suffer terrible
psychological and physical hardship before they finally made their way
to Seoul, South Korea — and to freedom.
Still in her early
twenties, Yeonmi Park has lived through experiences that few people of
any age will ever know — and most people would never recover from. Park
confronts her past with a startling resilience, refusing to be defeated
or defined by the circumstances of her former life in North Korea and
China. In spite of everything, she has never stopped being proud of
where she is from, and never stopped striving for a better life. Indeed,
today she is a human rights activist working determinedly to bring
attention to the oppression taking place in her home country.
Park’s testimony is rare, edifying, and terribly important, and the story she tells in In Order to Live
is heartbreaking and unimaginable, but never without hope. Her voice is
riveting and dignified. This is the human spirit at its most
indomitable.
About the Author
Yeonmi Park is a human rights activist who was born in North Korea.