In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom
SynopsisPlot
In In Order to Live, Yeonmi 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. Park confronts her past with a startling resilience. 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
Story
About this book
Yeonmi Park was thirteen years old when she and her mother fled North Korea in 2007. What followed was not a straightforward path to safety. After crossing into China, both were sold into forced marriages by brokers who exploited their vulnerability as undocumented refugees. Park and her mother endured two years of captivity and abuse before eventually reaching South Korea in 2009. Written with Maryanne Vollers, this memoir recounts the conditions Park grew up in, the dangers of escape, and the exploitation that awaited on the other side of the border.
Park describes daily life inside North Korea in concrete terms: the scarcity of food and electricity, the state propaganda that shaped her understanding of the outside world, and the slow erosion of her family's circumstances that made leaving feel necessary. She also writes about the difficulty of adjusting to life in South Korea, where she initially concealed parts of her story to fit in.
One factor that pushed Park to speak publicly was her older sister, who had escaped separately and disappeared into China for years. By sharing her account, Park hoped both to locate her sister and to draw attention to the situation of North Koreans still trapped in similar circumstances. She went on to work as a human rights activist focused on these issues.
