author: Yeonmi Park; Maryanne Vollers
genre: non-fiction, autobiography
published: September 27, 2016 by Penguin Books (first published September 25, 2015)
format: paperback, 288 pages
purchase: Amazon | B&N | Book Depository
rating: 4.5 / 5 stars
goodreads
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.
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.
a must read eye-opening memoir.
I picked this book up when I saw Yeonmi Park's speech somewhere in facebook. I know about the theories talked about North Korea and I never really bothered to search about it. But after that video I saw, I got interesting. And at that time, I thought Yeonmi Park was the first escapee from North Korea. However, as days past then, I saw other nonfiction regarding people who escaped from North Korea such as The Girl with Seven Names which I also hope to read.
