In Order to Live, A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom

Among the many joys of belonging to more than one book discussion group is discovering titles and authors that you might never have been drawn to on your own. Such was the case this month with the reading of an incredible, and I’ll admit, at times unbelievable memoir of Yeonmi Park who was only thirteen years old when she and her mother plotted their escape from North Korea to the south. It would take them two years, suffering what to some might seem unimaginable horrors, to arrive in a refugee detention camp in Mongolia until their stories could be verified by representatives from the South Korean embassy.

Readers who are acquainted with international literature and film will not be as shocked as some others when they discover that Yeonmi and her mother were betrayed by their North Korean guides. When they thought they had safely arrived in China, the way station on their path to freedom, (a concept that Ms. Park tells us North Koreans cannot even really comprehend), they were sold to a sex trafficking ring where Yeonmi was tasked with training other young refugees into prostitution and her mother was married off to a farmer who held her as an enslaved worker.

What struck me most about this young woman’s story was the telling of it. The brutal years of starvation and illness in North Korea, followed by the violence and shame visited upon her in China, were narrated in such a dispassionate voice that it felt as if I was listening to Siri. I wondered how many of the words were Yeonmi Park’s and how many were those of Maryanne Vollers, http://www.maryannevollers.com/bio.html, her well-regarded writing collaborator. I also questioned whether it was a deliberate style choice implemented to help the reader absorb the magnitude of Park’s ordeal. Not until section three, her arrival in South Korea, will readers with a good ear, sense a complete change of voice, one ringing with hope and an urge to fight for a future.

Our group’s discussion focused not on the style but on the substance of the memoir, specifically on the remarkable strength and perseverance of Ms. Park, her mother, and the thousands of other refugees who manage to escape certain death by starvation in the north. No one had the temerity to mention that much of the suffering has been exacerbated by the economic sanctions the United States and other countries have placed on Kim Jong Un’s government.

Park’s title, “In Order to Live,” was taken from a phrase about storytelling in a Joan Didion essay. It is a fitting reminder that being heard is imperative to healing. Through the cathartic act of recounting her life-affirming story Park reminds readers of the anguish faced by millions of homeless, stateless refugees traveling from northern Africa to Europe, from central America to the United States, and from war-ravaged Iraq and Afghanistan to any place that will have them. How I wish we’d had time to discuss this.

For a further understanding of Ms. Park’s life, you may want to look at one of her Ted talks. https://bit.ly/3pNj2JH

The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr. A Top Ten Contender This Early in the Season

What is a reviewer to do when words fail to describe the beauty of a new work of fiction? How to explain to readers the joy of discovering a writer who touches your very soul with his words? The influences are there, Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, certainly James Baldwin, but the voice of Robert Jones, Jr. is all his own. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/2203463/robert-jones-jr

In the opening pages of “The Prophets,” Mr. Jones remarkably channels an enslaved woman giving birth to and immediately being separated from her first-born child. The anguish is palpable. Jones writes her shame at having to beg for a glimpse of her baby before he’s sold away, and the despair that comes from blessing this boy with a name that will ultimately be replaced with the moniker that better reflects the white man who will own his physical being.

This child, now Isaiah, will live in a barn on a plantation in Mississippi sharing the duties of caring for the horses, pigs, and chickens with Samuel. These two desperately lonely boys grow up together, sleeping in the haystacks, washing up in the river, and comforting each other to sleep each night. They are best friends. They become lovers.

Their closeness is accepted by all the other enslaved workers as natural. Their relationship, their lovemaking, is exquisitely rendered. The ancestors, shades of black who resemble a Greek chorus, guard them, until the day that Amos decides to bring a bible and the twisted teachings of the Lord into their Sunday ritual and they hear the word “sin” for the first time.

Incredibly strong female characters grace this plantation, Maggie, Sarah, Essie, are all subject to the brutality of slave life yet still could find the strength for insurrection. Jones even paints the evil-doers, Paul and Ruth, the landowners, and their son Timothy, the catalyst for the inevitable downfall, with a trace of compassion. In a recent interview the author expressed the view that no one is born despicable, we are all informed by life’s circumstances, but as difficult as those may be, they do not absolve us from responsibility for our wrongdoing.

In wondrously lyrical prose Robert Jones has created a world of devastating horror tempered with amazing grace. This is by far the finest piece of fiction I have read in months and it will undoubtedly make my top ten for 2021. I can’t wait to see what his brilliant mind will come up with next.