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