In Order to Live
2015
- defectors
- korea (north), biography
- women social reformers
- women, biography
- korea (north), politics and government
- refugees, korea
- korea (north), history
- escapes
- refugees
- biography
The story
"'I am most grateful for two things: that I was born in North Korea, and that I escaped from North Korea.' Yeonmi Park was not dreaming of freedom when she escaped from North Korea. She didn't even know what it meant to be free. All she knew was that she was running for her life, that if she and her family stayed behind they would die--from starvation, or disease, or even execution. This book is the story of Park's struggle to survive in the darkest, most repressive country on earth; her harrowing escape through China's underworld of smugglers and human traffickers; and then her escape from China across the Gobi desert to Mongolia, with only the stars to guide her way, and from there to South Korea and at last to freedom; and finally her emergence as a leading human rights activist--all before her 21st birthday"--From Penguin Random House website.
What it’s like
Stark, unsparing prose in a plain first-person voice, where a young woman's observations come through clear and unadorned, sharpened by the sensory detail of hunger, cold, and open country. The book's world is a grey, rationed North Korea of crowded markets and watchful silence, then the murky, sodium-lit back alleys of Chinese border towns, and finally the enormous emptiness of the Gobi, where the night sky does the work of a map. Its mood is bleak and tense, a steady undertow of dread that rarely lets up, though the telling is alert and sometimes startlingly tender toward family and friends. Pacing is driven by escape and survival, with long stretches of waiting in hiding followed by sudden jolts of danger. Intensity is significant: hunger, illness, public executions described in passing, sexual exploitation and trafficking, and frightening violence at the hands of smugglers, all handled directly and without gore for its own sake. Written for readers drawn to true survival stories and to firsthand accounts of life under authoritarian rule, who can sit with heavy material and want a story of courage and self-definition, not comfort.
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