In Order to Live
Yeonmi Park, Maryanne Vollers
273 pages - 2015 - nonfiction, memoir
April 20th, 2024 — April 21st, 2024
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
A QUICK NOTE: This book is not for the faint of heart—there are many real-life instances of sexual assault, violence, abuse, and overall awful conditions. Please use caution and take care of yourself.
I was recommended this book by one of my favorite professors I ever had the opportunity to learn from. I was a junior chemistry major taking a creative writing class, and it was so enlightening and eye-opening for me that she told me I should think of pursuing English further. A part of why I loved the class was my removal from it; creative writing was a break for me, a part of my day where I didn’t have to think about atoms and molecules. I could let my mind really wander.
Nina had a plethora of recommendations, and I fell in love with almost all of the stories she had us read between classes. I remember offering her a few of my favorite pieces and poems, and she immediately recommended dozens more that have become my new favorites. When she recommended this book, with the caveat that it was a difficult read, I added it to my list immediately.
It took me a while to reach this book, both because of the nature of my randomly chosen next read and because I knew it would be hard to read. The book follows a girl who escaped from North Korea with her mother, only to be plunged into human trafficking across the border in China. One single sentence is enough to convey that it was a terrifying endeavor, but it is not enough to describe just how terrifying.
The title comes from a Joan Didion essay, “The White Album”, where she says, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live…. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.”
What Yeonmi Park had to do in order to live has become a story, and she takes her story with her, telling it in order to help others who may still be experiencing this terror. But it is not something to romanticize. It was a horrible experience, and one that happened while I was alive. We tend to assume that horrors of this nature are far behind us, but they are still ever-present and almost entirely unknown.
Yeonmi’s story starts in North Korea, where she explains how her parents met and how they both were a part of a middle social class. Yeonmi was born incredibly prematurely, in 1993, and it was assumed she would not live; obviously, she pulled through. Her father ran an illegal trading business, which offered them a good standing. However, the economy collapsed and there was a widespread famine when Yeonmi was quite young, causing her father’s business to struggle. He is also arrested and imprisoned for this trading, which lowers him and his entire family, Yeonmi included, into the lowest social class.
Yeonmi and her sister Eunmi learn that women can find work in China, and Eunmi escapes to China through a broker, leaving her family behind. Yeonmi and her mother find the broker, who does not know where Eunmi is, but they go on with the escape and make it to China.
However, they are sold to another broker, who rapes Yeonmi’s mother and sells her, then tries to assault Yeonmi. When she refuses, she is sold to Hongwei, another trafficker, who eventually breaks Yeonmi down with bribes and sleeps with her. She is so disgusted with herself and the situation that she says she is sick every night.
Yeonmi’s father escapes from North Korea, reuniting with his wife and Yeonmi right before he passes away from incredibly advanced colon cancer. The two women have to find jobs as sex workers in online chatrooms to survive when the trafficking business becomes riskier and unprofitable.
They learn that Christian missionaries are helping refugees escape to South Korea by going through Mongolia, which entails crossing the (freezing) Gobi desert, potentially dying in the process. Through sheer luck, it seems, the two of them, along with their missionary team, are able to make it to Mongolia and then Seoul, South Korea.
They settle down and Yeonmi tries desperately to catch up with her education, knowing that she is far behind. She earns her middle and high school GEDs and is accepted into a prestigious university. She also agrees to appear on a popular TV show, Now on My Way, a panel show broadcasting women who have escaped from North Korea. She hopes that, in appearing on it, she will reach her sister and be able to reunite with her.
While traveling abroad with a Christian group a few years later, she receives a phone call from her mother saying that her sister had been found. They all reunite in South Korea. Yeonmi also begins delivering speeches on her experience of escaping North Korea, although still hiding that she herself was a victim of sex trafficking. She began working on her memoir in 2015, finally revealing all.
This summary does not properly explain how heart-wrenching the memoir is. I often had to remind myself that this was real, and these were real, actual experiences that were had by a real, living individual. She is older than me, but the entirety of her escape happened while I was alive. I recognize that I am incredibly lucky to have been worrying about elementary school projects and braces and boys, while Yeonmi was being assaulted, trafficked, and fending for not only her own life, but the life of her entire family in the process.
It is terrifying knowing that this is an experience had by many others as well. I live in the US, so I know very little about North Korea—we have been fed tales that it is evil, and that Kim Jong Un is a scary little man, but we do not know what happens within its borders. Yeonmi, too, talked a great deal about how she had been brainwashed by the North Korean regime—she mentions that the first time she was in the US, she was terrified of the “American bastards” surrounding her, because that was what she had been told to feel. She says she worshipped the Kims as if they were gods, and it took a lot of power to break that. The moment she first thought ill of Kim Jong Il was when she was dying in the desert, finally recognizing that her situation was (in part) his fault. Even then, though, she felt bad about these feelings. Her mother expressed the same.
Yeonmi describes a lot of the nuance that came with their experience. She says that Hongwei is a man she hated with a burning passion, and yet he still took care of her and ended up tending to her father’s grave with an incredible sincerity. She says that despite the hate she feels, she also feels love for him, and it is like a war inside her. There are many instances of this through the book—she loves the Kims, but she also holds them responsible for all the pain and terror.
Even when she reached South Korea and was seemingly free, she had to suffer a great deal, not only with assimilating into society—she was often bullied and outcast for her accent and had to train herself to speak with a South Korean tone—but with dealing with the trauma she had faced. One powerful moment is towards the end when Yeonmi is speaking at the One Young World Summit and begins crying while telling her story. She notices that the entire audience is standing and crying with her. It is the first time she is being (almost) completely honest publicly about her life.
My favorite quote also comes from when she had started her schooling in South Korea. She says that she hates how much she has to think for herself; she hates the question, “What do you think?” She misses how, in North Korea, she was told everything to think and feel. She had never been asked her favorite color before and does not even know how to answer at first; she simply copies her teacher’s answer of pink. But she learns, over time, how to think for herself and have opinions. Yeonmi writes:
“But after five years of practicing being free, I know now that my favorite color is spring green and my hobby is reading books and watching documentaries. I’m not copying other people’s answers anymore.”
The idea of “practicing being free” is one that so many of us do not have to entertain. We are so lucky to have freedom of thought. We are lucky to have favorite colors.
I am so grateful that Yeonmi found the strength to write this memoir. I am honored to have been able to hear her story. The world is vast and there is so much happening, good and bad, about which we have no idea. While it is not easy to read, I think everyone should read this book. Her experiences are enlightening and inspiring to an enormous extent.
Total pages read so far, 2024: 8,536
Total books read so far, 2024: 24
Next book: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin