Review – In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom by Yeonmi Park

Research can be fun. It can also be harrowing and difficult, particularly when you are digging into an unpleasant topic. Communism and its many permutations (socialism, fascism, etc.) are highly unpleasant, to say the very least and maintain a PG rating on this site.

North Korea tends to be treated as a bit of a joke by the rest of the world. Like the meme says, we could “probably beat them with a magnet,” since their generals have so many medals on their chests despite not fighting a war in roughly sixty to seventy years. But laughter becomes a little harder when you read about or encounter people who got out of that country, let alone those convinced to go back. Learning about the famines there is just as difficult.

This is not the first time I have done research on North Korea. I have a post on my substack here with a video from a North Korean defector reacting to America’s respect for her soldiers, fallen and living. In this review post I linked to a separate video where North Korean defectors try American BBQ for the first time. This reaction video by a North Korean veteran to videos of soldier’s returning home is another one that I have watched (you may find you need to dust after viewing it, as she required several tissues to get through those “welcome home” clips). So, the subject is not unfamiliar to me, but I had never heard of Yeonmi Park before I saw a clip of her talking to college students (the full video is here).

It was that video that made me instantly want to learn more, and when I discovered that she had a couple of books out, I went to find them. Naturally enough, I picked up her first book, In Order to Live*. The blurb is as follows:

In In Order to Live, Yeonmi 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.

Park confronts her past with a startling resilience. In spite of everything, she has never stopped being proud of where she is from, and never stopped striving for a better life. Indeed, today she is a human rights activist working determinedly to bring attention to the oppression taking place in her home country. Park’s testimony is heartbreaking and unimaginable, but never without hope. This is the human spirit at its most indomitable.

The book is not graphic. I have seen worse in fiction. It’s as PG-13 as Miss Park can make it, and that is fine. She gets her point across perfectly without going into detail. If you want a real-life place in the world that reminds you of The Hunger Games*, this book will throw you into that mindset very, very easily. Only this time it will be real and there’s no triumphant toppling of the regime at the end (not yet, anyway).

Yeah, that’s one reason why reading the book hurts like heck.

I had to stop reading for a few days after reaching the part where Miss Park described being raped by the man who bought her. She was thirteen when that happened, so…yeah. I couldn’t read the book for a while nor could I read another book I have on tap to review (which hints at child sacrifice) for the same reason. Otherwise, I might have gone out and tried to chop a tree down with my bare hands, and no tree deserves that.

The rest of the book sped past pretty quickly for me after that, and though it wasn’t as hard to read, it wasn’t necessarily fun, either. I was more than a little unhappy when I found out that the Christian pastor helping to facilitate Miss Park and her mother’s escape from China said they weren’t “sorry enough” for having participated in sex internet chat rooms. I’m Catholic, and I can’t say Catholics do not have this attitude, but I was not happy with this guy. I was also furious to learn he apparently almost didn’t let them go with the other refugees scheduled to escape after they had confessed this to him, only for him to tell them the next day that they could go. You literally have them in your power and know damn well what will happen to them (and you) if you’re caught…and you do this to them?!

That he told Miss Park to “live a proper life in South Korea” before she and her mother left to cross the Gobi Desert into Mongolia at night in the winter infuriated me as well. It’s not as if she and her mother took part in sex chatrooms for fun. Just to stay fed, they had to sell her mom at one point before this, and without a fake ID neither of them could get jobs. Sex work is all that North Korean defectors can get in China. Provided they aren’t caught and shipped back, at least, or diced up so that their organs can be sold. Miss Park’s story of the brothel she almost begged to be sold to without knowing exactly what it would have meant for her is a good picture of what COULD have happened to her if the guy who literally owned her hadn’t liked her enough to repeatedly tell her no (he also threatened to start a gang war with another guy who kidnapped her, so she was VERY fortunate she didn’t end up with someone worse).

I can’t print the rest of what I thought about that pastor, okay? Suffice it to say, there was a lot of blue air in my mind. You don’t do that to people who are desperate and in a desperate situation. What the heck….

No, I am not going out to chop a tree down with my bare hands. I need to finish this post and another, so that isn’t going to happen. But it is tempting all the same.

Most of the women in the position where Miss Park and her mother found themselves don’t get a choice. Heck, they’re lucky if they end up being a mistress to a criminal who sells women to the Chinese countryside but who won’t sell them. The other options range from being deported back to North Korea, being gang raped to death in China, or being sold for their organs in China. At least when Miss Park was in the chatroom with her mom, they both managed to avoid undressing as she kept up a chat with around six or seven men at a time.

The book ends on a good note, with Miss Park beginning to engage in efforts to gain justice for her people. She’s a regular speaker here in the U.S., as the video I linked above shows. Right now, she has two children and is divorced, and her older sister managed to reunite with her and her mother a few years after they got to South Korea. So the book is far from bleak and if you take breaks, you can make your way through it fairly easily.

But I do not recommend reading it all at once or in the dark. I specifically avoided reading it at night or before bed as a precaution against potential nightmares since, even though the descriptions are not graphic they certainly are not fun. To read it all at once is impossible; I had to take a break, and I read relatively quickly. In Order to Live* still gave me enough of a gut-punch that I had to stop or get extremely angry.

With those caveats, however, I still highly recommend In Order to Live* for research. Not just research on how to write a story or a character, either. I recommend reading the book to learn more about North Korea, South Korea, and Communism. Denying oneself that knowledge is akin to playing “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” All that does is let evil propagate.

God only knows how North Korea will eventually collapse but that it will I think is likely. Reading this book and listening to Miss Park speak should help with that, and she does have other options for aiding North Korean defectors in the video above. If you cannot help with that, prayers are always an option – as is passing along her story.

If you feel up to it, pick up In Order to Live today in one of its four formats. This is a story that needs to be spread. These are things many people need to know and remember, lest we see these evils perpetrated further and farther afield…including in our own backyard. So better grab it and pass it along while you can.

We might need it more than we think.

*These are Amazon affiliate links. When you purchase something through them, this author receives a commission from Amazon at no extra charge to you, the buyer.

If you liked this article, friend Caroline Furlong on Facebook or follow her here at www.carolinefurlong.wordpress.com. Her stories have been published in Cirsova’s Summer Special and Unbound III: Goodbye, Earth. She has also had stories published in the Planetary Anthology Series. Another story was released in Cirsova Magazine’s Summer Issue in 2020, and she had a story published in Storyhack Magazine’s 7th Issue, Cirsova Magazine’s 2021 Summer Issue, and another may be read over at Ember Journal. Her book on archetypes, Knights of the Mutant Table, is available on her newsletter behind this paywall. Vol. 1* and Vol. 2* of her series – The Guardian Cycle – is available in paperback and ebook as well. So is her first YA novel, Debris, which can be purchased in ebook and paperback here* and here*. Order them today!

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