In Order to Live by Yeonmi Park ***

Yeonmi Park divides her memoir, In Order toLive, (written at twenty-one) into three parts: North Korea, China, South Korea. In North Korea, the former Soviet Union and China have abandoned the country. This led to economic collapse, crop failures, and widespread starvation.  At thirteen, she escaped to China, where she and her mother were trafficked. A few years later she and her mother escaped to South Korea (via Mongolia). By the end of the book, she is an international human rights activist.

In North Korea she is a member of the Jangmadang generation. A Jangmadang is a state-sanctioned market allowed after the economic collapse, a deviation from the socialist model that was maintained while North Korea was subsidized by China and the Soviet Union.

Having grown up in North Korea, Yeonmi is sensitive to the issues of truth, propaganda, and brainwashing. She was raised to believe what she was told and not question authority. In this environment, she became a chameleon, readily fitting into wherever she found herself. In her memoir, she has some self-awareness. For instance, she excuses/explains her behavior as something she did “in order to live.”

In Korea, she supported smugglers and black marketeers. In China, she married a human trafficker and worked in a sex chat room. Oddly, she seemed more concerned about the chat room than the human trafficking. She became a Christian to escape China, and for support once living in South Korea. She even became a television celebrity. In Korea she also became a super student, in a country of super students.

In between her fitting in “in order to live,” she makes some astute observations.  When trying to understand Christian missionaries, she puts her childhood indoctrination to use. “We got some help from one of the other defectors who explained it this way: ‘Just think of God as Kim Il Sung and Jesus as Kim Jong Il. Then it makes more sense.’” She also related her childhood in North Korea to Christian missionaries with, “We began by writing out quotations from Kim Il Sung or Kim Jong Il, the way people in other parts of the world would copy Bible verses or passages from the Koran.”

As much as Yeonmi presents herself as someone who has transcended her upbringing, she writes like a propagandist and I never feel we learn about the real Yeonmi Park, if such a person exists.

Yeonmi’s story is a fantastic rags-to-riches story which some believe is too fantastic to be true.

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