In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom

In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom is a memoir by Yeonmi Park first published in 2015 recounting previously untold facets of her experience fleeing North Korea with her mother. A human rights activist and denouncer of the North Korean regime, Park has told her story at various international events, including, famously, the One Young World summit in Dublin in 2014. However, all previous accounts of her escape from North Korea omitted the details of her time in China as both a victim and a reluctant perpetrator of human trafficking. Park describes In Order to Live as an attempt to confront and make sense of the painful truths of her past by committing her experiences to paper. The narrative is separated chronologically into three parts, accounting for each of the three countries in which she resided on her journey to freedom: North Korea, China, and South Korea.

Summary

Yeonmi Park was born prematurely on October 4, 1993, weighing less than three pounds and struggling to survive. She is the second daughter of Jin Sik Park (father) and Keum Sook Byeon (mother). Her sister, Eunmi Park, is older by two years. Park’s story begins in Hyesan, a small north-eastern rural town bordering the Yalu river, where she grew up. At first, her family is relatively affluent due to her father’s illegal trading business. Their luck changes when the economic collapse and famine of the 1990s pushes the leadership at Pyongyang to allow limited trading activities in state-managed marketplaces, jangmadang. Jin Sik Park’s business cannot shoulder the competition, and the family struggles to pay its debts. Later, he is arrested and imprisoned for smuggling metals from Pyongyang and forced to work in reeducation camps. In 2007, he bribes a prison guard to let him visit his family due to his deteriorating health.

Economic destitution and disillusion with the North Korean regime push the family to seek a way out that same year. They hear women can find work in China and young girls are sought after for adoption. At the request of their parents, young Yeonmi and her sister Eunmi begin discreetly asking around to find out how to cross the border to China. Yeonmi falls ill just as her sister finds a broker to guide them to China. With spring on the horizon and the threat of ice on the Yalu river melting, Eunmi is impatient to escape to China as soon as possible. She ends up leaving her family behind to make the trip on her own. Yeonmi learns the name of Eunmi’s broker through a message her sister hid under her pillow. She and her mother find the broker, who assures them they will reunite with Eunmi if they cross the river. Park realizes how eager she is to leave North Korea and begs her mother to go.

Once in Chaingbai—the city on the Chinese side of the border—Yeonmi and her mother soon realize they have become entangled in a network of human trafficking. Faced with the prospect of being sent back to North Korea if they do not cooperate, Yeonmi decides to stay. They are sold to a Chinese broker, Zhifang, who rapes Yeonmi’s mother, then sells her to a Chinese farmer. Zhifang attempts to rape Yeonmi as well, despite knowing she is only 13. When she refuses to sleep with him, he sells her to Hongwei, a middle-aged Han Chinese man at the top of the North Korean bride trafficking network.

Hongwei takes Yeonmi to Jinzhou, where he bribes her to sleep with him on the condition that he will reunite her with her parents and her sister. Yeonmi is also forced to help him in his bride trafficking business. Her first task is to negotiate a price to buy back her mother from the Chinese farmer. Hongwei keeps his promise and helps Yeonmi’s father escape North Korea. Although her family is reunited on her birthday in October 2007, Yeonmi’s father is diagnosed with advanced colon cancer and dies a month into the new calendar year.

With the onset of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, the Chinese regime cracks down on the North Korean human trafficking network. Hongwei’s business becomes risky and unprofitable, and Yeonmi and her mother are soon able to convince their captors to let them fend for themselves. They find jobs as sex workers in an online chat-room business in Shenyang, where Yeonmi’s mother learns that Christian missionaries in Qingdao are helping North Korean refugees to escape to South Korea through Mongolia. They decide they will risk their lives crossing the freezing Gobi desert for the chance of tasting freedom.

After landing in Seoul, Yeonmi and her mother find it difficult to rebuild their lives. They stay briefly at the Hanawon Resettlement Center to learn about life in South Korea and are given a small government stipend to help them begin their new lives. Mother and daughter settle in a rundown apartment in Asan, and Yeonmi begins reading to catch up with her education.

At the end of 2011, Yeonmi receives a phone call from the producer of a TV show who wants her to retell the story of her escape from China. After the program airs, she is invited to appear on another popular TV show, Now on My Way. Although afraid to be in the spotlight, she agrees in both instances in the hopes of finding Eunmi.

Yeonmi juggles a very busy lifestyle between studying and working, but her hard work pays off when she ranks 14th in her class in the spring semester of 2013. Untethered now that she has proven her worth—to herself and to the world—Park begins traveling abroad with a Christian group, Youth With A Mission, to help others in need and to make amends. She first hears that Eunmi has escaped to South Korea when she is in the United States. After flying home and reuniting with her, Yeonmi begins to heal and plan for the future.

In 2015, she agrees to deliver several speeches on the topic of human trafficking at international events, but she is not yet ready to reveal her own story as a victim of sex trafficking. Soon after representing North Korea at the One Young World Summit in Dublin, she realizes she had to commit her story to paper to accept the past. She begins working on her memoir in 2015. In Order to Live concludes with her mother travelling back to China to bring home her father’s ashes.