In Order To Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey To Freedom By Yeonmi Park

This is an amazing book, (true story) of a striving for freedom. Something most of us in the West can’t really relate to. I literally didn’t want to put the book down, it was that riveting! It will give you a new appreciation for the good fortune you have to have been born in the West and not in North Korea! I highly recommend reading her story. I was especially taken with her thoughts on western education (she did go to an Ivy league school after coming to the States). I let my daughter read my copy, but I made sure I got it back for my library. You will not be disappointed!

Such a raw and riveting story. It leaves you shocked in one moment and rejoicing the next. A big thank you to Yeonmi Park for sharing.

For me, this was a very quick read, because I had trouble putting it down. This young lady has an excellent true story to tell. Although I already had an idea of what life in North Korea is like, her first-hand description of what she, her family, and her friends went through is highly educational. What she and others had to go through in China’s human trafficking network is heart wrenching and angering.

Yeonmi Park is an exceptional young woman, and her story should be read in every high school in our country.

What can I say, but I loved this story. It was very moving and captivating. It was hard to put the book down and only took me a matter of days to finish. It was that good and very detailed. The love she had for her family and many sacrifices she made at such a young age is astounding.
We’re lucky to live in a country where we have so many freedoms. And after reading this story, it makes you realize just how blessed we are.

This was a dynamite read, though sometimes it was difficult, getting my head wrapped around a regime that allows its people to suffer and starve. Park decided to write the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and it has lent a great deal of power to the message that the North Korean government it a cruel and brutal machine, bent on breaking the backs of the very people keeping it afloat. I applaud Park–and she’s a clear and terrific writer, too.

As part of a family who once had risen in approval by the Kims, Park sees her father fall into disgrace, when he’s arrested for his participation in the Black Market–a necessary, but illegal operation taking place daily in North Korea. When living alone with her mother and sister, Park is forced to live with relatives who dislike her family, due to her father’s “behavior”. When winter is too cold and food is scarce, Park’s mother and sister agree it’s time to flee to China. First, Eonmi, the sister, disappears and nothing more is heard of her. Desperate to locate her, Park and her mother set out, assured by their escape guides that they’ll have work and a living waiting for them on the other side of the river. However, the “work” is nothing but grim human trafficking, and Park becomes enslaved as a mistress–at age THIRTEEN. When things in China become unbearable, she and her mother resort to yet another attempt at escaping; this time to South Korea, via the Gobi Desert. Successful, they must be debriefed in camps, set up to assist them in learning how to live in a free society.

Park’s tale is both poignant and masterfully organized. I highly recommend this book. It’s informative and should remind everyone never to take for granted the freedoms we enjoy.

This is a personal memoir of the author’s journey to freedom. It begins by recounting her early life under tyrannical rule in North Korea, providing one of the most personal and depressing portraits of life under that regime I’ve ever read. Presumably other readers will be as shocked and horrified as I was to learn about activities we would find unthinkable but North Koreans are forced to accept as just a part of daily life. Even linguistic repressions are in equal parts fascinating and terrifying. But the book then goes on to describe the author’s escape from that hell on earth at the of only thirteen years (and at the weight of only sixty pounds!). Unfortunately the journey through hell wasn’t over as she’d escaped one hell directly into the hands of human traffickers in China. It was only after a period of more years, fully detailed in these pages, that she eventually made her way to freedom first in South Korea and eventually in the United States.

Though the book is undeniably a fascinating and harrowing read, some have raised questions of its accuracy, and I think that’s an issue that should be addressed. This book is not a work of academic scholarship, but a personal memoir, and should be read as such. Minor errors of fact and slight inconsistencies do exist, as the book’s coauthor freely acknowledges and attributes to the author’s imperfect recollection of childhood memories and (at the time of the book’s publication) relatively weak English. If you’re planning to use the book for academic purposes, claims should be verified against independent sources, but if you’re reading the book to get a personal look into the life of one North Korean defector, you’ll find the book both useful and accurate on all points where it counts. With regard to more aggressive critics who try to call the entire story into question, coauthor Maryanne Vollers attributes those claims to an organized effort by the North Korean regime to discredit her claims.

Regardless of what one thinks of the accuracy of some of the book’s claims—and I am not expert enough to validate every line of the book—it’s undoubtedly one of the most important books I’ve read in a long time because it provides a portrait of a country into which most of us have few opportunities to peer and helps us to understand not only abstractly or academically but personally what it’s like to live under the kind of repressive regime most of us are fortunate enough to have never individually witnessed.