In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom — Yeonmi Park
Both inspiring and shocking, this powerful memoir of a girl’s escape from North Korea has lessons for all of us
“I am most grateful for two things: that I was born in North Korea, and that I escaped from North Korea.”
Yeonmi Park’s memoir begins with the night of her escape but quickly rewinds to show the myriad reasons why she would want to escape her home country in the first place. The escape is not the beginning of the story, but it is also not even remotely the end. Without spoiling too much, Park (no relation, in case you wondered) escaped from the horrors of North Korea and into the hands of sex traffickers. A number of events prevent her from being able to reach true freedom until years later. And even then, things are still difficult because of her history.
As the title suggests, Park walks the reader through the difficult choices that Park and her mother had to make to survive, which makes In Order to Live a tough read but at the same time an inspiring one. Park’s is a difficult story to review because it is so much better to read if you don’t know what will happen next. I feel that I would have enjoyed it more if I had known less. However, one theme of In Order to Live became clear and deserves some discussion.
Through Park’s narrative you begin to see the surface-level judgements of her by others. It almost becomes too much to bear, but she seems to take it in stride as if they have reason to treat her as lesser. In North Korea and later in China she is discriminated against as a woman. Later, Christian missionaries think twice about helping her because of work she had been forced into while in China. Even in college, her professors assume she will not be a good student because she is from North Korea. At every turn, she is assumed to be lesser before she is truly known. Especially among Christians, this behavior should be anathema. Yet it perseveres. For someone in the situations in which Park finds herself, our concerns should be for safety and freedom, not how this victim could make us look to outsiders.
However, while prejudice perseveres, so does hope. That is the message of Yeonmi Park’s story, and that is what she is fighting for even now. Hope tells us that sex trafficking will eventually be no more. Hope tells us that everyone will be accepted as free and equal. Hope tells us that the walls of brutal state regimes will be broken down in the face of the kingdom of Jesus Christ. In order to truly live, we must have that hope.
