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

I put off reading this book for a while. North Korea is one of those subjects where the statistics are so large that they stop meaning anything, and I expected another account built out of numbers: famine deaths, prison camps, border crossings. What I found instead was a very specific story about a girl who was thirteen, weighed sixty pounds, and did not know the word for freedom. That specificity is the reason the book stays with me. Yeonmi Park describes a world in which a bowl of rice is a political fact and a pair of shoes can decide whether you live.

The book was written with Maryanne Vollers, a journalist, and published by Penguin Press in 2015. It moves chronologically, from Park's childhood in Hyesan on the Chinese border, through her family's collapse, her escape in 2007, years of trafficking and hiding in China, a desert crossing into Mongolia, and finally resettlement in South Korea. It is a memoir, not a history, and it is shaped by memory and by the demands of telling a story to strangers. That matters when you read it, and I will come back to it.

A Childhood Measured in Electricity and Food

Park was born in 1993 in Hyesan, a city in the far north of North Korea. Her father, Jin Sik, traded on the black market. Her mother, Keum Sook, taught school and believed much of what the state told her. Her older sister, Eunmi, was the one who first began to question the official version of things.

The details Park uses to establish normal life are small and concrete. The electricity came on rarely. Children learned to read by candlelight and to calculate how long a battery would last. The family ate corn and potatoes, and meat was a rumor. Her mother kept a portrait of Kim Il Sung in the apartment and dusted it with more care than anything else. Park explains the songbun system, the hereditary caste ranking that decided where a family could live, what work they could do, and whether a child could go to university. Her family's ranking was already shaky because of her father's black market activity, and it fell further when he was arrested.

What Park does well in these early chapters is show how propaganda and hunger coexist. The state broadcasts a story of abundance while people eat grass and bark. Children are taught to recite slogans and to report on their neighbors. Park's mother, who had internalized much of this, is not a villain in the story. She is a woman trying to keep her children alive inside a system that has taught her to trust it. The book does not mock her for that.

The Market as a Second Education

The jangmadang, the informal markets that grew after the state economy collapsed, become Park's real school. She sees people bargaining, lying to officials, and surviving without permission. She notices that the market has its own logic, one that does not care about songbun. This is where she first understands that the state is not all powerful, that people can carve out small spaces the regime cannot fully control.

Smuggled DVDs and Chinese television reach her through neighbors. She watches South Korean dramas and sees apartments with refrigerators and people who argue with each other without being arrested. She does not yet imagine leaving. She imagines eating bread every day. That distinction is important. Park is not a political dissident as a child. She is hungry, and she is curious, and those two things turn out to be enough.

Her father is the book's most ambiguous figure before Hongwei. Jin Sik is a smuggler, a risk taker, and a man who sometimes puts his family in danger for a deal. He is also the parent who first shows Yeonmi that the state can be cheated. Park does not turn him into a hero. She remembers his charm and his absences, the way he could talk his way past a guard and the way he left his wife to manage the consequences. When he comes back from the labor camp, wasted by illness, the family's grief is mixed with relief and resentment. That kind of messiness is what makes the memoir feel lived rather than constructed.

Her father's arrest in 2002 changes the family's standing. He is sentenced in 2004 to a labor camp. Park describes visiting him and the way prison strips a person down. He returns on medical leave in 2005, thin and in pain. The family moves to Kowon, a rural town, where her mother tries to start over. It is there that rumors reach them about brokers who can take young women into China.

The Night of March 31, 2007

The escape itself is the most vivid sequence in the book. Park had been hospitalized for an intestinal infection that doctors mistook for appendicitis. She was still recovering from surgery when the plan was set. Eunmi had already left for China. Yeonmi and her mother were supposed to follow. On the night of March 31, 2007, they scrambled down the bank of the frozen Yalu River. Park was weak enough that she had to slide down on her bottom, sending rocks into the water. A soldier appeared. The guide bribed him. They ran.

Park's account of that crossing is careful about fear. She does not pretend she was brave. She was paralyzed, and the guide had to drag her across the ice. When she looked back, the power grid was down and the horizon was black. She did not think about freedom. She thought about her sister and about food.

What waits on the Chinese side is worse than she expected. A broker separates mother and daughter almost immediately and rapes Keum Sook. Yeonmi is sold to a man called Zhifang, who tries to rape her and then sells her to another man, Hongwei. Her mother is sold to a farming family. The book does not soften any of this. Park describes the mechanics of trafficking with a flatness that is more disturbing than drama: who paid whom, what was promised, how quickly a person becomes property.

Hongwei

Hongwei is the most complicated figure in the memoir. He is a trafficker and a rapist. He is also, at times, Yeonmi's only protection. He cycles between violence, gifts, and promises. He tells her he will find her mother and her sister if she cooperates. She learns to detach from her body and to treat sex as a transaction, because that is the only way she can keep going. She also helps him with other trafficked women, teaching them basic hygiene and how to navigate Chinese households. Park is honest about the shame she felt doing this, and about the way survival can make a person complicit in things she despises.

Hongwei does keep some of his promises. He reunites Yeonmi with her mother. He brings her father across the border. The family is together again, minus Eunmi, but the reunion is brief. Jin Sik has advanced colon cancer. He dies in early 2008 with Yeonmi beside him. They cremate him in China because they cannot take him home.

The Beijing Olympics crackdown destroys Hongwei's business. He becomes more volatile. He sells Keum Sook to ease his financial problems, and Yeonmi is later kidnapped by a wealthy man named Huang. Hongwei retrieves her, which is the moment the book makes clearest: he is not a rescuer, and she knows it. After that, she decides she will not depend on him again. He lets her go, and she returns the jewelry he gave her. It is not a clean break, and Park does not pretend it is.

Chat Rooms, Missionaries, and the Gobi

In Shenyang, Yeonmi and her mother work in online adult chat rooms, talking to men for money. The work is degrading, and Park describes it without moralizing. It also teaches her that there are other ways to live. Through another refugee, they hear about a Christian network in Qingdao that helps North Koreans reach Mongolia, where they can seek asylum and eventually be resettled in South Korea.

The Qingdao section is quieter. They hide in safehouses with other defectors, study the Bible with missionaries, and prepare for the crossing. Park is not sure what she believes, but she is grateful for the help. The journey to Mongolia is brutal: days on buses, then a foot crossing of the Gobi Desert. When Mongolian soldiers detain them, Yeonmi threatens to kill herself rather than be sent back to China. The soldiers relent and take the group to safety.

They enter South Korea on April 20, 2009. The processing is not the happy ending a reader might expect. They spend weeks being interrogated at the National Intelligence Service, then months at Hanawon, the government resettlement center. Park has to learn how to make choices. A counselor asks her favorite color and she cannot answer. She has never been asked to have a preference. She struggles with depression and anxiety, hides her accent to avoid discrimination, and races through years of missed schooling.

Seoul and the Return of Eunmi

Park starts at Dongguk University in 2012, studying police administration. She begins appearing on South Korean television, partly to earn money and partly in the hope that Eunmi will see her. The strategy works, though not immediately. In 2013, while Park is in the United States with a missionary group, she gets a call. Eunmi is alive and has arrived in South Korea. The sisters reunite after seven years apart. They had been living near each other in China without knowing it.

The last chapters follow Park's emergence as a public speaker. She addresses the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2014. She begins writing the book. Her mother returns to China to retrieve Jin Sik's ashes and brings them to South Korea. The memoir ends with Park hoping to finish her degree and study law, and with her insistence that telling the story is the way to honor the life she fought for.

What the Book Does, and What It Does Not

The strength of In Order to Live is its resistance to abstraction. Park shows how a totalitarian system works through small humiliations: the portrait that must be dusted, the accent that must be hidden, the favorite color that cannot be named. She shows how trafficking works through ordinary transactions. She shows how survival can involve choices that no one should have to make.

The book has limits. It is a memoir written with a journalist, and some scenes are reconstructed with a novelist's pacing. Park's public account has been challenged since publication, most notably in a 2023 Washington Post investigation that raised questions about details of her timeline and her father's death. Some of those questions are about memory, some about the way defector stories are packaged for Western audiences. The core of the book, the famine, the border, the trafficking, the resettlement, is corroborated by other defectors and by human rights organizations. The disputed details matter, but they do not erase the larger picture.

I also think the book is weaker when it tries to explain North Korea as a whole. Park is at her best when she stays close to what she saw. When she generalizes about the regime or about Korean culture, the prose becomes flatter and more predictable. The final chapters, which cover her activism, feel rushed compared with the earlier material.

Still, this is one of the clearer accounts of what a closed society does to a child. Park does not ask the reader to admire her. She asks the reader to understand how quickly a normal life can become a survival problem, and how much of what we call freedom is made of small, ordinary choices. The favorite color question is the one I keep thinking about. It is a trivial question, and it is the whole book. A person who has never been allowed to want anything has to learn how to want, and that is a longer project than a border crossing.