[Book Review] Yeonmi Park’s ‘In Order to Live’

A memoir full of hard-won freedom, feeling and frankness. Yeonmi Park’s story is as harrowing as it is awe-inspiring, and makes for an impactful and unforgettable read.

In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom, written by Yeonmi Park with Maryanne Vollers. Image: Amazon UK.

“As soon as I decided to tell my secret, I felt free for the first time ever.” (p. 264)

I have an unruly habit of steering myself towards the lighthearted in life. I read unrealistic romance and fantasy books to escape, I turn off the news when I hear something too depressing, I brush struggles under the rug.

So picking up this book was a bold move for me, and it really paid off. I’ve not read anything so real and so hard to brush under the rug in a long time.

As is evident in the title, this autobiography follows Yeonmi Park and her life before and after her escape from North Korea. Throughout the text, she undergoes countless unimaginable trials and trauma, and yet manages to find her voice along with her freedom. It is a truly remarkable and inspiring story.

Yeonmi sharing her life story in Dublin. Image: One Young World.

“I had never been taught to use the critical thinking part of my brain.” (p. 216)

It is through telling her story that she ‘felt free for the first time ever.’ Yeonmi Park tells us that: “sometimes the only way we can survive our own memories is to shape them into a story that makes sense out of events that seem inexplicable.”

This is what moved me the most in this text, the idea that she’s lived her life with no real sense of individual identity and is now able to truly express herself.

In Hanawon (the Settlement Support Centre for North Korean refugees), she is taught how to introduce herself, and asked her favourite colour. She cannot answer. She thinks: “Why would anyone care what ‘I’ wanted,” and tells us that in North Korea there is no ‘I,’ only ‘we.’ She tries hard to come up with the right answer, for fear of being punished, only to eventually learn that the answer requires her opinion to be expressed.

Yeonmi and her sister Eunmi. Image: The Telegraph.

“Sometimes the only way we can survive our own memories is to shape them into a story that makes sense out of events that seem inexplicable.” (p. 5)

Steven Borowiec comments in A Firefly in the Dark of North Korea that certain North Korean defector stories have been subject to ‘questions over factual accuracy.’ Yeonmi’s story has also been subject to scrutiny. No matter where you stand in regards to these concerns, it seems poignant to point out the difference between truth and fact.

Every word in Yeonmi Park’s work is imbued with a brutal honesty and genuine emotion. I felt as if I were with her every step of the way. Does it matter that some are sceptical over the details, when the tone is so sincere?

Now I know how important it is to read the painful stories, to not brush the hard-won voices of others under the rug, because we don’t know what they have endured to be able to use them.

Yeonmi Park in Brooklyn. Image: Stefan Ruiz for The Telegraph.

Copies of this are available on Amazon UK as well as other bookseller sites.

Edited by Isabel Miller.

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