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

by Yeonmi Park

I wasn’t dreaming of freedom when I escaped from North Korea. I didn’t even know what it meant to be free. All I knew was that if my family stayed behind, we would probably die—from starvation, from disease, from the inhuman conditions of a prison labor camp. The hunger had become unbearable; I was willing to risk my life for the promise of a bowl of rice.

I know that it is possible to lose part of your humanity in order to survive. But I also know that the spark of human dignity is never completely extinguished, and that given the oxygen of freedom and the power of love, it can grow again.

When you have so little, just the smallest thing can make you happy—and that is one of the very few features of life in North Korea that I actually miss.

For more than four thousand years there has been one Korean people, but many different Koreas.

The United States dropped more bombs on North Korea than it had during the entire Pacific campaign in World War II. The Americans bombed every city and village, and they kept bombing until there were no major buildings left to destroy. Then they bombed the dams to flood the crops. The damage was unimaginable, and nobody knows how many civilians were killed and maimed.

“This man is in bad shape,” she thought. “If I don’t marry him, he’ll never find a wife.”

only students from better families are allowed a say in what they will study.

I loved stories, but the only books available in North Korea were published by the government and had political themes. Instead of scary fairy tales, we had stories set in a filthy and disgusting place called South Korea, where homeless children went barefoot and begged in the streets. It never occurred to me until after I arrived in Seoul that those books were really describing life in North Korea. But we couldn’t see past the propaganda.

I’m often asked why people would risk going to prison to watch Chinese commercials or South Korean soap operas or year-old wrestling matches. I think it’s because people are so oppressed in North Korea, and daily life is so grim and colorless, that people are desperate for any kind of escape. When you watch a movie, your imagination can carry you away for two whole hours. You come back refreshed, your struggles temporarily forgotten.

There were so many desperate people on the streets crying for help that you had to shut off your heart or the pain would be too much. After a while you can’t care anymore. And that is what hell is like.

To us, it is a mystical shrine with towering monuments and thrilling pageantry—like Red Square, Jerusalem, and Disneyland all in one city.

I also visited a zoo for the first time in my life and saw monkeys, tigers, bears, and elephants. It was like stepping into one of my picture books. The most exciting animal I saw was a peacock. I didn’t think these birds were real, just drawings somebody made up. But when the male peacock spread his magnificent tail feathers, I nearly screamed. I couldn’t imagine it was possible for something so beautiful to exist in the same world as me.

One of the big problems in North Korea was a fertilizer shortage. When the economy collapsed in the 1990s, the Soviet Union stopped sending fertilizer to us and our own factories stopped producing it. Whatever was donated from other countries couldn’t get to the farms because the transportation system had also broken down. This led to crop failures that made the famine even worse. So the government came up with a campaign to fill the fertilizer gap with a local and renewable source: human and animal waste. Every worker and schoolchild had a quota to fill. You can imagine what kind of problems this created for our families. Every member of the household had a daily assignment, so when we got up in the morning, it was like a war. My aunts were the most competitive. “Remember not to poop in school!” my aunt in Kowon told me every day. “Wait to do it here!”

I was so sad that people who had been so respectful of my father when he was wealthy and powerful now treated him so badly.

Salted radishes are the poor person’s kimchi; we couldn’t afford the ingredients necessary to make the spicy sauce for the traditional pickled cabbage.

Because there was no elevator in the building, we had to walk up eight flights in a dark stairwell to get to the apartment—that’s why in North Korea the lower-floor apartments are more desirable. The less money you have, the higher up you live.

Skipping a meal could literally mean death, so that became my biggest fear and obsession. You don’t care how food tastes and you don’t eat with pleasure. You eat only with an animal instinct to survive, unconsciously calculating how much longer each bite of food will keep your body going.

I never knew freedom could be such a cruel and difficult thing. Until now, I had always thought that being free meant being able to wear jeans and watch whatever movies I wanted without worrying about being arrested. Now I realized that I had to think all the time—and it was exhausting.

I read to fill my mind and to block out the bad memories. But I found that as I read more, my thoughts were getting deeper, my vision wider, and my emotions less shallow. The vocabulary in South Korea was so much richer than the one I had known, and when you have more words to describe the world, you increase your ability to think complex thoughts.