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

by Yeonmi Park

I understand 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.

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.

There was no music blaring in the background, no eyes glued to smartphones back then. But there was human intimacy and connection, something that is hard to find in the modern world I inhabit today.

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.

After my sister and I were asleep, my parents would sometimes lie awake, sick with worry, wondering what they could do to keep us all from starving to death. Anything I did overhear, I learned quickly not to repeat. I was taught never to express my opinion, never to question anything. I was taught to simply follow what the government told me to do or say or think. I actually believed that our Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, could read my mind, and I would be punished for my bad thoughts. And if he didn’t hear me, spies were everywhere, listening at the windows and watching in the school yard.

In North Korea, if one member of the family commits a serious crime, everybody is considered a criminal. Suddenly my father’s family lost its favorable social and political status.

In the free world, children dream about what they want to be when they grow up and how they can use their talents. When I was four and five years old, my only adult ambition was to buy as much bread as I liked and eat all of it.

They need to control you through your emotions, making you a slave to the state by destroying your individuality, and your ability to react to situations based on your own experience of the world.

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.

In North Korea, schoolchildren do more than study. They are part of the unpaid labor force that keeps the country from total collapse. I always had to carry a set of work clothes in my school bag, for the afternoons when they marched us off for manual labor. In the spring we helped the collective farms with their planting. Our job was to carry stones to clear the fields, put in the corn, and haul water. In June and July we weeded the fields, and in fall we were sent out to pick up the rice or corn or beans that had been missed by the harvesters. Our small fingers were good for this purpose. I hated this work. But we were told we couldn’t waste a single grain when people were hungry.

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!”

At school the teachers would send us out into the streets to find poop and carry it back to class. So if we saw a dog pooping in the street, it was like gold. My uncle in Kowon had a big dog who made a big poop—and everyone in the family would fight over it. This is not something you see every day in the West.

I discovered that the hospital used the courtyard to store the dead. The whole time I was staying there, several bodies were stacked like wood between my room and the outhouse. Even more horrible were the rats that feasted on them day and night. It was the most terrible sight I have ever seen. The first thing the rats eat are the eyes, because that is the softest part of a body. I can still see those hollow red eyes. They come to me in my nightmares and I wake up screaming. My mother couldn’t believe the hospital just left the bodies out there in the open. “Why can’t you take these people away and bury them!” she demanded when a nurse walked by. The nurse shrugged. “The government won’t come and collect the bodies until there are seven of them. That’s only five,” she said, then walked away.

when you have more words to describe the world, you increase your ability to think complex thoughts.

Reducing the horror of North Korea into a simple allegory erased its power over me. It helped set me free.

I could finally think about something beyond food and safety, and it made me feel more fully human. I never knew that happiness could come from knowledge. When I was young, my dream was to have one bucket of bread. Now I started to dream great dreams.

It amazed me how quickly a lie loses its power in the face of truth. Within minutes, something I had believed for many years simply vanished.

we all have our own deserts. They may not be the same as my desert, but we all have to cross them to find a purpose in life and be free.