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

by Yeonmi Park

I was thirteen years old and weighed only sixty pounds.

turned to take a quick glance back at the place where I was born. The electric power grid was down, as usual, and all I could see was a black, lifeless horizon.

The hunger had become unbearable; I was willing to risk my life for the promise of a bowl of rice.

Like tens of thousands of other North Koreans, I escaped my homeland and settled in South Korea, where we are still considered citizens, as if a sealed border and nearly seventy years of conflict and tension never divided us.

North and South Koreans have the same ethnic backgrounds, and we speak the same language—except in the North there are no words for things like “shopping malls,” “liberty,” or even “love,” at least as the rest of the world knows it. The only true “love” we can express is worship for the Kims, a dynasty of dictators who have ruled North Korea for three generations. The regime blocks all outside information, all videos and movies, and jams radio signals. There is no World Wide Web

at least half of North Koreans live in extreme poverty and many are chronically malnourished.

My former country doesn’t even call itself North Korea—it claims to be Chosun, the true Korea, a perfect socialist paradise where 25 million people live only to serve the Supreme Leader, Kim Jong Un.

Many of us who have escaped call ourselves “defectors” because by refusing to accept our fate and die for the Leader, we have deserted our duty. The regime calls us trait...

I believed that, somehow, if I refused to acknowledge the unspeakable past, it would disappear. I convinced myself that a lot of it never happened; I taught myself to forget the rest. But as I began to write this book, I realized that without the whole truth my life would have no power, no real meaning.

At our house in Hyesan, our water pipes were almost always dry, so my mother usually carried our clothes down to the river and washed them there. When she brought them back, she put them on the warm floor to dry. Because electricity was so rare in our neighborhood, whenever the lights came on people were so happy they would sing and clap and shout. Even in the middle of the night, we would wake up to celebrate.

The country I grew up in was not like the one my parents had known as children in the 1960s and 1970s. When they were young, the state took care of everyone’s basic needs: clothes, medical care, food. After the Cold War ended, the Communist countries that had been propping up the North Korean regime all but abandoned it, and our state-controlled economy collapsed. North Koreans were suddenly on their own.

he was born in North Korea, where family connections and party loyalty are all that matter, and hard work guarantees you nothing but more hard work and a constant struggle to survive.

For more than four thousand years there has been one Korean people, but many different Koreas. Legend tells us that our history began in 2333 B.C., with a kingdom called Chosun, which means “Morning Land.” Despite its soothing name, my homeland has rarely been peaceful. The Korean peninsula lay at the crossroads of great empires, and over the centuries Korean kingdoms had to fight off invaders from Manchuria to Mongolia and beyond. Then, in the early twentieth century, the expanding Japanese empire slowly absorbed Korea using threats and treaties, finally annexing the whole country in 1910. That was two years before the birth of North Korea’s first Leader, Kim Il Sung,

at the outset of World War II, Kim Il Sung joined the Soviet army and (as I later learned), contrary to North Korean propaganda, which has him almost singlehandedly defeating the Japanese—spent the war at a military base far from the fighting.

Kim Il Sung was a Stalinist and an ultranationalist dictator who decided to reunify the country in the summer of 1950 by invading the South with Russian tanks and thousands of troops. In North Korea, we were taught that the Yankee imperialists started the war, and our soldiers gallantly fought off their evil invasion. In fact, the United States military returned to Korea for the express purpose of defending the South—bolstered by an official United Nations force—and quickly drove Kim Il Sung’s army all the way to the Yalu River, nearly taking over the country. They were stopped only when Chinese soldiers surged across the border and fought the Americans back to the 38th parallel. By the end of this senseless war, at least three million Koreans had been killed or wounded, millions were refugees, and most of the country was in ruins.

During the 1950s and 1960s, China and the Soviet Union poured money into North Korea to help it rebuild. The North has coal and minerals in its mountains, and it was always the richer, more industrialized part of the country. It bounced back more quickly than the South, which was still mostly agricultural and slow to recover from the war. But that started to change in the 1970s and 1980s, as South Korea became a manufacturing center and North Korea’s Soviet-style system began to collapse under its own weight.

In North Korea, if one member of the family commits a serious crime, everybody is considered a criminal.

There are more than fifty subgroups within the main songbun castes, and once you become an adult, your status is constantly being monitored and adjusted by the authorities. A network of casual neighborhood informants and official police surveillance ensures that nothing you do or your family does goes unnoticed. Everything about you is recorded and stored in local administrative offices and in big national organizations, and the information is used to determine where you can live, where you can go to school, and where you can work.

Despite what others might call disappointments, she never questioned the regime’s authority to control her life. Unlike North Koreans who grew up along the borders, my mother had no exposure to the outside world or foreign ideas. She knew only what the regime taught her and she remained a proud and pure revolutionary. And because she had a poet’s heart, she felt an enormous emotional connection to the official propaganda. She sincerely believed that North Korea was the center of the universe and that Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il had supernatural powers. She believed that Kim Il Sung caused the sun to rise and that when Kim Jong Il was born in a cabin on our sacred Mount Paektu (he was actually born in Russia), his arrival was marked by a double rainbow and a bright new star in the sky.

There was no concept of “dating” in North Korea at that time. Our culture has always been extremely conservative about relations between men and women. If you grow up in the West, you may think that romance occurs naturally, but it does not. You learn how to be romantic from books and movies, or from observation.

There is another Korean saying: “The thread follows the needle.” Usually the man is the needle and the thread is the woman, so the woman follows the husband to his home. But she does not take his name. For many women, it is the only independence that remains in their lives.

Because my mother had spent her whole life in the center of the country, far away from any outside influences, she didn’t know anything about the black market. She didn’t even understand the concept of business. This all changed during the 1990s, when the famine and an economic collapse turned the whole country into a nation of traders in order to survive. But before that, capitalism was something dirty to North Koreans, and money was too disgusting for most people to mention in polite conversation.

North Koreans are raised to venerate our fathers and our elders; it’s part of the culture we inherited from Confucianism. And so in our collective minds, Kim Il Sung was our beloved grandfather and Kim Jong Il was our father.

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.

Almost everybody I knew lost family in the famine. The youngest and oldest died first. Then the men, who had fewer reserves than women. Starving people wither away until they can no longer fight off diseases, or the chemicals in their blood become so unbalanced that their hearts forget to beat.

Only the most privileged citizens are allowed to live and work in the nation’s capital. You need special permission even to visit. But Pyongyang is as familiar to ordinary North Koreans as our own backyards because of the hundreds upon hundreds of picture books and propaganda films that celebrate it as the perfect expression of our socialist paradise.

After I escaped to South Korea, I was surprised to hear that the blossoms and green shoots of spring symbolize life and renewal in other parts in the world. In North Korea, spring is the season of death. It is the time of year when our stores of food are gone, but the farms produce nothing to eat because new crops are just being planted. Spring is when most people died of starvation. My sister and I often heard the adults who saw dead bodies on the street make clucking noises and say, “It’s too bad they couldn’t hold on until summer.”

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.

North Koreans my age and younger are sometimes called the Jangmadang Generation, because we grew up with markets, and we couldn’t remember a time when the state provided for everyone’s needs. We didn’t have the same blind loyalty to the regime that was felt by our parents’ generation.

Before he was arrested, my father had been a brilliant, funny, irreverent man. But even as a thirteen-year-old girl, I could tell that his time in the prison camp had broken his spirit. He couldn’t look a policeman in the face, not even the ones who used to joke and drink with him at his table. My father used to love South Korean music; now he refused to listen to it. He was afraid someone might hear it and report him.

North Koreans have always been told that the rest of the world was an impure, disgusting, and dangerous place. Worst of all was South Korea, which was a human cesspool, no more than an impoverished colony of the American bastards we were all taught to hate and fear.

Ordinary smugglers didn’t trade in people. That was a much more dangerous operation. And surveillance was too tight to risk crossing the river alone. We would need a broker to bribe the border guards and guide us across.

My father was rocking back and forth, crying silently. He didn’t dare make a noise because our neighbors would hear and know something was wrong.

“If you want to stay in China, you have to be sold and get married,” she told us.

Already the air seemed different in China. In North Korea we lived in a haze of dust and burning trash. But in China the world seemed cleaner and you could smell wonderful things cooking everywhere.

Virtually all defectors in China live in constant fear. The men who manage to get across often hire themselves to farmers for slave wages. They don’t dare complain because all the farmer has to do is notify the police and they will be arrested and repatriated. The Chinese government doesn’t want a flood of immigrants, nor does it want to upset the leadership in Pyongyang. Not only is North Korea a trading partner, but it’s a nuclear power perched right on its border, and an important buffer between China and the American presence in the South. Beijing refuses to grant refugee status to escapees from North Korea, instead labeling them illegal “economic migrants” and shipping them home. We didn’t know any of this, of course, before we escaped. We thought we would be welcomed. And in some places we were—just not by the authorities.

men and their families created the market for North Korean slave-brides. But brides weren’t cheap, sometimes costing thousands of dollars, or the equivalent of a year’s earnings for a poor farmer. Of course, trafficking and slave marriages are illegal in China, and any children that result are not considered Chinese citizens. That means they cannot legally go to school, and without proper identification papers, can’t find work when they get older. Everything about trafficking is inhuman, but it’s still a big business in northeastern China.

she sprayed my head with something to kill the lice and put my hair in a shower cap. Everybody in North Korea had lice, and there was no way to get rid of them. So this treatment was a huge relief.

I felt such despair. I rubbed my skin until I bled, and that made me feel a little better. I discovered that physical pain helped me feel less pain inside, and for a while pinching and scratching myself with a rough cloth became a habit. Sometimes it was the only way to escape the aching in my heart.

August 15 is a big holiday in North Korea because it celebrates the day in 1945 that Japan surrendered.

the police are always scanning for illegal calls.

I didn’t know anything about cancer because it is so uncommon in North Korea. This wasn’t to say the disease didn’t exist; it probably just went undiagnosed. Most people didn’t die of cancer because other things killed them first.

If I had to accept Christ as my savior to get to South Korea, then I was going to be the best Christian these people had ever seen. We had to worship every morning and then study the Bible all day. The pastor had us write out page after page from the book of Proverbs in Korean. We did a lot of singing and praying and repenting for our sins. I had no trouble grasping the concept of an all-powerful, all-knowing God. It was a lot like what we had been taught in North Korea about our Dear Leader, who knew everything and would take care of everything for us if we were loyal to him. But I had trouble understanding how He was a merciful God. I wondered why this God existed in South Korea but not in North Korea.

twenty-six thousand North Koreans who have passed through the Center and now live in South Korea.

Prostitutes in China can often be identified by tattoos on their arms or backs.

I said, “I want to study and go to university.” He snorted with surprise and said, “Oh, I don’t think you can do that.” Then he added, “But I suppose everybody should get a second chance.” A second chance? I thought. A second chance is what criminals get. I knew I wasn’t a criminal; I did what I had to do to survive and save my family. But now my heart sank. I realized I had no hope in this place. I felt dirty and lost, just like I had when the pastor was lecturing me about sin. If this was the way people were going to treat me when they found out who I was, then I would have to become somebody else. Somebody who could be accepted and succeed in South Korea.

My life so far had been all about survival. I had found a way to survive in North Korea. I had found a different way to survive in China. But I wondered whether I had the energy to survive here. I felt so very tired.

South Koreans use a lot of unfamiliar slang, and English has crept into the vocabulary as “Konglish.” For example, a handbag in South Korea is now a han-du-bag-u. And shopping is syoping.

I was able to believe that Kim Jong Il lived in luxurious mansions while his people starved. But I could not accept that it was his father, the Great Leader Kim Il Sung, and not the evil Yankee and South Korean invaders, who started the Korean War in 1950. For a long time, I simply refused to believe it. Assuming that North Korea was always the victim of imperialist aggression was part of my identity.