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

by Yeonmi Park

In South Korea, I learned to hate the question “What do you think?” Who cared what I thought? It took me a long time to start thinking for myself and to understand why my own opinions mattered.

“I’d like to use this PC . . .” I said. As soon as he heard my accent, he knew I was not from South Korea. “We don’t allow foreigners in this place,” he said. “Okay, I’m from North Korea, but I’m a South Korean citizen now,” I said, utterly shocked. I could feel tears stinging my eyes. “No, you’re a foreigner,” he said. “Foreigners are not allowed here!”

I didn’t feel that I was getting enough of what I needed out of the school’s curriculum, and I didn’t like all the extra religious activities. I didn’t like having to pretend to believe more deeply than I did. And the preaching sometimes reminded me of how the pastor in Qingdao had made me feel so dirty and sinful.

I vowed to myself to read one hundred books a year, and I did.

it was discovering George Orwell’s Animal Farm that marked a real turning point for me. It was like finding a diamond in a mountain of sand. I felt as if Orwell knew where I was from and what I had been through. The animal farm was really North Korea, and he was describing my life. I saw my family in the animals—my grandmother, mother, father, and me, too: I was like one of the “new pigs” with no ideas. Reducing the horror of North Korea into a simple allegory erased its power over me. It helped set me free.

The whole idea of a “celebrity” was very strange to me. Beautiful people in South Korea were adored like our Leader in the North. But the big difference was that in South Korea, people had a choice of whom to idolize.

Being told that what I wanted to do was impossible had motivated me, and earning the GED showed me, for the first time, that there could be justice in my life. Hard work would be rewarded.

In North Korea, the police were the ones who took your money and hauled you away to prison. In China, I froze in fear anytime I saw a uniform, because the police there would arrest me on the spot. Police officers had never protected me from anything in my life. But in South Korea, protection was their job description. And so I chose to run toward the thing I feared the most and join their ranks.

I often bought a small coffee from a vending machine for a few cents and just sat there for a while, staring into the sea of lights that was metropolitan Seoul. Sometimes I wondered how there could be so many lights in this place when, just thirty-five miles north of here, a whole country was shrouded in darkness.

I put it out of my mind and moved ahead—which is something I’ve always been good at.

But I still did not know how to cry for a stranger’s suffering. As far as I knew, it was impossible, because no stranger had ever cried for me.

I had chosen Youth With A Mission because I knew they served some of the poorest and most forgotten communities, but I came to understand that I wasn’t there for other people—I was there for myself. These homeless men and women in Costa Rica might have thought I was ladling rice and picking up trash for them—but I was actually doing it for me. Through helping others, I learned that I had always had compassion in me, although I hadn’t known it and couldn’t express it. I learned that if I could feel for others, I might also begin to feel compassion for myself. I was beginning to heal.

My tutors had me reading everything from Shakespeare to the American abolitionist and escaped slave Frederick Douglass. His defiant letter to his former master made me wonder what kind of letter I might write to Kim Jong Un if I had the nerve. Maybe, like Douglass, I would tell him that I was a human being and he didn’t own me anymore. Now I owned myself.

Until early 2014, most people—including South Koreans—knew North Korea only through its crazy threats of nuclear destruction and its weird, scary leaders with bad haircuts. But in February, the United Nations released a report documenting human rights abuses in North Korea, including extermination, rape, and deliberate starvation. For the first time, North Korean leaders were being threatened with prosecution in the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. But most of the three hundred or so witnesses who contributed to the report remained anonymous, while others had trouble communicating their stories. Suddenly defectors with English skills were needed to give a voice to the millions of North Koreans trapped behind a wall of silence and oppression.

I was being watched closely by the North Korean government. He didn’t tell me how he got this information, only that I should be careful what I said. It could be dangerous. If this was supposed to scare me, it worked. It had never occurred to me that the regime would think I was important enough to be a threat. Or to threaten me. The detective had spoken to my mother and frightened her, too. She wanted me to stop all this crazy activism right away. Why couldn’t I just live a normal life and finish my education before trying to save the world? But the more I thought about it, the angrier I got. I had risked my life to escape from North Korea, yet they were still trying to control me. I would never be free if I let them do that.