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

by Yeonmi Park

Although many families owned televisions, radios, and VCR players, they were allowed to listen to or watch only state-generated news programs and propaganda films, which were incredibly boring.

There were advertisements for exotic things like milk and cookies. I never drank milk in North Korea!

The idea that people could choose their own destinies fascinated me.

One is what you are taught to believe; the other is what you see with your own eyes.

But we North Koreans can be experts at lying, even to ourselves.

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.

She described a beautiful island off the southern coast called Jeju, where women divers can hold their breath for a long time and swim like fish while they gather food from the bottom of the sea.

Most of her stories were from the time of Chosun, when there was no North or South Korea, only one country, one people.

We had enough of that on the streets and at home.

When I was growing up, women could not sit at the same table with men.

men in North Korea were taught they were superior, just as they were taught to obey our Leader.

and this skinny girl from Pyongyang wasn’t prepared for the freezing weather.

If you asked anyone in the North Korean countryside, “What is your dream?” most would answer, “To see Pyongyang in my lifetime.”

You need special permission even to visit.

2002 was the first summer that North Korea staged its now-famous Arirang Festival,

But that fizzy soda scared me so much that I never wanted to try another.

Because of an order by Kim Jong Il, all the women had to wear skirts.

The only thing that was ever lit up at night in Hyesan was the Kim Il Sung monument, but here all the important buildings glowed like torches.

In Hyesan, we could sometimes eat food at the market, and there were a few places like restaurants in people’s houses, but you always sat on the floor.

Just about every morning we woke up to the sound of the national anthem blaring on the government-supplied radio.

In North Korea, everybody is required to wake up early and spend an hour sweeping and scrubbing the hallways, or tending the area outside their houses.

We have to do everything at the same time, always.

Most impressive were the thirty thousand to fifty thousand schoolchildren who had trained for many months to sit in the risers behind the stage, holding up colored squares like a living mural to create enormous, ever-changing scenes and slogans glorifying the regime.

We were taught that it was an honor to suffer for our leaders, who had suffered so much for us.

What I saw in them was a pure determination to live, an animal instinct for survival even when there seemed to be no hope.

Like everybody else, she was just trying to survive.

In “reeducation” camps, the inmates are forced to work at hard labor all day, in the fields or in manufacturing jobs, on so little food that they have to fight over scraps and sometimes eat rats to survive.

Education is supposed to be free in North Korea, but students have to pay for their own supplies and uniforms, and the school expects you to bring gifts of food and other items for the teachers.

In North Korea, spring is the season of death.

But it was a tricky thing to buy and sell property in North Korea because everything belonged to the state.

Not many houses had clocks in Songnam-ri, so we would wake up whenever the rooster crowed.

the cities, patients can sometimes buy their own drugs on the black market, but in the rural areas, that isn’t always possible.

Even in big city hospitals there is no such thing as “disposable” supplies. Bandages are washed and reused. Nurses go from room to room using the same syringe on every patient.

Prisoners in these camps can’t even look directly at the guards, because an animal cannot look a human in the face.

As in many places in Asia, dog meat is a delicacy where I grew up, although I loved dogs too much to want to eat them.

Inminban meetings were held once a week as a way for the state to keep track of everybody’s activities and announce new directives.

After we had finished our public confessions, it was time to criticize others.

In North Korea, schoolchildren do more than study. They are part of the unpaid labor force that keeps the country from total collapse.

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.

In North Korea, all the schools had to collect rabbit fur for the soldiers’ winter uniforms.

My small market transactions made me realize that I had some control over my own fate. It gave me another tiny taste of freedom.

The government has to give you permission to move outside your assigned district, and the authorities don’t make it easy.

Because there was no elevator in the building,

that’s why in North Korea the lower-floor apartments are more desirable. The less money you have, the higher up you live.

only human beings can have IDs and he was considered subhuman.

Some were even dyeing their hair and wearing jeans, which was illegal.

The people in the interior of North Korea speak much more slowly than residents of the Chinese border towns.

Some of my friends had rooms with thick curtains they could use for watching DVDs, so we could play movies and dance around to the soundtracks.

We didn’t have the same blind loyalty to the regime that was felt by our parents’ generation.

The only way for a boy to make a date with a girl he liked was to go find her.