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

by Yeonmi Park

Joan Didion, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

But there was human intimacy and connection, something that is hard to find in the modern world I inhabit today.

“emotional dictatorship.” In North Korea, it’s not enough for the government to control where you go, what you learn, where you work, and what you say. 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.

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.

Still, I learned something important from my short time as a market vendor: once you start trading for yourself, you start thinking for yourself. Before the public distribution system collapsed, the government alone decided who would survive and who would starve. The markets took away the government’s control. My small market transactions made me realize that I had some control over my own fate. It gave me another tiny taste of freedom.