This month I will be reviewing In Order to Live by Yeonmi Park. I came to have this book in an odd fashion. I was recently traveling and because of poor time management of the travel coordinators we had a lot of time to read. One of the other travelers was reading this book and at first I thought it was The Girl with Seven Names by Hyeonseo Lee that I reviewed here and Barrie reviewed here, which started up a conversation.
When the other traveler was finished reading the book, she gave it to me. I brought it home and read it.
There are a lot of similarities in the two books in that the way they describe life in North Korea is the same - could've been written by the same person. But what is different is how and why they left North Korea.
Hyenoseo Lee cross the river into China on a whim only planning to stay a few days but ended up staying so long that the government noticed her absence and it became dangerous for her and her family if she were to come back.
Yeonmi Park, her sister and her mother wanted to go to China because they didn't have enough food to eat - their sole purpose in going to China was for food. They found brokers who were willing to help them get into China and they took advantage of it. Due to an unexpected health issue, Yeonmi and her mother were held up but the sister didn't want to wait and left before they did.
What they found out was that the brokers who had graciously agreed to help them escape to China actually were human traffickers and they sold Yeonmi and her mother as sex slaves. Yeonmi was only 13 and she talks about her introduction into sex being watching her mother be raped in front of her.
She went into a lot of detail of what they had to endure and as I read her story I was struck by something that she later admitted as part of her story - as bad as things were for her, she didn't have it as bad as she could have. She was sold to someone who actually cared about people. He bought her mother back so that they could be together. He helped them look for her sister. And he even made arrangements to have her father brought to China and helped get him medical assistance when he needed it. That's not to say it wasn't a bad situation, just that it could be worse.
It only took two years for her and her mother to get to South Korea (they hadn't yet found her sister), whereas it took Hyenoseo something like 12 years but it still wasn't easy for them. She was way behind in her studies and didn't believe the terrible things that were being said about North Korea and their leaders, even despite what she had lived through. It took a lot of time for her to realize and really believe that North Koreans were essentially brainwashed. She doesn't hold back in what she experienced and what she felt during this, even though for years she had pushed back any feelings that didn't come across as happy and well adjusted. It was a very moving story and one I think is important, particularly in these times.
It's worth noting too that when I went to pull the links for the reviews Barrie and I previously did on the other book, Margy had commented that her husband had read this book. Also, the other traveler took down the information for Hyenoseo Lee's book so she could read that one as well. :)
For more book reviews go to barriesummy.blogspot.com.
