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

Yeonmi Park recounts her childhood in Hyesan, North Korea, where she experienced systemic starvation and the constant threat of state punishment. After her father was imprisoned for trading on the black market, she fled across the frozen Yalu River into China at age thirteen. The narrative details her subsequent fall into the hands of human traffickers, the years spent in the Chinese underground, and her eventual escape across the Gobi Desert to Mongolia. She explains the psychological transition from total state indoctrination to finding personal autonomy in South Korea.

Readers interested in the logistics of human trafficking and the internal social structures of the Kim regime read this memoir to understand the reality of survival under a totalitarian state. It serves those studying North Korean defectors and the difficulties of cultural integration after living in isolation. The reader walks away with a concrete perspective on the human rights crisis in East Asia and a factual account of the illicit trade networks operating along the North Korean-Chinese border.

Clear-cut; an easy read.

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