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

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Your mother and sister went through journeys as difficult as your own. What did this experience teach you about the importance of family? 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 don't care anymore. And that is what hell is like.” It must be a sign that you’re doing something right that the Kim regime feels the need to spread malicious propaganda about you? We all have our own deserts. They may not be the same as my desert, but we all have to cross them to find a purpose in life and be free.”

as I began to write this book, I realized that without the whole truth my life would have no power, no real meaning.” 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.” I inhaled books like other people breathe oxygen. I didn't just read for knowledge or pleasure, I read to live.” One man, in particular, stands out – Hongwei. He’s a violent gangster, but he also clearly loved you. Do you have mixed emotions about him now? He, after all, helped you escape.I could not feel, smell, see, hear, or taste the world around me. If I had allowed myself to experience these things in all their intensity, I might have lost my mind. If I had allowed myself to cry, I might never have been able to stop. So I survived, but I never felt joy, never felt safe.”

Family are everything; everyone understands the strength of family. For me, they were the reason that I managed to get by while I was in captivity and now they are the reason to live in freedom. They are the biggest blessing I have in the world. I understand that sometimes the only way we can survive our own memories is to shape them into a story that makes sense out of events that seem inexplicable.”I am most grateful for two things: that I was born in North Korea, and that I escaped from North Korea.”– Yeonmi Park In North Korea, even arithmetic is a propaganda tool. A typical problem would go like this: “If you kill one American bastard and your comrade kills two, how many dead American bastards do you have?” Why does this person, who doesn’t even speak our language, care so much about us that he is willing to risk his life for us? It moved us both to tears. I said a silent prayer of thanks as we became a part of the night.” With a few notable exceptions, the men in your story are monsters, exploiting women for gain or pleasure.

I was beginning to realize that all the food in the world, and all the running shoes, could not make me happy. The material things were worthless. I had lost my family. I wasn’t loved, I wasn’t free, and I wasn’t safe. I was alive, but everything that made life worth living was gone.” Later, I could understand him in some ways. I thought about this a lot. I was going to kill him. I said I’d never forgive him, that there was nothing he could do to make me feel that he could justify what he did. But people can make mistakes. He’d lost his own parents, he knew what it was to live without your parents, so he knew what I was going through. So I cannot hate him any more, but everything is very complex; I cannot say exactly what I feel.It's not easy to give up a worldview that is built into your bones and imprinted on your brain like the sound of your own father's voice.” I’m still scared about food. In North Korea, hunger means death. Here, hunger just means you go to the corner to buy something. I worry about food. I eat a lot – too much. But one day I will be fully adapted to the free world. I really hope this book will shine a light on the darkest place in the world. We don’t feel like human beings: people don’t feel that they can connect with North Koreans, that we’re so different. People are making jokes about Kim Jong-un’s haircut, about how fat he is – this country is a joke, really. It is a joke, but it is a tragic joke, that this kind of thing can happen to 25 million people. These things shouldn’t be allowed to happen to anyone, because another Holocaust is happening and the west is saying: “It isn’t happening, it’s a joke, it’s funny – things can’t be that serious.” But we are repeating history – there are thousands of testimonies, you can see the concentration camps from satellite photos, so many people are dying. Just listen to my testimony, to the testimonies in front of the United Nations. I just hope people will read the book and will listen. The vocabulary in South Korea was so much richer than the one I had known, and when you have more words to describe the world, you increase your ability to think complex thoughts.” But when I was seven or eight years old, the film that changed my life was Titanic. It amazed me that it was a story that took place a hundred years ago. Those people living in 1912 had better technology than most North Koreans! But mostly I couldn’t believe how someone could make a movie out of such a shameful love story. In North Korea, the filmmakers would have been executed. No real human stories were allowed, nothing but propaganda about the Leader. But in Titanic, the characters talked about love and humanity. I was amazed that Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet were willing to die for love, not just for the regime, as we were. The idea that people could choose their own destinies fascinated me. This pirated Hollywood movie gave me my first small taste of freedom.”

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