Book Review: In Order to Live by Yeonmi Park with Maryanne Vollers

An inside look at North Korea.

In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom by Yeonmi Park with Maryanne Vollers. Narrated by Eji Kim. Penguin Random House, 2015. 10 hours (approx.).

It is, perhaps, too high a praise to say Yeonmi Park is today’s Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. However, both exposed the oppressive regimes they came from - Solzhenitsyn from communist Russia and Park from socialist North Korea. You’d think the final nail in the coffin of Marxism would have been hammered home by now given all the bodies it has piled up in the 20th and now 21st centuries. Alas, we are still struggling with this ideology.

To be fair, North Korea initially provided for its people. But a centralized economy has many failings. To illustrate just one, conceptualize a centralized economy as standing on a single pillar. Now take out that one pillar and the whole country's economy crashes. A distributed system, on the other hand, has many built in redundancies.

According to Park, the big decline happened in 1990. The USSR had fallen apart and Moscow dropped friendly rates for exports to North Korea. Without subsidized fuels and other commodities the economy crept to a halt. Fertilizers could not be made or transported. Crop yields dropped. Famine set in.

Russia did not send food aid. North Korea defaulted on their loans and could not borrow. Most supplies were funneled to the military. Medicine was distributed unevenly throughout the country, leaving some areas without any medicine whatsoever and others with exorbitantly high medical prices. Millions died from disease and hunger.

Rather than changing its policies, North Korea ignored its problems. The regime that once supported its people now told them to survive on their own.

Corruption, bribery, theft and even black market capitalism took hold. What little food supplies the people got, they quickly learned to trade it - illegally - or die. At first the North Korean regime merely tolerated this incursion of capitalism into their “socialist paradise.” Later, it supported it by allowing for state-regulated markets to be built.

Things kept getting worse but the citizens didn’t know why. That is because the state censored all foreign media, and the local papers only reported good news or blamed the bad news on enemies.

Songbun, according to Wikipedia, is “the system of ascribed status used in North Korea. Based on the political, social and economic background of one’s direct ancestors as well as the behavior of their relatives, songbun is used to determine whether an individual is trusted with responsibilities, is given opportunities within North Korea, or even receives adequate food. Songbun affects access to educational and employment opportunities…”

In 1980 Park’s uncle was convicted of rape and attempted murder. Her mother’s ancestors had been landowners. Together, these things lowered Park’s family’s songbun, limiting their opportunities. Nevertheless, they were wealthy by North Korean standards. In the 90s Park’s father needed to supplement the family income by smuggling goods and selling them on the black market. Later, he was arrested and sentenced to hard labor.

After his arrest, the family sank into extreme poverty. Park developed a condition called pellagra due to malnutrition. She and her sister roamed the fields looking for dragonflies to roast over a pocket lighter just to have something to eat.

On Saturdays, Park and her fellow classmates would meet for propaganda and self-criticism sessions. These sessions were mandatory for all North Koreans and were either organized by the school or a job. The attendees would write down everything they did the previous week. Then, they take turns standing up and explaining the ways in which they failed to live up to their dear leader’s expectations. Once a student finished with his self-criticism, he’d criticize the next student. That other student would stand and listen respectfully, then he’d  promise to correct his behavior.

Park said North Koreans are taught to think as one mind. They have ten principles much like the ten commandments. She gives three examples:

1. Give your all in the struggle to unify society with the revolutionary ideology of Kim Il-sung. 

2. Respect Kim Il-sung with the utmost loyalty. 

3. Pass down the revolution’s achievements and continue the fight.

In North Korean schools, math word problems are written like this: “If you kill one American bastard and your comrade kills two, how many dead American bastards do you have?” North Korean kids must disrespect their enemies by calling them “bastards” or some other derogatory name - yankee devil, big-nosed American, etc. If they did not show this kind of disrespect the other children would call them out. The Kims needed to be praised with every mention.

Park watched movies smuggled from South Korea. She particularly liked Titanic. She claimed it taught her the true meaning of love. Expressions of love were reserved for the Kims.

Park said she had two narratives in her head at one time. The first is what she was told to believe. The second is what she saw with her own eyes, which often contradicted the first. She’d later learn this is called doublethink from Orwell’s 1984. 

Doublethink is what allows a person to hold two opposing ideas in her mind at the same time without going crazy or realizing one is a lie. This is why Park was able to shout anti-capitalist slogans in the morning but shop for smuggled South Korean cosmetics in the evening; why she believed North Korea was a socialist paradise with the happiest people and nothing to envy but also devoured movies from other nations that showed people living in a prosperity she could not imagine; it is why the schools taught her “children are kings'' yet the orphanages were filled with children with distended bellies.

“Maybe deep, deep inside me I knew something was wrong. But we North Koreans can be experts at lying, even to ourselves,” Park concluded.

Park and her mother escaped to China, then to Mongolia and South Korea. The journey was difficult and is difficult to read, but it is worth reading. Park and her mother were sold into slavery by sex traffickers; they had to cross the Gobi Desert at night to enter Mongolia; when the Mongolian authorities caught them, they pledged to commit suicide rather than be deported back to North Korea.

In South Korea, Park became a voracious reader. “As I read more my thoughts were getting deeper, my vision wider and my emotions less shallow.” 

The vocabulary was richer in the south. She said, “When you have more words to describe the world you increase your ability to think complex thoughts.” North Korea limits language to limit its people’s thoughts. As we have seen, the only expression of love is for the leader. But in South Korea, Park learned there were many ways to express love. She was taught saying, “I love you” to plants made them grow stronger, and so she should say, “I love you” to her family often.

Park first visited America in 2013. The lessons of North Korea’s propaganda remained in the back of her mind. “What was I doing visiting these evil people?” she asked. But she saw parents holding hands, people eating chips and teens wearing sport jerseys. Americans, she then realized, were no different except for their language. 

“It amazed me how quickly a lie loses its power in the face of truth,” she said.

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Addendum

It would please to no end to have ended this book review with that uplifting message. However, since the publication of In Order to Live in 2015 Park has attended Columbia University and described her time there as brainwashing.

“I expected that I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy, to learn how to think. But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think,” Park told Fox News. “I realized, wow, this is insane. I thought America was different, but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying.”

Are you worried? Is the concern for American universities over blown? Peter Boghossian has taught philosophy at Portland State University for ten years. His recent resignation letter can be read on Common Sense with Bari Weiss. How does Boghossian’s experience exemplify Park’s statement?