In Order to Live

Usually in this blog, I write about "freedom" as time away from my duties as a housewife and mother.  When I know that in reality, I'm lucky to have the freedom to have chosen those roles. Beyond the fact that I'm free from persecution, I'm free from my former jobs as a secretary, administrator, and badly paid college lecturer.  (At least for the time being.)  And with only one child, and my husband working successfully in the tech industry so that I don't have to go back to work just yet, I really have an enormous amount of freedom.

The lack of freedom Yeonmi Kim, the author of the memoir In Order to Live, has experienced in her life so far, is almost too monumental to comprehend...but it's important to make an effort--to try to understand North Korea, and how badly its 25 million people are suffering.

As a child, Kim was frequently starving and doing without the most basic necessities, including, in one harrowing passage, the necessity of having one's parents at one's side (at the age of eight, she lived alone with her only slightly older sister in their very poorly heated home in North Korea for weeks, waiting for their mother, who was in another city looking for their imprisoned father.  They were alone, freezing, and had almost nothing to eat).  Not only was her family stripped of everything because of the difficulty of making a living, but they were simultaneously forced (like everyone else) to believe that their rulers were nothing short of gods, even though those same rulers were killing and torturing hundreds of thousands of their own people.

Then, as a refugee in China, she and her mother were treated worse than farm animals--raped, beaten, sold as sex slaves.  In another horrible moment shortly before leaving North Korea, she had her appendix removed and then, while recovering at the hospital, had to walk past dead, decaying, rat-infested corpses stacked up outside, just to use an outdoor latrine.

She quotes Joan Didion in the title of her book:  "We tell ourselves stories in order to live."  I feel that way sometimes--that if I don't tell stories, I might as well be dead.  But for Kim this statement has a much more important meaning.  There are people being cruelly tortured and treated like animals right now in North Korea and the part of China that borders it, and they are essentially voiceless.   She is speaking for all of them.

I am afraid for her; she talks about her post-traumatic stress, as well as the difficulties of fitting into both South Korean society and Western society; also, there is the simple fact that she is considered a despicable person now by the North Korean government.  But she has an incredible fighting spirit.  Looking at the trajectory of her life so far, I have to believe that she'll survive everything life throws at her, and will continue to be an admirable spokesperson for her people.

Given the disparity between how she speaks in live interviews and the smooth-flowing English in which the book is written (it was written "with" another writer, Maryanne Vollers), I feel somewhat cheated; that's my only slight criticism of the book.  I want to hear it in Kim's own words, directly; it's her story, her very personal story, and I want to know exactly how she described it before the professional writer made it sound more beautiful.  My mother was also from another country, and spoke English badly; I could never write a story about my mother unless I included her grammar and usage mistakes.  Those flaws in her English tell a story, too...of how hard it was for her in America, and how she was always painfully straddling two very different identities.

But that's a minor quibble with what is otherwise a very moving book, well worth reading.