In Order to Live Study Guide

Yeonmi Park is a North Korean defector and an activist. Born in 1993 in Hyesan, Park was raised under North Korea’s totalitarian regime, led by the Kim family. When Park was 13, after her father was imprisoned for black-market trading, she and her mother fled across the border into China. She endured trafficking, separation from her family, and years of hiding before eventually reaching South Korea in 2009, where her harrowing story was elevated to the national stage. In 2014, she began writing her memoir In Order to Live, where she shared new, horrifying details about her experience fleeing North Korea. Park later moved to the United States, continuing her education at Columbia University, and became known internationally for her advocacy work. In 2023, she published her second book, While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector’s Search for Freedom in America. Maryanne Vollers, who co-authored In Order to Live, is an American journalist and ghostwriter whose work often explores the intersections of gender, politics, and power. She began her career reporting on domestic terrorism, including major events like the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, before moving into long-form nonfiction. She has written for major publications such as Rolling Stone and Time, and she has collaborated on memoirs with public figures like Hillary Clinton and Billie Jean King. In In Order to Live, Vollers helped shape Park’s experiences into a clear, accessible narrative without compromising the complexity of her story. She is currently based in Montana.

Park’s memoir situates her personal story within the broader history that shaped modern Korea, tracing how foreign occupation, war, and political ideology produced the divided world that she was born into. In the early 20th century, until 1945, Japan controlled Korea, which was at that point one single nation called “Chōsen.” While Japan ruled Korea, Koreans were stripped of their culture and national identity and forced to assimilate into a Japanese way of life. But after Japan’s defeat in World War II, the Korean peninsula was split along the 38th parallel, with the Soviet Union influencing the North and the United States supporting South Korea. The Korean War followed in 1950, drawing in both superpowers and deepening the division that would harden into a permanent border. Park also explains how the Kim family used propaganda and surveillance to build a rigid political system in North Korea that isolated its citizens and controlled every aspect of their lives. This system was heavily influenced by Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, which provided both ideological guidance and practical support in the country’s early years. Kim Il Sung adopted many of Stalin’s tactics, including centralized power, an extensive secret police network, and a personality cult that viewed the “Dear Leader” as the source of all national strength. This influence helped create the insulated, highly militarized state that Park describes in her memoir. These events explain why escape, for Park’s family and so many other North Koreans, carried both immense risk and the possibility of an entirely different future, defined by freedom rather than subservience.

In her memoir, Park mentions that reading George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) when she reached South Korea was a personal turning point for understanding her own past, as its allegorical depiction of authoritarian control gave her a language for recognizing the lies that she’d internalized in North Korea. After arriving in the South, she also discovered writers like Jane Austen, whose observations about class, marriage, and social pressure offered a window into a world of choices and individuality that she’d never before been allowed to imagine. Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) especially echoes Park’s discovery of personal choice after a childhood shaped by strict social expectations. Readers interested in other impactful, inspiring memoirs like Park’s can look to tennis legend Billie Jean King’s All In (2023), another collaboration with Maryanne Vollers. For a parallel account of escape from the North Korean regime, Hyeonseo Lee and David John’s The Girl With Seven Names (2015) follows another young woman’s struggle through trafficking and ultimately toward reinvention, highlighting both the shared challenges and the unique paths that defectors face. To understand the broader system that Park, her family, and so many other North Koreans have fled, Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy (2009) draws on the lives of real North Korean defectors, revealing how the regime’s control shaped their daily realities and choices.