In Order to Live

I knew then that something was terribly wrong. We had come to a bad place, maybe even worse than the one we had left.

I am most grateful for two things: that I was born in North Korea, and that I escaped from North Korea.

I actually believed that our Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, could read my mind, and I would be punished for my bad thoughts.

In most countries, a mother encourages her children to ask about everything, but not in North Korea. [...] “Remember, Yeonmi-ya,” she said gently, “even when you think you’re alone, the birds and mice can hear you whisper.”

It is extremely difficult to move to a higher songbun, but it is very easy to be cast down into the lowest levels through no fault of your own. And as my father and his family found out, once you lose your songbun status, you lose everything else you have achieved along with it.

They need to control you through your emotions, making you a slave to the state by destroying your individuality, and your ability to react to situations based on your own experience of the world.

North Koreans have two stories running in their heads at all times, like trains on parallel tracks. One is what you are taught to believe; the other is what you see with your own eyes. It wasn’t until I escaped to South Korea and read a translation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four that I found a word for this peculiar condition: doublethink.

By comparison, my father was an enlightened man. He included my mother and my sister and me at the table; he respected us. He drank only occasionally and rarely beat my mother. But sometimes he did. I am not excusing his actions, but I am explaining the culture—men in North Korea were taught they were superior, just as they were taught to obey our Leader.

Still, I learned something important from my short time as a market vendor: once you start trading for yourself, you start thinking for yourself.

I could tell that his time in the prison camp had broken his spirit. He couldn’t look a policeman in the face, not even the ones who used to joke and drink with him at his table. My father used to love South Korean music; now he refused to listen to it.

There were also rumors that young North Korean women could easily find jobs in China. A number of teenage girls had dropped out of sight recently, and people were whispering that they had gone to China. Maybe Eunmi and I could find work, too.

It’s still hard to fathom why we went along with all of this, except that we were caught between fear and hope. We were numb, and our purpose was reduced to our immediate needs: Get away from the dangerous border. Get away from this terrible bald broker and his frightening wife. Get something to eat and figure out the rest of it later.

I still hated Hongwei, but I learned to live with him. He was sometimes very harsh with me in the beginning, but he softened with time, and I think he grew to respect me, trust me, and, in his own way, love me.

In Korea we say that if a person cannot close his eyes in death, it is because he hasn’t fulfilled something in this world. I think my father was still searching for Eunmi, and that was why he could not rest. I thought that I would be like my father and never close my eyes until I had found my sister.

But I felt an old hunger burning in me, one that told me there was more to life than just surviving.

Mongolia’s stated policy was to allow North Korean refugees from China safe passage to a third country, but events on the ground were much murkier. In fact, defectors were caught in a long-standing political and economic tug-of-war.

A second chance? I thought. A second chance is what criminals get. I knew I wasn’t a criminal; I did what I had to do to survive and save my family. But now my heart sank. I realized I had no hope in this place.

Hanawon is like a boot camp for time travelers from the Korea of the 1950s and ‘60s who grew up in a world without ATMs, shopping malls, credit cards, or the Internet. [...] There was so much more: printer, scanner, salad, hamburger, pizza, clinic. This wasn’t just a new vocabulary for me; these were code words for entry into a completely new world.

In North Korea, we are usually taught to memorize everything, and most of the time there is only one correct answer to each question. So when the teacher asked for my favorite color, I thought hard to come up with the “right” answer.

I read to fill my mind and to block out the bad memories. But I found that as I read more, my thoughts were getting deeper, my vision wider, and my emotions less shallow.

Police officers had never protected me from anything in my life. But in South Korea, protection was their job description. And so I chose to run toward the thing I feared the most and join their ranks.

It amazed me how quickly a lie loses its power in the face of truth. Within minutes, something I had believed for many years simply vanished.

I learned something else: 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.

It was the sound of a captive, a tentative voice belonging to someone afraid of saying the wrong thing, afraid of being punished. It was the sound of my own voice, echoing across the years, reminding me of how far we had to go.

How could I ask people to face the truth about North Korea, to face the truth about what happens to the women who escape into China and fall into the hands of brokers and rapists, if I couldn’t face it myself?