Reviews - Yaşamak İçin | The StoryGraph

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Yaşamak İçin

Yeonmi Park, Arzu Çağlan

4.47 AVERAGE

biaslibrary's review against another edition

4.75

dark hopeful reflective sad tense fast-paced

trindaq's review against another edition

4.5

emotional informative inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

himpersonal's review against another edition

3.75

adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring sad tense medium-paced

This is the third North Korean defection account I've read or heard of. The first was called Danny's Story. It was a YouTube documentary that I watched at the Asia Society when the defector was the guest of a fireside chat. The second was Hyeonseo Lee's The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector's Story. Now there's this one. Commonalities: they were all so young!, all desperate, all brave, all through China, and all live and survive by grit. All three are worth listening to/reading to.

Yeonmi Park was the youngest of the three, and also the most recent. Her story is heartbreaking - of course it is. How could it not be? The sacrifices made by her parents. My mom would've done the same as what her mom did, but that's not something she ever would've had to face by virtue of her family having been below the DMZ at the time of the Korean War. So many families were separated by an arbitrary line back then, and they remain separated. By this time, people don't even know who their family might be on the other side of that line. The generations that knew are dying off.

I remember going to a summer camp in Korea in middle school. It was a government sponsored two-week cultural tour of the country. It was a lot of fun, amazing food, and lots of learning. But the day we were going to the DMZ, they wanted us to know how awful North Korea was, how brainwashed their people were, how horrid the government was. This was before the famine mentioned in this book. I resisted all of what they were saying. I was innocent, and I couldn't believe they were right. I was sure it was an ugly and unnecessary nationalism. I still think there's a large element of that, because it really sounds like the kind of thing the US government taught them to say in the name of westernized freedom and democracy. However, books like this also seem to confirm all I remember from back then.

I'm glad they got out. I'm surprised we are up to 26k defectors as of the times just before the Beijing Olympics when this book was written. While I'm the last person to perpetuate US Cold war propaganda on anyone, I do think these stories are important. I commend their courage, and I hope they continue to thrive. I'd love to read a part two maybe 30 years from now to see if they were able to stay in touch with anyone or how else they've continued on with their lives.

Update: dropping a star after reading up on her on Wikipedia. I realize Wikipedia isn't always reliable, but there's enough on there that make me wonder enough about her narrative.