The North Korean defector on her harrowing memoir,her deep-rooted awe of starvation and learning to trust menYeonmi Park was born in the North Korean city of Hyesan, close to the Chinese border, and brought up in the brutal and paranoid atmosphere of the Kim dictatorships. Aged 13,she and her mother braved the frontier guards and fled to China. In Order to Live, her clear-eyed and devastating autobiography tells of her famine-struck childhood in North Korea, and her defection and the years in which she was trafficked around northern China by gangsters running forced marriage and prostitution rackets. She and her mother,finally reunited, travelled across the Gobi desert before reaching freedom. Park is now studying criminal justice in South Korea and working as an activist, and most recently speaking at the One Young World summit in Dublin and at the UN Human Rights session on North Korea.
How has seeing your life on the page made you feel? It’s a harrowing story.
Until I started to write this book,I didn’t know what trauma was, I didn’t know what a counsellor did, or because in North Korea we don’t have these words,we don’t have these jobs. I didn’t know what post-traumatic stress disorder was and I didn’t think I had it. I thought that I was a totally normal person. Until I started writing the book, I just shut my intellect off. I couldn’t even remember what had happened – a lot of things I had just blacked out. As I started writing it down, and I started remembering: writing was a process of remembering.
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Source: theguardian.com