Yeonmi Park: ‘I hope my book will shine a light on the darkest place in the world’

The North Korean defector on her harrowing memoir, her deep-rooted fear of hunger and learning to trust men

Yeonmi 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, 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, 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, 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 mind off. I couldn’t even remember what had happened – a lot of things I had just blacked out. As I started writing it down, I started remembering: writing was a process of remembering.

It was also reliving it. After I wrote the book, when I read it on my own, I could see the order of the story. I said: “Wow, this is what happened and this is how it happened.” Because I wrote it not only using my own memory, but using my mother’s memory, my sister’s memory, using the memories of the people who escaped with us. So lots of people had their input. And it’s only now that I feel free. I don’t feel like I did before, when something was pushing me down. Now I’ve written the book all that pressure has gone.

Was there any of your own past that you were tempted to leave there?
Honestly, I was never going to let this story out. I was determined to forget these memories. Now I’m thinking about the fact that – wow! – my grandchildren will read this book. Am I going to have a normal family after this? Someone who will see me and say: “You are not crazy.” To know a girl who’s been through that, do you really want to be friends with that person? Or be their partner? To me, it was surrendering everything – my privacy, my dignity as a woman who wants to be a normal person.

You write frankly about the way North Korean women in China are treated as “merchandise” by the people traffickers…
There are thousands of people who are going through this and their stories cannot be heard. If you can be more open about this, then it will help others talk about it. In North Korean society, for a woman to admit these kinds of things, it’s the end of the world. Our tradition is purity, virginity – for a woman, that is everything. A woman cannot talk about the bad things that happen to her. So writing this did feel like the end of the world for me.

With a few notable exceptions, the men in your story are monsters, exploiting women for gain or pleasure.
For a long time, I lost faith in humanity, especially men. I couldn’t imagine that I’d ever see men as normal people and I could never trust them. I couldn’t bear any human connection with men. Until recently, I just couldn’t do it. It has been six years and there has been no contact with men. It was only when I started writing this book that I refound hope in humanity, and especially in men. It was bad for me to hate men for such a long time, to think they were the worst thing in the world. My father was a man.

One man, in particular, stands out – Hongwei. He’s a violent gangster, but he also clearly loved you. Do you have mixed emotions about him now? He, after all, helped you escape.
Later, I could understand him in some ways. I thought about this a lot. I was going to kill him. I said I’d never forgive him, that there was nothing he could do to make me feel that he could justify what he did. But people can make mistakes. He’d lost his own parents, he knew what it was to live without your parents, so he knew what I was going through. So I cannot hate him any more, but everything is very complex; I cannot say exactly what I feel.

Will there be a Kim in charge of North Korea in 50 years’ time?
Of course we won’t let that happen. I’m not going to let that happen. I’ll live longer than Kim Jong-un – he’s fatter than me. He doesn’t like me.

It must be a sign that you’re doing something right that the Kim regime feels the need to spread malicious propaganda about you?
That’s what I tell myself. Honestly, it’s terrifying that one of the most brutal regimes in the world is against me. To them, life means nothing compared with their need for power. Now not only my life is at risk, but all of my relatives’ lives are at risk. It’s a huge responsibility and it almost made me want to give up the whole project altogether. I’m terrified that they’ll do something to my relatives. But I knew what was going on in North Korea and I knew I had to speak about it. It was unacceptable.

Your mother and sister went through journeys as difficult as your own. What did this experience teach you about the importance of family?
Family are everything; everyone understands the strength of family. For me, they were the reason that I managed to get by while I was in captivity and now they are the reason to live in freedom. They are the biggest blessing I have in the world.

You’re currently speaking to me from New York. How do you like it there?
I’m still scared about food. In North Korea, hunger means death. Here, hunger just means you go to the corner to buy something. I worry about food. I eat a lot – too much. But one day I will be fully adapted to the free world.

What do you hope people will get from reading your book?
I really hope this book will shine a light on the darkest place in the world. We don’t feel like human beings: people don’t feel that they can connect with North Koreans, that we’re so different. People are making jokes about Kim Jong-un’s haircut, about how fat he is – this country is a joke, really. It is a joke, but it is a tragic joke, that this kind of thing can happen to 25 million people. These things shouldn’t be allowed to happen to anyone, because another Holocaust is happening and the west is saying: “It isn’t happening, it’s a joke, it’s funny – things can’t be that serious.” But we are repeating history – there are thousands of testimonies, you can see the concentration camps from satellite photos, so many people are dying. Just listen to my testimony, to the testimonies in front of the United Nations. I just hope people will read the book and will listen.

In order to live by Yeonmi Park (Penguin, £18.99). To order a copy for £13.29, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.

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