68 pages • 2 hours read
Yeonmi Park, Maryanne VollersIn Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Key Figures
Yeonmi Park
Yeonmi Park is a North Korean defector and a human rights activist with South Korean citizenship. She was born on October 4, 1993, in the small town of Hyesan, which borders China to the northwest. As she recounts in this memoir, Park’s family falls into financial destitution after her father is arrested in 2003 for smuggling metals from Pyongyang to sell across the border. She escapes to China with her mother in 2007 at the age of 13 in search of her older sister, who left on her own. Her father follows in their footsteps six months later but dies of colon cancer in early 2008. After her father’s death, Park and her mother are aided by Christian missionaries in Qingdao and flee to South Korea by way of Mongolia. They arrive in Seoul in 2009, where Park continues her education.
While Park and her family are safer in South Korea, Park does not feel truly free when she arrives. She struggles with adapting to South Korean society, being accepted by her peers, and discovering who she is. A volunteering mission in which she travels to help impoverished communicates helps her heal and makes her realize that her story can help and inspire others. Park appears on several Korean TV shows, including the famous talk show Now on My Way to Meet You, and rises to global prominence after sharing her story at the One Young World Summit in Dublin in 2014.
Park began penning her memoir in collaboration with Maryanne Vollers in 2015 to unveil the truths about her experience as a defector. A victim of rape and a denouncer of the North Korean bride trafficking network in China, Park currently runs the YouTube channel “Voice of Korea by Yeonmi Park,” which, as of this writing, has accumulated almost 800,000 subscribers.
Keum Sook Byeon
Park’s mother, Keum Sook Byeon, is her companion and confidante in her arduous path to freedom. She holds a degree in inorganic chemistry and is an accomplished singer. She officially divorces her husband, Jin Sik Park, but the choice was made out of practicality rather than romantic incompatibility. After her husband is sentenced to prison, she needs to change her official residence, and asking for a divorce is her only option. They are briefly reunited in China, but Jin Sik soon dies from advanced colon cancer. Keum Sook Byeon defects to South Korea with her younger daughter, Yeonmi, in 2009. She is reunited with her older daughter, Eunmi, in 2014.
Jin Sik Park
Jin Sik, Park’s father, is a natural businessman and entrepreneur. Having grown up in Hyesan with family across the Chinese border, Jin Sik is skilled at the craft of trading and buying the silence of North Korean guards. Park laments that her father, with his positive attitude and good disposition, had no room to grow as an entrepreneur and an individual in an oppressive socialist society. After he is sentenced to prison, Jin Sik briefly reunites in China with Park and her mother in China, but he dies soon after from advanced colon cancer. He is the only person in the memoir portrayed to see past the lies of North Korean propaganda.
Eunmi Park
Eunmi is Park’s elder by two years. She is Park’s closest friend and protector in Hyesan. Although she is missing for most of the memoir, she is the primary force that drives Park’s most life-changing decisions. Her disappearance prompts Park and her mother to escape to China. The wish to find her eventually drives them to seek refuge in South Korea. Finally, Park becomes a public figure in the hopes of reaching her sister. Eunmi escapes to South Korea through Southeast Asia and is reunited with her sister and mother in 2014. Generous and intelligent, she adapts to her new life and excels at school.
Hongwei
Hongwei is a Han Chinese and the man at the top of the North Korean bride trafficking network in Chaingbai. Hongwei is an alias; his real name is unknown. He purchases and sells Park’s mother in 2007 and returns to buy Park for himself. After unsuccessfully trying to rape her, he bribes Park to sleep with him by promising to reunite her with her parents. He ends up keeping his end of the bargain and upon, learning that Park is only 13, begins to treat her with more care. Park has mixed feelings about him. She hated him at first and to this day sees him as an abuser, but his relative kindness to her and her family prevent her from despising him completely.
