In Order to Live
The Penguin Press (Verlag)
978-1-101-98045-3 (ISBN)
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Park's family was loving and close-knit, but life in North Korea was brutal, practically medieval. Park would regularly go without food and was made to believe that, Kim Jong Il, the country's dictator, could read her mind. After her father was imprisoned and tortured by the regime for trading on the black-market, a risk he took in order to provide for his wife and two young daughters, Yeonmi and her family were branded as criminals and forced to the cruel margins of North Korean society. With thirteen-year-old Park suffering from a botched appendectomy and weighing a mere sixty pounds, she and her mother were smuggled across the border into China.
I wasn't dreaming of freedom when I escaped from North Korea. I didn't even know what it meant to be free. All I knew was that if my family stayed behind, we would probably die-from starvation, from disease, from the inhuman conditions of a prison labor camp. The hunger had become unbearable; I was willing to risk my life for the promise of a bowl of rice. But there was more to our journey than our own survival. My mother and I were searching for my older sister, Eunmi, who had left for China a few days earlier and had not been heard from since.
Park knew the journey would be difficult, but could not have imagined the extent of the hardship to come . Those years in China cost Park her childhood, and nearly her life. By the time she and her mother made their way to South Korea two years later, her father was dead and her sister was still missing. Before now, only her mother knew what really happened between the time they crossed the Yalu river into China and when they followed the stars through the frigid Gobi Desert to freedom. As she writes, "I convinced myself that a lot of what I had experienced never happened. I taught myself to forget the rest."
In In Order to Live, Park shines a light not just into the darkest corners of life in North Korea, describing the deprivation and deception she endured and which millions of North Korean people continue to endure to this day, but also onto her own most painful and difficult memories. She tells with bravery and dignity for the first time the story of how she and her mother were betrayed and sold into sexual slavery in China and forced to suffer terrible psychological and physical hardship before they finally made their way to Seoul, South Korea-and to freedom.
Still in her early twenties, Yeonmi Park has lived through experiences that few people of any age will ever know-and most people would never recover from. Park confronts her past with a startling resilience, refusing to be defeated or defined by the circumstances of her former life in North Korea and China. In spite of everything, she has never stopped being proud of where she is from, and never stopped striving for a better life. Indeed, today she is a human rights activist working determinedly to bring attention to the oppression taking place in her home country.
Park's testimony is rare, edifying, and terribly important, and the story she tells in In Order to Live is heartbreaking and unimaginable, but never without hope. Her voice is riveting and dignified. This is the human spirit at its most indomitable. Yeonmi Park träumte nicht von der Freiheit, als sie im Alter von erst 13 Jahren aus Nordkorea floh. Sie wusste nicht einmal, was Freiheit ist. Alles, was sie wusste war, dass sie um ihr Leben lief, dass sie und ihre Familie sterben würde, wenn sie bliebe - vor Hunger, an einer Krankheit oder gar durch Exekution. In ihrem Buch erzählt Yeonmi Park von ihrem Kampf ums Überleben in einem der dunkelsten und repressivsten Regime unserer Zeit; sie erzählt von ihrer grauenhaften Odyssee durch die chinesische Unterwelt, bevölkert von Schmugglern und Menschenhändlern, bis nach Südkorea; und sie erzählt von ihrem erstaunlichen Weg zur führenden Menschenrechts-Aktivistin mit noch nicht einmal 21 Jahren.
Yeonmi Park wurde 1993 in Nordkorea geboren und lebt derzeit in New York, wo sie ein Studium absolviert und bei der UNO tätig ist. Die Geschichte ihrer Flucht aus Nordkorea wurde in der englischen Presse breit dokumentiert, u.a. in Artikeln des "Daily Mail", des "Telegraph" und des "Independent". Ihre Aufsehen erregenden Reden, u.a. beim "One Young World Summit" in Dublin, dem "Oslo Freedom Forum" oder "TEDx" in Bath, machten sie einem breiten Publikum bereits vor Erscheinen ihres Buches bekannt. Yeonmi Park ist mit ihren jungen Jahren eine herausragende Aktivistin für Menschenrechte und kämpft mit großem Engagement dafür, ihrem Volk eine Stimme zu geben.
Visit for a larger version of this map. Prologue On the cold, black night of March 31, 2007, my mother and I scrambled down the steep, rocky bank of the frozen Yalu River that divides North Korea and China. There were patrols above us and below, and guard posts one hundred yards on either side of us manned by soldiers ready to shoot anyone attempting to cross the border. We had no idea what would come next, but we were desperate to get to China, where there might be a chance to survive. I was thirteen years old and weighed only sixty pounds. Just a week earlier, I'd been in a hospital in my hometown of Hyesan along the Chinese border, suffering from a severe intestinal infection that the doctors had mistakenly diagnosed as appendicitis. I was still in terrible pain from the incision, and was so weak I could barely walk. The young North Korean smuggler who was guiding us across the border insisted we had to go that night. He had paid some guards to look the other way, but he couldn't bribe all the soldiers in the area, so we had to be extremely cautious. I followed him in the darkness, but I was so unsteady that I had to scoot down the bank on my bottom, sending small avalanches of rocks crashing ahead of me. He turned and whispered angrily for me to stop making so much noise. But it was too late. We could see the silhouette of a North Korean soldier climbing up from the riverbed. If this was one of the bribed border guards, he didn't seem to recognize us. "Go back!" the soldier shouted. "Get out of here!" Our guide scrambled down to meet him and we could hear them talking in hushed voices. Our guide returned alone. "Let's go," he said. "Hurry!" It was early spring, and the weather was getting warmer, melting patches of the frozen river. The place where we crossed was steep and narrow, protected from the sun during the day so it was still solid enough to hold our weight-we hoped. Our guide made a cell phone call to someone on the other side, the Chinese side, and then whispered, "Run!" The guide started running, but my feet would not move and I clung to my mother. I was so scared that I was completely paralyzed. The guide ran back for us, grabbed my hands, and dragged me across the ice. When we reached solid ground, we started running and didn't stop until we were out of sight of the border guards. The riverbank was dark, but the lights of Chaingbai, China, glowed just ahead of us. I turned to take a quick glance back at the place where I was born. The electric power grid was down, as usual, and all I could see was a black, lifeless horizon. I felt my heart pounding out of my chest as we arrived at a small shack on the edge of some flat, vacant fields. I wasn't dreaming of freedom when I escaped from North Korea. I didn't even know what it meant to be free. All I knew was that if my family stayed behind, we would probably die-from starvation, from disease, from the inhuman conditions of a prison labor camp. The hunger had become unbearable; I was willing to risk my life for the promise of a bowl of rice. But there was more to our journey than our own survival. My mother and I were searching for my older sister, Eunmi, who had left for China a few days earlier and had not been heard from since. We hoped that she would be there waiting for us when we crossed the river. Instead the only person to greet us was a bald, middle-aged Chinese man, an ethnic North Korean like many of the people living in this border area. The man said something to my mother, and then led her around the side of the building. From where I waited I could hear my mother pleading, "Aniyo! Aniyo!" No! No! 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 e
| Erscheinungsdatum | 30.09.2015 |
|---|---|
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 155 x 234 mm |
| Gewicht | 404 g |
| Themenwelt | Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte |
| Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Zeitgeschichte | |
| Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte | |
| Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Gender Studies | |
| Schlagworte | Englisch; Biografien/Erinnerungen • Flucht; Berichte/Erinnerungen • Flucht / Flüchtling; Berichte/Erinnerungen • Korea; Berichte/Erinnerungen • Menschenrechte (MenschR) • Nordkorea; Berichte/Erinnerungen • Park, Yeonmi • Südkorea; Berichte/Erinnerungen |
| ISBN-10 | 1-101-98045-1 / 1101980451 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-1-101-98045-3 / 9781101980453 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
| Informationen gemäß Produktsicherheitsverordnung (GPSR) | |
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