I really wasn't planning on writing another book review for a while.
My intention, as soon as I finished my last article, was to prepare an article addressing the Chinese government's botched response to the Wenchuan Quake of 2008 (and their outrageous cover-up of how government corner-cutting led to the loss of thousands of lives), which I had every intention of publishing on the 12th, the 11 year anniversary of said quake. The time, however, simply wasn't there (for reasons that will become clear in my next situation-update article), and on the night of Sunday, the 13th -the day after I had planned on publishing that article- I put down Victor Cha's The Impossible State, which I had been nibbling away at for nearly a month, and reached for the next book in my "it's time to familiarize myself with North Korea" section; the autobiography of Yeonmi Park, a young North Korean defector turned Human Rights advocate.
The dedication page alone (which reads "For my family, and for anyone, anywhere, struggling for freedom") was enough to induce a sigh given my current situation. Even so, I did not anticipate that I was going to devour this in book in under a week. And yet, from the end of the first scene, I knew that I was not going to spend a moment's spare time on anything other than this book until I had finished it.
The Prologue is a Hell of a Hook
The opening pages of the book are a preview of the author's crossing of the Yalu River into China, an event not described in full detail until almost halfway through the book. It reads like such a thriller that it doesn't take long to forget you're reading a non-fiction book. However, it is the sentence the author uses to describe her very first reaction within moments of arriving in China that reeled me in.
I knew then that something was terribly wrong. We had come to a bad place, maybe even worse than the one we had left (p. 3).
When the immediate response to China is "this might even be worse than North Korea," you know you're reading a book by someone whose eyes are open, and after reading so many naive articles by soft Westerners who foolishly think China will one day join the rest of the world in addressing the Human Rights abuses of the Kim Regime, this willingness to lump China and North Korea together was an attention-grabber.
I spent a chunk of the prologue nodding along and saying "yeah, I can relate" as the author described being lured to China with false promises of prosperity (p. 4), and smiled broadly when the author described how her first expression of freedom once she escaped was to dive headlong into books (p. 5). Indeed, the author's feverish hunger for knowledge and her voracious reading appetite becomes a recurring topic throughout the book's later chapters, once the desperate struggle to survive has given way to a life that makes a valiant attempt at normalcy. However, this early impression of the book (namely, that it was something I could relate to) would later prove to be so brash that I found myself ashamed to have thought it.
A Look Inside Hell
There are already volumes upon volumes of material written about the horrors of life inside North Korea, and there is even enough material about Park's descriptions of it in particular, that I needn't belabor the points too much, but the plain, unassuming and... I'd almost say "childlike" way the author presents the bare facts of everyday life inside the DPRK with such frankness makes the reality even more chilling, and making the story even more heart-wrenching is the fact that these events are being described through the eyes of a girl who was not even 15 years old. Throughout, I found myself checking the dates of the events described, calculating the author's age and asking "what was I doing at that age?"
To read about someone dodging North Korean and Chinese military patrols at the age when my biggest worry in the world was trying to finish Star Fox 64 on expert mode, then read several chapters later of the same person leading a band of refugees across the Gobi Desert into Mongolia (with what the author thinks were a pack of wolves hanging around) at the age where I thought the world pivoted on the question of whether I beat my rival in Drum Major auditions or not, was, to say the least, sobering, and by the time I was halfway through the book I felt foolishly presumptuous to have thought, within the first few pages, that I could compare my own situation to the author's simply because we both had "I was determined to get to China and then found myself trapped there" in common. Without divulging too much of the book (if you want to know the author's story then buy a copy), I'll say I certainly wish I'd read this before writing my article on sex-trafficking in China.
"Worth a Thousand Words" and All That Stuff
Maybe it is a silly thing to say, but the one aspect of the book that broke my heart the most thoroughly was the picture insert between pages 130 and 131. The second picture is a black-and-white photo of the author on her first birthday. Whoever the photographer was, they caught the wide-eyed smile on her face as she is surrounded by sweets and presents (for an occasion that she can't possibly understand at that age except in a vague sense that the people around her are showing her she is loved) in a way that so perfectly captures the helpless innocence of a child who is still too young to doubt that the world must be a good place, it would make any parent choke up. This knowledge of the innocence of the child in the picture is made that much more gut-wrenching by an awareness of just what the grim context of the picture is (North Korean life).
It must be noted that in the very following picture (of the author at the age of 100 days) and nearly every subsequent picture, that smile is replaced by a look that is both fearful and reproachful, the face of a child who has already learned to say out of sight and out of mind, and whose natural curiosity (the defining trait of any child as they soak up the world full of knowledge around them that is their birthright as a member of the Human Race) has been well and truly extinguished.
If the publisher's intention was to instill readers with an irrational urge to shirtfront the latest scion of the Kim Dynasty and faceplant them into a collage of images of starving, sorrowful, utterly soul-broken and demoralized children from North Korea and shout "this is what you and your line have been doing for 70 years, you sonofabitch," prior to roasting said dictator over a spit, then it worked.
A Dose of Perspective
In the thousands of reviews and responses that this book has spawned, "inspirational" is probably the most frequently used word, and probably rightly so. For me though, the inspiration was far more personal, and somewhat humbling. Here is a woman who is ten years my junior, writing about events from when she still spoke of adulthood in the future tense. She was trapped in China in a situation far more desperate than mine (even in the medical sense; I'm recovering from a leg surgery botched by Chinese doctors but she had to deal with the aftermath of an unnecessary appendectomy performed in a North Korean hospital with no anesthesia), with fewer resources and dimmer hope of escape. And yet, she not only survived and overcame it, but thrived so vitally that the regime she fled from began to fear her (p. 259, 260, 264). If a teenage girl can endure that, then, well...
As I said: the inspiration was personal.
So Who Should Read It?
Well, "everyone," at the risk of sounding melodramatic, but there are a choice few groups who would benefit from it most. Obviously anyone whose work focuses on global Human Rights issues should read it (if they haven't already). For the North American baizuai's who think North Korea is not as bad as "Western Propaganda" makes it out to be, this book is a reality check. For the self-righteous and entitled twenty-somethings who made up most of the Occupy Wall-Street movement, this account of life in North Korea stands as a reminder of just how truly privileged most of the self-proclaimed "99 percenters" truly are. For anyone who feels inclined to become familiar with North Korea in general then I would recommend this book but I would recommend reading Victor Cha's The Impossible State first so some of the political facts which Park only glosses over will make more sense.
For anyone else though, I'd still recommend this book simply for its raw, unfiltered spotlight on the most fundamental Human drive of all: the urge to survive. To go on. To draw another day's existence even when hope seems gone, in the hope that a day might come when you can do more than just survive.
