Author: Yeonmi Park

Park crossed the frozen Yalu out of North Korea at thirteen in 2007 with her mother, was trafficked in China, where she has said her mother was attacked in front of her, and eventually walked the Gobi into Mongolia to reach Seoul. In Order to Live is that account. She turned into the most widely heard defector speaker anywhere, and reporters including at the Washington Post documented that details had shifted between tellings; she answered that the early versions were shaped by fear for relatives still inside, by poor English and by the people handling her, and some specific discrepancies have never been resolved. The defection itself is corroborated. Her later work has moved into American political argument and other defectors have criticised her for it. She studied at Columbia.