North Korea

Assalamualaikum and Hi Friends!

Earlier this year, I have come across this book. Reading the synopsis at the back of the book makes me want to know more about what this little girl had to go through in order to live, just like the title of the book, In Order to Live by Yeonmi Park.

The Synopsis :

'I am most grateful for two things: that I was born in North Korea, and that I escaped from North Korea.' Yeonmi Park was not dreaming of freedom when she escaped from North Korea. She didn't even know what it meant to be free. All she knew was that she was running for her life, that if she and her family stayed behind they would die - from starvation, or disease, or even execution. This book is the story of Park's struggle to survive in the darkest, most repressive country on earth; her harrowing escape through China's underworld of smugglers and human traffickers; and then her escape from China across the Gobi desert to Mongolia, with only the stars to guide her way, and from there to South Korea and at last to freedom; and finally her emergence as a leading human rights activist - all before her 21st birthday.

North Korea - image from Google

Here some of the stories from the book :

By the time Kim II Sung died in 1994, famine was already taking hold in the northern provinces. Government rations had been cut sharply and sometimes they failed to arrive at all - Tears of Blood

Our Dear Leader (Kim Jong II) had mystical powers. His biography said he could control the weather with his thoughts, and that he wrote fifteen hundred books during his three years ad Kim II Sung University. This workship of the Kims was reinforced in documentaries, movies, and shows broadcast by the single, state-run television station. Whenever the Leaders' smiling pictures appeared on the screen, stirring sentimental music would build in the background. It made me so emotional every time. - The Dear Leader

If you asked anyone in the North Korea countrysides, "What is your dream?" most would answer, " To see Pyongyang in my lifetime."

Only the most privileged citizens are allowed to live and work in the nation's capital. You need a special permission even to visit. But Pyongyang is as familiar to ordinary North Koreans as our own backyards because of the hundreds upon hundreds of pictures books and propaganda films that celebrate it as the perfect expression of our socialist paradise. To us, it is a mystical shrine with towering monuments and thrilling pageantry - like Red Square, Jureselam, and Disneyland all in one city - City of Dreams

Yeonmi Park was born in Hyesan, North Korea in 1993 and now based in Seoul, South Korea. 

Image from Google.

#misimembacajambatanilmu2016