I just finished reading In Order to Live by Yeonmi Park, and it was such a good book. I highly recommend giving this book a read, and I'll give you a review and a summary of it here. In Order to Live is the journey of Yeonmi Park out of North Korea to China, and then into South Korea, and finally into the USA. For me, I experienced a much different picture of life than I'm used to. I've lived in the USA, Japan, and Germany, and in Japan and Germany I lived on or near air bases because my mom was in the army. I've never had a day in my life where I went hungry because there wasn't food, and the reason she left North Korea is because of fear of starving to death. It's amazing how bad things were there. It's really helped me to get and expand my perspective.
What I see is that reading different books and learning different skills in different fields, things like basic psychology and basic finance principles, continuing to read all kinds of different books, expands my mind. I love hearing people's life stories, especially when they're significantly different from mine. Her experience growing up was vastly different than mine. Growing up in North Korea, the communism made what initially seemed pretty nice in a lot of ways, where everybody's taken care of and you get your food rationed out to you. It seemed idyllic to start, but it degenerated into everybody having to just do things on the black market just to stay alive and get by. Everybody's cheating and lying. Everybody's hiding just to survive. This was an amazing story to hear, her journey and the things she went through.
A Story of Survival and Human Trafficking
For example, she risked her life making a border crossing, willing to die rather than to stay, first in North Korea, then willing to die rather than to stay in China. She escaped North Korea and got caught up immediately in human trafficking in China, which I think everybody should hear about. Those of us who have taken issue with things like slavery in the past should see how people are living today. I remember in school we talked so much about the Civil War and slavery in the American South, and there's still all this stuff that goes on about that today. And yet there are millions of people living in slavery today, as she experienced. And we collectively have the opportunity to work together and help each other out of that.
It was beautiful to see in her book that, despite some of the worst places and situations she ended up in, sometimes there were people there who were kind, who were helpful, who risked their lives to help her. Like the man in China who was risking his life to help her and others escape from China into Mongolia. And then she arrived in South Korea and had to go through so much just to get started in South Korean society, only to then be discriminated against by other South Koreans as a foreigner. It's then, I hear in her new book which I haven't read, that coming to the USA she wrote her next book while there's still time to warn us that the USA is going in a direction more toward being like North Korea and China than the freedom that we hold sacred today.
I listened to this on Audible, which is how I listen to most books, and I went through it very quickly. I listened to it as often as I could. It only took a few days to listen to the whole book. Some of the parts of the book were certainly hard to hear about, getting into human trafficking. The fact that she was 13 years old in China made it an understandably brutal experience, and in many ways her life in North Korea was much better than what she had in China. It's shocking to see the differences. When she got into human trafficking in China, she suddenly had all this food she could eat and all these clothes and things materially she could have, but then, being violated in the most basic ways and being alone, it made her wish that she had just stayed in some ways in North Korea and at least been around people who loved her and cared about her.
Freedom Is Precious
It seems crazy to me that there are places like this on this planet when there's so much material abundance, and it seems shocking that people will allow some dictator like Kim Jong Il or Kim Il Sung. It seems insane that people would allow someone like that to rule, that everyone who is in the position to do something about it wouldn't do it. I mean, that seems crazy to me. I would not tolerate living in a society like that. I'm proud that in the USA our government tries to cross the line and citizens frequently stand up and resist over the smallest things, and it's important. I think every American should read her story and see the stakes we're playing for, because at one point North Korea had a lot more freedom than it did for her growing up, and this oppressive government was allowed to rule because the people allowed it to rule, allowed it to take over. And that could happen. Freedom is very precious: the ability to go where you please, to do the kind of work you want to do, to earn a salary in relation to what you contribute to society instead of just getting a handout no matter what you do.
I think this book and the experiences she went through are valuable learning opportunities for all of us, and this is why I suggest to people, I talk to a lot of people who are into crypto a lot and spend a lot of time researching and watching crypto videos, which are largely pointless, I suggest stop spending so much time doing that and take more time to read books like this to hear other people's stories. At one point in China she was working in a chat room, a very early adult chat room, and it's amazing how doing that, compared to the rest of the experiences she had, didn't seem like that bad of a deal.
I love the devotion she maintained throughout her life to make sure she found her mother and her sister, and the journey of that was really beautiful. In a culture where instant gratification is something we're programmed in the US to constantly seek, something that will make us happy now and relieve our pain now, take this drug now and you'll feel better right away, which I obviously am against, you can see in her story that sometimes it's going to be years, if ever, before you are able to do something like find your sister. You may have to risk everything, and it's worth risking everything to go for the life you want. In some parallel universe maybe she died trying to escape from North Korea or escaping from China, and I imagine there are lots of stories like hers that haven't been shared where people did risk everything and they lost. To me, it is better to risk everything and go for the life you really want than to just tolerate whatever happens to you and sit back and feel powerless.
Telling the Truth Changes the World
To me this is a story of empowerment. Even when she was a kid, she did whatever she could do to improve her situation, always considering the people around her, her mother, her sister, and thinking about people globally. She put herself at great risk sharing her story out to the world and telling people what actually happened to her. I'm very proud of her for putting the things in her book that happened to her that she wanted to keep secret, because to me that's how I see we change the world. Like in Alcoholics Anonymous, getting sober, you go through this process of taking a searching and fearless moral inventory and then sharing that with other people. The way I see we can really make the most change and transform this world is by doing exactly what she's done. When we have a story that we'd like to keep to ourselves because people judge us for it, because we feel alone because of our story, it leaves us feeling different, potentially getting discriminated against, and having opportunities that can't come our way.
Even her safety was at stake. When she came out with this kind of information, the North Korean government put out videos trashing her family and even got members of her family still in North Korea to speak out against her. She risked everything just to tell the truth, and the biggest thing I see we can do to change this world is tell the truth, especially when we don't want to. If you have any more book recommendations like this, I'd love to hear them, and the best way to send them my way and stay in touch is to join the Jerry Banfield Family. I'm always looking for stories like this that really expand my mind and open my mind and my heart.
Some people ask how I stay so motivated. Jerry, how do you stay so motivated every day? I read books like this, and that's how I stay so motivated. I hear her story and it motivates me to get in my studio every day and share her story with you, so that maybe some of you will take that time to read this book too and it'll expand your mind and fire up that motivation in you. I want to do whatever I can. I have a very privileged life. I have as much food as I want, I live in a great situation, and I've also risked everything to set my life up the way I want. I haven't had to risk everything like she did, but I've risked all I had to risk in this fairly comfortable environment. I've risked financial security, having no money, looking stupid, and sharing my darkest secrets out all over the place, having people judge me and make fun of me and attack me and become haters and go insane. And yet I read her book and I feel I want to show up and do everything I can to make a world that's free, where the truth is encouraged, where we work together and help each other, where we don't tolerate things like oppressive dictatorship governments that make her sing dumb songs about how great her leader is. What a joke. It's just another person. I'm not worshiping some other person.
We can make a world that is more transparent. The only way the human trafficking happened in China is because everyone from North Korea was afraid of being caught by the police, because they'd be sent back to North Korea. This secrecy and the policies that China set up facilitated human trafficking and facilitated the need for girls especially to be trafficked because of the one-child policy. Who's making these decisions? I think we the people should be making the decisions, and we make the decisions get made by us changing the world and telling our truth and getting out there. You can find more reflections like this across my Life playlist. I'm very grateful for Yeonmi Park sharing her story, and I hope I have helped you get curious about hearing her story as well.