North Korean memoirist cancels trip to Taiwan

Staff writer, with CNA





Park Yeon-mi, author of the memoir In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom, has canceled her seven-day visit to Taiwan, the book’s Taiwan publisher Locus Publishing Co said on Friday.

Park, who fled North Korea in 2007, was invited to Hong Kong last week, Locus said.

She had originally planned to fly to Taiwan tomorrow from Hong Kong, but told Locus that the trip was canceled without providing a reason.

Park is one of a few North Korean defectors who have retained their real names and have told their stories of life in North Korea.

Park was born in October 1993 to an educated family, which was relatively well-off until the country’s economic collapse in the 1990s.

Her father then turned to the black market, for which he was imprisoned and tortured, and his relatives were branded as criminals and forced to the margins of North Korean society.

When she was 13 and weighed only 27kg, Park and her mother were smuggled into China.

She wrote that if her family had stayed behind, “we would probably die — from starvation, from disease, from the inhuman conditions of a prison labor camp.”

The memoir, published in English in 2015, describes how she and her mother risked their lives to cross the Yalu River into China and struggled to live under the influence of human traffickers before going to South Korea in 2009.

Park rose to global prominence after she delivered a speech at the 2014 One Young World Summit in Dublin, Ireland — an annual event that gathers young people from around the world to develop solutions to global problems.

Her memoir has been translated into French, German, Spanish and Japanese.

The Chinese version, published by Locus in August last year, has sold more than 100,000 copies.