Thanks for the notes and highlights function of my kindle, I am now able to share my feelings and understandings of the stories, instead of just making a shrug and saying "yes I've read it. It's good." which means actually I've forgotten most of the content.
Here I would like to share 36 highlights in the following book--In Order to Live, written by a 20 something North Korea defector, telling a story of her childhood life in North Korea, how she was trafficked to China, and how finally she made it to South Korea.
I like reading biography, but I did experience some frustration when came across some reviews in Goodreads saying the girl "marketed her story". One review doubted the girl has altered or exaggerated some details, for the American help her to publish this book and they manipulate how we think of other cultures. It said this harrowing story of a pretty young lady fits in well with the US demolishing North Korea.
It's convincing and for a while destroyed my fantasy and trust towards biography. But when I went through the notes and highlights again, I realized that facts can be edited but feelings and perceptions raising from experiences are unlikely to be made up. And even if they were made up, they would not touch readers and build up any connections.
Hence, I choose to give my trust in this story, and with these notes and highlights, hopefully you can also enjoy it.
**high recommendation to English leaners in beginning level
**elementary language, but an integrated story with well description
1. In 2002, an average worker’s salary was about 2,400 won per month, worth about $2 at the unofficial exchange rate. (notes: salary per month of a North Korean worker; 14 块钱rmb/month; 打的是什么工。。)
2. Even in big city hospitals there is nosuch thing as “disposable” supplies. Bandages are washed and reused. Nurses go from room to room using the same syringe on every patient. They know this is dangerous, but they have no choice. When I came to South Korea, I was amazed when the doctors threw away the tools they had just used on me. (notes: It was 2007 in North Korea. Scary medical hygiene! )
3. The only time I was happy in the fields was when I found a mouse hole, because mice were doing the same kind of work. You could dig up their homes and find a couple of pounds of corn or beans they were storing for later. If we were lucky, we would catch the mice, too.
4.(notes: People in North Korea are required to gather their waste, poops/shit to be more precise. Funny part)……human and animal waste. Every worker and schoolchild had a quota to fill. You can imagine what kind of problems this created for our families. Every member of the household had a daily assignment, so when we got up in the morning, it was like a war. My aunts were the most competitive. “Remember not to poop in school!” my aunt in Kowon told me every day. “Wait to do it here!” Whenever my aunt in Songnam-ri traveled away from home and had to poop somewhere else, she loudly complained that she didn’t have a plastic bag with her to save it. “Next time I’ll remember!” she would say. Thankfully, she never actually did this.
5. Our bathrooms in North Korea were usuallyfar away from the house, so you had to be careful that the neighbors didn’tsteal from you at night. Some people would lock up their outhouses to keep thepoop thieves away.At school the teachers would send us out into the streets to find poop and carry it back to class.(notes: Schooling in North Korea is about collecting grains and poops. 你有时间简史吗？我有时间也不拣屎. But it seems not true in our neighboring country.) So if we saw a dog pooping in the street, it was like gold. My uncle in Kowon had a big dog who made a big poop—and everyone in the family would fight over it. This is not something you see every day in the West.
6. Once you start trading for yourself, youstart thinking for yourself. (Thumbs up for the word “Trade” which means use one thing to exchange another. When we are in the status of chasing dreams, we cannot say we are trading for ourselves, because we do that without reluctance. But when we make do with something, we are trading for ourselves and we have to care and protect well ourselves.)
7. Jeans were symbols of American decadence, and if the police caught you wearing them they would take scissors and cut them up. Then you could be sentenced to a day of reeducation or a week of extra work. But it didn’t stop the teenagers from trying new things.
8. But now we were hungry all the time. I no longer dreamed of bread. All I wanted was to have something to eat for my next meal. Skipping a meal could literally mean death, so that became my biggest fear and obsession. You don’t care how food tastes and you don’t eat with pleasure. You eat only with an animal instinct to survive, unconsciously calculating how much longer each bite of food will keep your body going.
9. I discovered that the hospital used the courtyard to store the dead. The whole time I was staying there, several bodies were stacked like wood between my room and the outhouse. Even more horrible were the rats that feasted on them day and night. It was the most terrible sight I have ever seen. The first thing the rats eat are the eyes, because that is the softest part of a body. I can still see those hollow red eyes. They come to me in my nightmares and I wake up screaming. (notes: 太精彩了,恐怖片)
10. Somehow in my desperation he was willing to offer me a little bit of warmth, light, and hope. I will always be grateful for that. (notes: She is describing the trafficker in China who bought her home but not sold her out, and the man kept her as his “wife” against her own will. Such a complex feeling)
11. Not knowing was the hardest thing. (notes: Deadly true under any circumstances and in any aspects of life.)
12. As North Koreans, we were innocent in a way that I cannot fully explain. (notes: 正常啊，没见过什么世面就会innocent)
13. Finally, they reached a deal. My mother, who had been sold by the North Koreans for 500 Chinese yuan, the equivalent of about $65 (the value in 2007), was being bought by Zhifang for the equivalent of $650. My original price was the equivalent of $260, and I was sold to Zhifang for 15,000 yuan, or just under $2,000. The price would go up each time we were sold along the chain. I will never forget the burning. (notes: Facts.人口买卖的价钱，从朝鲜到中国，每卖一次价更高。)
14. We went outside, and the bald broker told me to wait by the gate. Then he threw my mother to the ground and raped her right in front of me, like an animal. I saw such fear in her eyes, but there was nothing I could do except stand there and shiver, begging silently for it to end. That was my introduction to sex.（The last sentence was god damn cruel.）
15. He has nothing to lose, and you have everything at stake.
16. When we arrived, my mother and I hadnever heard of Jesus Christ. We got some help from one of the other defectorswho explained it this way: “Just think of God as Kim Il Sung and Jesus as Kim Jong Il. Then it makes more sense.” (notes: How can she understand God and Jesus in this way…… it makes no sense to me.)
17.And in that case, my mother and I had decided we were not going to be taken. My mother had stashed away a large cache of sleeping pills—the same kind my grandmother had used to kill herself. I hid a razor blade in the belt of my tweed jacket so that I could slit my own throat before they sent me back to North Korea. (notes: better to die than being captured)
18.I also started hating the dictator Kim Jong Il thatnight. I hadn’t thought that much about it before, but now I blamed him for oursuffering. I finally allowed myself to think bad thoughts about him becauseeven if he could read my mind, I was probably going to die out here anyway. (notes: To criticize your country leaders is a shame and even a sin. And even the mice and birds could hear that and report to the dictator. What the hell! It has been 21 century come on. Where is science ?! We have already been talking about AI, genetic engineering, organ transplantation and space travel, and who on earth could believe in these hilarious words. Such horrible dictatorship and brainwashing education)
19. And the faucets in the row of basins kept turning on mysteriously when you walked by, but then would stop unexpectedly. I was too ashamed to ask for help, and I felt very stupid and inadequate. So even before I officially entered South Korea, I felt like a failure. (notes: 没见过running water尼玛，但老娘懂这种别人认为理所当然司空见惯，但自己却觉得陌生无法理解like a failure的心情)
20. Now I realized that I had to think allthe time—and it was exhausting. There were times when I wondered whether, if itwasn’t for the constant hunger, I would be better off in North Korea, where allmy thinking and all my choices were taken care of for me.(notes: I like this critical thinking, and I can perfectly understand this thought. Sometimes we may feel even more uncomfortable when given the better thing or put into a more advanced situation. Then we become nostalgic and want to turn backward. But the only solution is to fit in, in order to dig out its value. No one can comfortably use tools, like chopsticks, knives, forks, to eat at the very beginning, but who would like to eat using their bare hands to grab food after they have picked up well using chopsticks and forks? )
21. All of us at Hanawon were trying to act like normal people, while inside the anguish of our past and the uncertainty of our future was eating us alive.
22. My mother and I received a resettlement package for housing and other expenses worth approximately $25,234 over the next five years. This seems like a lot of money until you consider that it’s about what most South Korean households earn in one year.(notes: 虽然不多钱，但也不算太差，韩国还是会帮助“脱北者”的，而且人家棒子也不是必须得帮助你们的啊，他们也是够仗义的了)
23. Another great thing about South Korea was the affordable fruit in the shops. In North Korea, oranges and apples were unimaginable luxuries, so here my mother loved buying them and slicing them for us to share.（notes: 水果都买不起，真是伤不起。虽说世界穷困的国家很多，但朝鲜这个地方就穷得很不一般。别人非洲那些国家土地贫瘠，气候恶劣，政局不稳，战乱频繁，他们贫穷也无可奈何。而朝鲜就是好端端的，但领导人就让自己的国民往死里穷，真变态）
24. So many things I learned at Hanawon didn’t make sense at all. But there was one simple phrase I heard over and over that really struck me: “In a democracy, if you work hard, you will be rewarded.” (notes: A thought will never go with dictatorship.)
25. I read to fill my mind and to block outthe bad memories. But I found that as I read more, my thoughts were gettingdeeper, my vision wider, and my emotions less shallow.(notes: BTW, reading is always worthy.)
26.……when you have more words to describe the world, you increase your ability to think complex thoughts. (notes: 这一part是在教育大家多读书的)
27. “Yes, it’s true I don’t have the sameskills as other applicants, but I can learn them. More important, while thesestudents were in school, I was learning from life. And so I have something tooffer that they do not. If you give me the chance, I can do this and make youproud of me.” (notes: I highlighted this for any coming interviews haha. Take it free.)
28. In August, I checked the online admissions notices and learned that I had been accepted at Dongguk University in the criminal justice department. I put my face in my hands and wept. Finally someone believed in me.
29. I could finally think about something beyond food and safety, and it made me feel more fully human. I never knew that happiness could come from knowledge. When I was young, my dream was to have one bucket of bread. Now I started to dream great dreams.
30. ……living a meaningful life requires embracing something bigger than yourself. My mother knew this already. She had always told me that to be happy, you must give to others, no matter how poor you are.
31. I learned that if I could feel for others, I might also begin to feel compassion for myself. I was beginning to heal. (notes: for both 30&31施比受有福，真命题)
32. I learned something else that day: we allhave our own deserts. They may not be the same as my desert, but we all have to cross them to find a purpose in life and be free.(notes: Analogy nicely goes with her experience as a defector to cross a dark and vast Gobi desert to escape to Mongolia.)
33. Until early 2014, most people—includingSouth Koreans—knew North Korea only through its crazy threats of nuclear destructionand its weird, scary leaders with bad haircuts. (notes: Haircuts make him stand out hahahah.)
34. But in February, the United Nations released a report documenting human rights abuses in North Korea, including extermination, rape, and deliberate starvation. For the first time, North Korean leaders were being threatened with prosecution in the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.
35. All defectors are paired with a police officer for five years after their arrival in South Korea to help them resettle safely. My detective usually just wanted to know my schedule and see how I was doing. But this time was different. He said he had been instructed to check on my safety, because word had come down that I was being watched closely by the North Korean government. He didn’t tell me how he got this information, only that I should be careful what I said. It could be dangerous. (notes: 韩国的警察得多忙，一对一帮助朝鲜的逃亡者5年)
36. After hours of searching the hills above Yangshanzhen, they found the spot where I had carried my father’s ashes in the middle of the night, eight years ago. Someone had been tending my father’s grave and had even planted a tree that, for years, had stood next to him like a sentinel. Hongwei had kept his promise. (notes: 看到最后变成了一个爱情故事。The author and her mother escaped to Mongolia and then to South Korea, leaving her father buried in China. The Chinese trafficker mentioned above, Hongwei, not only set her free, but also kept tending her father’s grave for the years followed.)