we tell ourselves stories in order to live meaning

But when her father was arrested and thrown in a prison camp, Park had nothing. They had nice clothes, enough food and a television. Her father was a smuggler who sold goods on the black market (see dumbass from the first paragraph?! Your ideas aren’t original!) and her mother helped with the business, allowing them to avoid a lot of the famine of the 1990s. Compared to others in her country, the Park’s had it pretty good in North Korea for awhile. Yeonmi Park was brought up near the Chinese border in the city of Hyesan. It’s just that the way out is nearly impossible. The latest, Yeonmi Park’s In Order to Live is yet more evidence that many people in North Korea see their situation more clearly than we give them credit for. The recent rash of books written by North Korean escapees is proof that nothing could be further from the truth. Implicit in that criticism is the idea that if the North Koreans wanted to leave, they could. There’s a pervasive myth that the people of North Korea are miserably complacent, blinded by their cultlike adoration for the Dear Leader. We ended up talking about North Korea one day, and one waste of valuable mass stood up to proclaim that if he were a North Korean, hewouldn’t be taking any of “ this Kim Jong Whatever’s shit.” When our professor (I hope trying to amp up our fremdschämen, and as a slight tangent, seriously God bless the German language) asked this oxygen destroyer what he would do to survive in North Korea, he said he would sell his own stuff at the market (“free market capitalism, baby!”) escape, or he would just kill the dictator himself. It was an Intro class, populated by a lot of students who heard it was a skate class. When I was in college, I remember taking an international politics class.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live meaning