While Time Remains is a captivating true story of a North Korean defector. It is not an account of her life in North Korea, but an account of what her life is like now in America - which may shock some. Very well-written! Highly recommend. ( )

Words such as "remarkable", "stunning", "miraculous" hardly begin to capture the qualities in the life of Yeonmi Park and in this, her autobiographical account of her coming into "first contact" with life as a resident and, soon, citizen, of the United States after her harrowing childhood in North Korea. Despite the abiding love of her parents, the material and psychological misery of her childhood was relieved only briefly while her father, for a few years, succeeded in circumventing the full horrors of Korea's inconceivably cruel dictatorial regime by his own initiatives as a black-market trader in scavanged metals. North Koreans, outside the privileged few at the uppermost ranks of the state party apparatus, knew grinding poverty and life-long starvation, and, for many, imprisonment at hard labor for minor "offences" such as taking desperate measures to scavange food in order to avoid starving to death. A farmer who raised beef would be executed for the crime of taking one of the herd--not, by any means, his herd--for everything of material value was the de facto property of the state--and slaughtering the animal for food to nourish himself and his family; millions died from the direct and indirect consequences of these conditions.

She relates the story of her family's and her own struggles to survive and, in doing so, gives us, her readers, an inestimable gift of insight into realms of deprivation which our materially privileged lives in the West deny us. We are second-hand witness to the courage and resilience of a people who, against all odds, seek ways to survive. In desperation and at the risk of their lives, she and her mother undertook an escape from North Korea through a long and perilous journey which took them into Mongolia. Their decision was prompted, made urgently imperative, by the sudden and unannounced departure, first, of Eunmi who had disappeared, leaving only a note hidden under her pillow to explain her decision to flee across the Yalu River into China in late March of 2007; three months after their departure, Yeonmi's father, released from prison through promises of bribe-payments and now a physically and emotionally broken man, was somehow able to rejoin his family in China. Meanwhile, however, in the process, Yeonmi, her sister and mother had, by escaping, fallen into the hands of people-traffickers and were kept as slaves and sexually abused. Yeonmi's father died of cancer while the family was held by Chinese traffickers. I'll omit describing further the horrors which she suffered there and recommend the reader turn to her account as she gives it.

Having grown up in the virtually complete isolation which is North Korea's and having been fed a steady stream of lies about the society of Western nations--above all, the social and material conditions of life in the United States--Ms. Park's experience of the reality of life in the U.S. was that of a person seeing it "with 'new eyes'"-- as close as possible to our idea of an extra-terrestrial coming into our presence and reporting its impressions of a completely alien world's conditions and habits. This scenario itself is so rare as to be the stuff of science-fiction. But Ms. Park allows us to know it as a real-world set of facts. That she brings to the task so remarkably fine an intellect is only the greater blessing her story bestows upon us.

One of the few ways for her former life's hardships and misfortunes to be compounded would be for Western audiences of today and in times to come to fail to read her account and fail to take full advantage of the favor she has done us by writing it and seeing it through to publication.
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Also by Yeonmi Park : In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom (2016) ( )