'In Order to Live' arrives in bookstores, just days before Park's DePauw Ubben Lecture

"I think everybody deserves to be free and to have a happy life," Yeonmi Park told NPR this week.

The 21-year-old's story of defecting from North Korea, the horrors of human trafficking and the need to bring freedom to all people of the world is told in her book, "In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom," which was released Tuesday.

On Monday, Park will be at DePauw University at 7:30 p.m. in Kresge Auditorium.for an Ubben Lecture, "What It Means to be Free."

Park, who will turn 22 the day before she speaks at DePauw, also told NPR, "I wanted to show North Korean people that they have hope, and they can be free someday, like myself."

In the past two decades, thousands of North Koreans have fled to South Korea. Yeonmi Park is one of them. Her father had been imprisoned, and her family didn't have enough money to survive, so she and her mother escaped across a frozen river, finally making it to China. They thought they were free, but as Park writes in her new memoir, they found themselves in a different kind of hell. Her mother was sold to a Chinese farmer as a wife, and Yeonmi was sold to a man named Hongwei for $260.

Park says, "I didn't know it was even possible to sell humans. I thought people can only sell animals, chickens. But I didn't even know that kind of concept -- human traffic -- can be exist in the world. So I just couldn't process it when I heard it. "