Disclosure: David Tian, the author of this piece and interviewer, is also the translator for Eunsun Kim’s book: ‘A Thousand Miles to Freedom: My Escape from North Korea’.

At the height of the Arduous March – the great North Korean famine of the 1990s – Eunsun Kim watched her relatives lose their lives to starvation one by one.

At age 11, Kim (a pseudonym), too, would have succumbed to the famine had her mother not made the risky decision to take her and her sister across the Tumen River to China in search of food. Shortly after they arrived in China,