Escape from North Korea (14 page)

HALF-AND-HALF CHILDREN

B
efore we reach the secret house orphanage in the Korea-town section of a city in northeast China, my hosts instruct me: “Don't ask the children about their mothers. It's too sad for them.”
¹

The boys and girls we are en route to visit are the children of North Korean brides and their Chinese husbands. They represent the most vulnerable subgroup of the North Korean humanitarian crisis in China—abandoned children. Caring for these children is a growing focus of Christian missionaries in China, and small, secret house orphanages have sprung up across the Northeast. They usually are set up and paid for by American or South Korean Christians and staffed by local Chinese Christians. The orphanage I am about to visit is run by Crossing Borders, a small Christian nonprofit based in Illinois and dedicated to serving North Koreans in China. Crossing Borders operates several orphanages there.

The children aren't strictly orphans, but given that both parents are absent, they are effectively so. Their mothers have been arrested and repatriated to North Korea, or they've left of their own accord on the new underground railroad. The fathers either don't want the children or don't have the means to care for them. Aid workers estimate that there are tens of thousands of half-Chinese, half–North Korean children in that part of China.
²
Like other demographic issues involving North Korean refugees, there are no reliable statistics, only informal estimates. No one really knows how many half-and-half children exist overall or what percentage of these kids are abandoned.

Half-and-half children pose a special set of ethical and legal problems for those who want to care for them—especially for activists who are contemplating whether to help them get out of China on the new underground railroad. Does anyone have the moral right to remove a child from his country of birth without the consent of at least one of his parents and in contravention of Chinese law? What is best for the child?

Even if a half-and-half child were to make it safely out of China to a neighboring country, his chance of reaching South Korea or another country is slim. There is a high risk that the host government of the country where he took refuge would return him to China. This has happened. Half-and-half children usually lack documentation of any sort. They seldom have birth certificates or proof of citizenship. Seoul is willing to accept half-and-half children when they are accompanied by their North Korean mothers, but it is understandably reluctant to take unaccompanied children whom China might claim as citizens. Neither the South Korean government nor the Christian rescuers want to be accused of kidnapping Chinese children.

The bottom line is that many aid workers reckon they can help more children more effectively by taking care of them in China. In most cases, the aid workers opt to care for the children in place rather
than take them out of the country. In the words of an American missionary whose organization shelters half-and-half children in China, “We hope they'll grow up to be productive citizens.”

The five children I am about to visit are typical of the half-and-half children. In every case, the child's mother disappeared. Either she was arrested and repatriated to North Korea or she left home voluntarily in search of the underground railroad and a new life in South Korea or another country. But the reason for her absence matters less to the child she has left behind than the absence itself. “The children miss their mothers very much,” I am told. Many bear emotional scars.

When Chinese police arrest a North Korean woman who is living with a Chinese man, they leave her children behind. Refugees tell stories of half-Chinese children being ripped from their mothers' arms by Chinese policemen. It's possible that Beijing's policy is motivated in part by a recognition of the Chinese father's parental rights. But another reason for leaving the children in place is practical: Beijing knows that North Korea will reject these children if China tries to repatriate them with their mothers. Because the children are half-Chinese, the North Koreans deem them to be of “impure” blood and unworthy of entering their country. Both North Korea and China are in violation of the international Convention on the Rights of the Child, which prohibits separating children from their mothers.

Chinese racism against North Koreans, as bad as it is, is overshadowed by the virulence of North Korean racism against Chinese. In the view of many North Koreans, theirs is the “cleanest race,” possessing a unique moral purity. The worst invective is reserved for Americans—official propaganda describes Yankees as animals with “snouts,” “paws,” or “muzzles”—but North Korea's Chinese allies are also denigrated.
³

This attitude is exemplified by an anecdote told by a South Korean professor who conversed with a North Korean scholar at a conference in Beijing. In his presentation at the conference, Mo
Jongryn, the South Korean professor, made passing reference to the growing number of South Koreans who are marrying foreigners. Later, the North Korean scholar approached Professor Mo. He was aghast. “You are diluting the purity of our race,” he wailed.
⁴

Nowhere is North Korea's attitude about racial purity more apparent than in its treatment of pregnant women repatriated from China. For the perceived crime of carrying “Chinese seed,” their North Korean jailers force the repatriated women to undergo abortions, even in the final weeks of pregnancy. There are numerous eyewitness reports of pregnant women being beaten or required to work at hard labor until they abort spontaneously. One such technique is called the Pump. The pregnant woman is forced to stand up and squat down repeatedly until she aborts or collapses of exhaustion. In cases where the repatriated woman gives birth, her newborn is taken away from her. The infant is drowned, smothered, left outside in the elements, or clubbed to death.
⁵

The South Korean government debriefs every refugee who arrives in Seoul and reports its findings in an annual publication. Many of the refugees have spent time in North Korean prisons, and the section on pregnant women is a parade of horrors. The matter-of-fact, staccato language of the government report only heightens the atrocity:

The five children I visit at the tiny orphanage in China all come from a remote rural village in Heilongjiang Province in the extreme northeast of China. Their mothers fled to China in the late 1990s and were sold as brides. Heilongjiang, which translates as Black Dragon River, is the Chinese name for the Amur River. The province borders the Russian Far East on the north and the Chinese autonomous region of Inner Mongolia on the west. It is the northernmost part of China, subject to sub-Arctic weather in winter and harsh living conditions for much of the year. China's economic miracle hasn't reached most parts of Heilongjiang yet, and the children's home village is very poor. Indoor plumbing was new to at least one of the children when he arrived at the orphanage. Another child, accustomed to being hungry, was amazed to find rice served at every meal. He had to learn how not to overeat.

These motherless children are fatherless as well, or the fathers are as good as dead to the children. The kids are in the orphanage in the first place because their fathers either cannot afford to take care of them or they do not want to. Centuries-old racial prejudices remain strong, and if the father is Han Chinese, he can be ashamed of having a half-Korean child. Once a man's North Korean wife is gone, some husbands want nothing further to do with their children. Whatever the reason, in the case of the five little ones at the orphanage I visit, the men handed their sons and daughters into the care of the village church. The church in turn delivered them to the American couple who are my guides.

Mary and Jim—they asked me to use pseudonyms—are a retired couple from the Midwest. They never told me their last name, and I never asked. We were introduced through an associate of theirs in New York City. Our first meeting took place in Seoul, where
we rendezvoused at a prearranged time at the information desk of a popular mega-bookstore on the city's main avenue. It was a get-acquainted meeting, and I must have passed inspection, for they later agreed to meet again in China and take me to one of their foster homes. Crossing Borders, with which Mary and Jim work, had turned down my first request, made directly to the group's board of directors a few months earlier.

Back home, Mary was an accountant and a homemaker and Jim worked in a trading company. Their children are grown. Like most of the Americans working with North Koreans in China, they are of Korean heritage and speak fluent Korean. Despite that ethnic background, neither would be mistaken for Chinese or even South Korean. Their jeans, backpacks, and sneakers are giveaways, as is Jim's long hair, which sweeps across his forehead in a Ringo Starr–like bob. Both look American through and through. I easily spot them coming through the crowd when we meet near a congested train station in a city in northeast China.

Mary is effervescent and outgoing and acts as the couple's unofficial spokesperson. “After our younger child graduated from college, we decided we wanted to do mission work together,” she tells me. “It was the right moment for us. We were thinking of going to Africa, but then this opportunity came up. We realized that this is the way God is leading us.”

The couple is in China on work visas, and Jim's official job is with a company owned by a relative in South Korea. But their real work is with Crossing Borders. They manage a string of foster homes located in two cities in the northeast and divide their time traveling among them. The foster homes care for orphaned North Korean children as well as children whose mothers are North Korean. The couple also runs a shelter for young North Korean women who are in danger of being sold as brides.

This kind of second career is not for everyone. The work is far from home, poorly paid, and dangerous. If they are caught, there is
a good chance they will go to jail; they would certainly be deported and barred from returning to China. “We thought about it carefully,” Mary says, while Jim nods his assent. “We thought that after a life of work, we wanted to spend the rest of our lives helping someone. The U.S. is wonderful, and we had a good life, but there's not a lot of time left for us, and we want to use it well.”

The Chinese foster parents who staff the orphanages are hazarding much more than Mary and Jim are. They face a constant risk of exposure by a nosy neighbor, a suspicious friend, or even a child in their care who reveals information to someone he shouldn't trust. If the foster parents are arrested and sent to prison, putting the pieces of their lives back together won't be easy. They will always be under suspicion. The foster parents also are putting their own biological families at risk. All the foster parents are married couples. If they're parents as well, they'll be separated from their child if they are arrested and jailed.

In the mid-2000s, aid workers in China began sounding the alarm about the special difficulties surrounding half-Chinese, half-North Korean children. This was about the time that the first wave of such children was reaching school age, their mothers having arrived in China during the famine years. The children are in legal limbo. As far as the Chinese government is concerned, they're invisible because they aren't listed on the family's official household registration card known as a
hukou
. Without a
hukou
, children can't attend school or obtain medical care.