Escape from North Korea (15 page)

Under Chinese law, a child born in China is entitled to citizenship if one parent is a Chinese citizen. But there is a catch. To obtain the right of citizenship for their child, parents must register their newborn, a process that requires them, among other things, to identify themselves, their address, and their citizenship. The
hukou
is a passport-like document, containing personal information about every member of a household. The data recorded in the
hukou
include gender, date and place of birth, ethnicity, current address, previous address, citizen ID number, height, blood type, education level, occupation, and work address. The
hukou
is an essential document, required for virtually every interaction with the state. Students are required to present copies of their
hukou
to enroll in school. Adults must show their
hukou
when they change jobs or move to a new residence. A
hukou
is required to obtain medical treatment.

The father of a Chinese–North Korean child is thus compelled to make a wrenching choice: Does he register the baby, an act that will expose the nationality and location of the child's mother? If he does so, his wife will be vulnerable to arrest and deportation, and he and his family will be susceptible to shakedowns by authorities. Or does he forego the registration, making it difficult, if not impossible, for the child to receive health care and an education? It is a kind of Sophie's Choice: the life of the mother or the well-being of the child.

Fathers who care about their half–North Korean children sometimes take desperate measures to make sure they receive an education. Officials at an elementary school sometimes can be bribed to admit a child without a
hukou
. But the enrollment is unofficial, and the school will not keep formal records of the child's work; when it comes time for junior high school, it again will be as if the child did not exist. Parents also have been known to borrow or buy the
hukou
of a full-Chinese child. There is even a market in counterfeit
hukou
. But all these options are expensive, risky, and unreliable. They also require proactive steps on the part of a responsible father.

If they can afford it, Chinese fathers sometimes apply for
hukou
for their children after their North Korean wives have left or been arrested. There is a fine for late registration, and the authorities sometimes demand to see a police document verifying that the North Korean mother is gone, a piece of paper that requires yet more bribes.

Mary and Jim have managed to obtain
hukou
for all the children under their care, thanks to funding from Crossing Borders. Real IDs are preferable, because the children will use them for the rest of their lives, and Mary and Jim are willing to pay a premium for government-issued registration cards. If a child has a Chinese father who is identifiable and willing to put his half–North Korean child on his family's
hukou
, their organization will ante up the funds for the late registration fee and attendant bribes. If the father is absent or unwilling to add his half–North Korean child to the family
hukou
, Mary and Jim will purchase fake IDs on the black market. There are a few fully Korean children in their orphanages, and obtaining fake IDs for them costs the most—up to $8,500 per child.

Mary and Jim are extremely careful about security, and with good reason. The legal status of their foster homes is at best ambiguous. Under Chinese law, foreigners are not permitted to perform these kinds of social services, and, in any case, proselytizing is forbidden. Teaching Christianity to the children is against the law.

The explanation given to neighbors of their house orphanages or to inquiring officials is that the foster parents are operating a
jun tag
business. That is, they are taking care of the children of ethnic Korean-Chinese who have temporarily moved to South Korea. There are more than four hundred thousand Korean-Chinese working in South Korea, so this is a plausible scenario. Korean-language newspapers run ads for
jun tag
, which are often run by retired teachers. The foster father of the orphanage I visited used a variation on the
jun tag
story, telling neighbors that he was caring for the children of relatives who had gone to South Korea to work. He instructed the children to call him and his wife “Uncle” and “Auntie.” The families worship at home on Sundays, preferring not to call attention to themselves by attending a local church. The children are warned not to talk about Jesus outside their home.

The network of foster homes that Mary and Jim supervise operates on a monthly budget of about $10,000. This covers rent, a small
salary for the foster parents, food, school supplies, and clothes for the thirty children under their care. There is little left over for extras. The children go without dental care or birthday presents. At Christmas, Jim dresses up as Santa Claus and gives each child one gift.

Mary and Jim learned the hard way about the need for tight security. Early in their stay in China, one of the foster parents threatened to expose them. He said he would turn them over to the police and reveal the location of their apartment and all the house orphanages if they did not pay him a bribe. Mary and Jim immediately called home for advice, and the board of Crossing Borders dispatched one of its directors to China, where he negotiated hush money with the foster parent. Since that episode, Mary and Jim keep their home address secret. They each carry two cellphones—one for talking to foster parents, the other for talking to each other. Sensitive matters are saved for face-to-face conversations. They also took the precaution of opening two foster homes in a second city so that they have bolt-holes for the children in case of another such emergency. The couple says the trust issue is the hardest part of their job. “We want to trust everyone, but we can't,” Mary says. “That kind of stress is the worst.”

Their focus on security extends to our meeting. When I connect with Mary and Jim at the train station in China, it's just after six o'clock in the evening and still light. Mary suggests that we kill forty-five minutes at a nearby McDonald's while we wait for dusk. We are going to take a cab to the foster home, and she wants us to arrive after dark so we'll avoid prying eyes. Every Chinese neighborhood has an official busybody, a government watchdog who reports to the local authorities. The last thing the foster parents need is for a neighbor to spot me walking into the apartment and start asking questions about what a
gweilo
, a foreigner, is doing there.

A little before seven, Mary glances out the window at the darkening sky and says, “Let's go.” She hails a cab, negotiates a price with the driver, and we pile in. It is fully dark by the time we reach
Korea-town; there are no streetlights, and it's hard to make out the faces of the people on the sidewalk. Jim called the foster father a few minutes before our arrival, and he is waiting for us as we get out of the car. We don't linger. Introductions will come later. He and Jim lead us quickly through a maze of alleyways between blocks of identical high-rise apartment buildings. Eventually we enter a doorway, someone flips on a light, and we start to climb the stairs. The stairway and landings are clean and tidy. We know we are in Korea-town by the huge brown earthenware pots outside the doors. They hold kimchi, or pickled cabbage, a staple of every Korean meal and the culinary accomplishment by which every Korean housewife is judged.

When we reach the fourth floor, the foster father sprints ahead, opens the door to his apartment, and pandemonium erupts. Five children race to the vestibule and shout “hello!” in English, the “l's” sounding more like “r's.” One child helps us remove our shoes and shoves slippers onto our feet; two others grab the bags from our grip; and the other two run to the kitchen to fetch boxes of cookies, which they thrust into our hands the moment we step up from the vestibule into the living room. I am ushered to a white plastic chair that one of the children has put out for me. Mary, Jim, and the foster father sit nearby.

After greeting each child by name, Mary takes charge. She has the children sit cross-legged on the floor in front of me. One by one, each child rises, bows formally, and introduces himself. The children are suddenly tongue-tied, too shy to answer questions with more than a word or two. Later Mary describes each child's background for me, and I am able to piece together their stories based on her information along with what the children told me.

The children have been living in the house orphanage for a year now, and they look well fed, energetic, and healthy. Mary says they were malnourished when they first arrived. To my American eyes, they look like they are only nine or ten years old even though their
real ages are twelve and thirteen. The emotional deficits are harder to notice or remedy.

“Kuon” lost his mother when he was six. The police raided his home on a cold night in December after the family had gone to bed. They handcuffed her and took her away while Kuon remained asleep. When he awoke, she was gone. After his mother left, Kuan stayed home alone all day while his father went to work. He eventually went to school for a while, but his father was too poor to buy even a notebook for his son, so the boy dropped out. Kuon is luckier than many of the half-and-half children: His father is a good man, I am told, and loved his North Korean wife. He called Mary and Jim angels from heaven for welcoming his son into their orphanage.

The other two boys were less fortunate in their families. “Sung Hoon” has no memory of his mother, who was arrested and sent back to North Korea when he was only seven months old. His father was too poor to take care of him, so the boy went first to an uncle's house and then to a state orphanage before finding his way to Mary and Jim's foster home. “Hak Chul's” father died of cancer when he was ten, and his North Korean mother left home shortly after that. The boy went to live with an uncle, but the uncle abused him and was only too happy to turn him over to Mary and Jim. Hak Chul's chubby face is round and cute, but it belies his unhappiness. He cries frequently and won't join in games with the rest of the children.

The two girls are polar-opposite personalities. “Eun Hee” has a ballerina's body. She is tall, slender, and perfectly proportioned. Mary says she likes clapping games, but on the evening we meet, it is hard to imagine her loosening up enough to take part in any such lively activity. She sits with her hands folded in her lap, and her eyes never leave my face. She is silent and serious and doesn't smile. Her mother, who was arrested when Eun Hee was six, was abusive, and Eun Hee has a nightmarish memory of being nearly strangled to death by her. Her father is disabled and cannot work. Her grandfather took care of her before handing her over her to Mary and
Jim. When I ask her what she wants to do when she grows up, she thinks a moment and then gives a surprising reply: She wants to be a scientist.

“Kim Sun” also comes from an abusive home, but she somehow seems the child most capable of rising above it. Of all the children they care for, she is the one in whom Mary and Jim place the most hope. She is quick-witted and intelligent. She is already second in her class at a Korean-language elementary school even though she is a native Chinese speaker and doesn't understand Korean very well yet. When Mary and Jim and I speak English together, I hear her softly repeating some of our words. “Thank you” comes out “sank you” and “sixty-seven” is “sixty-seben.”

Like many of the half-and-half children, Kim Sun comes from a violent home. She was abused by both her father and her uncle, who took her mother as his “wife” after her father died, when Kim Sun was five. She retains vivid memories of her mother, who left home when Kim Sun was ten, abandoning the girl to her violent uncle. Shortly after that, the uncle agreed to send her to Mary and Jim's orphanage. Although most of the other children in the foster homes make occasional holiday visits back to their home villages, Kim Sun has nowhere to go and spends her holidays in the foster home or with Mary and Jim.

Mary and Jim think Kim Sun is smart enough to go to university one day, and they are committed to seeing her and the other half-and-half children through to adulthood. If, that is, they can afford it. The children are only in fourth or fifth grade now, but the Americans are already worried about paying for junior high school and high school, should the children qualify. Schooling is ostensibly free in China, but parents are obligated to pay for books, supplies, and uniforms. These costs add up as children reach higher grades. If a child needs special attention, teachers expect “extra” payments. In addition, the half-and-half children often need after-school tutoring to help them keep up. Many have not attended school full time
before moving to their foster homes and are a grade or more behind. Others have emotional problems that interfere with studying. Foster parents usually don't have time to provide the necessary tutoring, or they are poorly educated themselves and can't keep up with the curriculum after the early grades.

For the meantime, Crossing Borders can pay the bills, though just barely. One day, after the children are older, Mary and Jim may decide to send them out of China on the new underground railroad, they told me. They and other Christian aid organizations that work in China are also exploring ways to get half-and-half children out of China legally and have them adopted in the West. For this to happen, the children's legal guardians would need to be identified and agree to give up their rights.

It's getting late, way past the children's bedtime. We have been talking a long time, and the children are getting sleepy. But before Jim and the foster father walk me out to the street to find a taxi, Mary wants to tell me one more story about the half-and-half children. “Usually they don't talk about their mothers,” she said. It's too painful. But sometimes the subject comes up naturally in conversation, as it did with one little girl Mary supports in a foster home in another city. Mary was reading the children a bedtime story, when the child told her that Cinderella was her favorite fairy tale. The girl saw herself in the story of the impoverished, motherless child rejected by her stepfamily. The girl liked the story, Mary said, not because Cinderella married a prince or became rich. She liked it because Cinderella was happy even though she didn't have a mother.