Escape from North Korea (23 page)

The buyer turned out to be an evangelist working for a South Korean church. He was a bit of a shady character, she said, and in retrospect she believes he was less interested in building a successful business than in recruiting North Koreans to Christianity even at the expense of exposing them to punishment at the hands of the North Korean regime. She later learned that he operated on a quota system, with the South Korean church paying him a bonus for every North Korean he introduced to the church's underground mission in China. She figured this out after he tricked her into visiting the mission house by promising to pay her the money he owed her only if she would come and pick it up. When she arrived at the mission house, he told her that before he would give her the money, she had to complete a “New Believers” course. She had no choice but to comply.

To her surprise, she found herself receptive to the Christian message. After three weeks of studying the Bible, her perspective shifted.
“I started sensing that maybe there is a God,” she said. “There was a glimmer of light that began to shine on me.”

But she still wanted to go home. After a month in the Chinese mission house, she crossed the border back into North Korea, accompanied by the buyer-evangelist. They were caught. North Korean police arrested them and took them to a detention center, where they were interrogated. Pastor Eom was in a bind. What should she say when she was asked, as she knew she would be, if she had met any Christians in China? Contact with Christians was a crime punishable by time in a political prison. “But I couldn't really say no,” she said. “The person I was caught with was a known Christian, at least to the authorities. So the way I answered that question was to say, of course he talked to me about Christianity, but I didn't believe him. That's how I did it.”

Interrogations in North Korea are not mere question-and-answer sessions. More persuasive measures are employed. Pastor Eom was beaten by her interrogators, who kept trying to get her to confess to being a Christian. She denied it. Finally, they gave up. Her denials, coupled with her past record as a model citizen, had an impact, and the police decided to let her go. She was released with a warning.

When she got home and told her husband what had happened, he was furious. “Christianity is no good,” he told her and berated her for putting their family in jeopardy. She tried to persuade him that her business relationship with the Chinese-Korean man was too important to jeopardize, but he wouldn't listen. She showed him a palm-sized Bible her business partner had given her. Her husband grabbed the Bible out of her hand, took it to the kitchen, and burned it. A few months later, a friend tipped her off that she was about to be arrested again. She fled to China.
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Asked why so many North Korean refugees become Christians, Pastor Eom cited her own faith journey. “Not a lot of conversions are genuine at first,” she said. Refugees are usually desperate, and some falsely claim to be Christians in order to get the aid they need.
Pretending to accept their benefactors' religion is also a way North Koreans can show respect and appreciation to the Christians who help them, she explained.

But, as in her case, the message often sticks. “There's a seed planted in their hearts,” she said. “And some of the refugees eventually become true Christians. Because they have been exposed to the pastors, to missionaries, to prayer, to the Christian lifestyle, it has a profound effect on their thinking.” How so? “At first they can't believe that someone would want to help others for the sole benefit of helping, just for the purpose of serving God.” But seeing is believing. Once North Koreans realize that the Christians who help them aren't motivated by the hope of personal gain and run serious risks by helping them, she said, they often take a closer look at the religion. The example of Christians who put their faith into action is a powerful recruiting tool.

On one level, North Koreans are ready for the Christian message, Pastor Eom argues. The old socialist system has broken down, and Kim Il Sung, once revered as a deity, has been exposed as a fraud. “A lot of people know that they have been lied to all their lives” by the government, she said. At the same time, they are wary. She explained: “They are not ready to put their faith in another unseen force, in another unseen god, like Kim Il Sung, that they cannot see or touch. They don't want to be fooled again.” It takes a while for North Koreans to understand that Christian faith is different from worship of Kim Il Sung.

Pastor Eom does not hold a high opinion of many of the foreign missionaries who work in the Sino-Korean border area. She thinks many have unrealistic expectations about the effectiveness of their evangelism. In her view, a lot of the South Korean and Korean-American missionaries are under the mistaken impression that just because they speak the same language and share the same ethnicity, they have an advantage in talking to North Koreans about the Gospel.

The most effective way to spread Christianity in North Korea, she argues, is through North Koreans who have escaped. That is already happening, as North Koreans who have left the country talk about Christianity in phone calls to their relatives at home. As North Koreans inside North Korea observe the spiritual transformation of their relatives who have become Christians, it will be the beginning of what Paster Eom calls “the opening of the hearts and minds of all North Koreans for the Gospel, for Christianity.”

Like Pastor Eom, Kang Su-jin had an experience with a Christian evangelist who treated her in a devious way. When she arrived in China from North Korea, a South Korean Christian made her an offer too good to refuse: Study the Bible, become a Christian, and return to North Korea as a secret missionary. “That was the deal,” Kang Su-jin said. If she said yes, the missionary promised to reward her at the end of her studies with a gift of 3,000 Chinese yuan. That was the equivalent of about $500, a small fortune in North Korea.
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Kang Su-jin evaluated the missionary's offer in purely practical terms. Since she was planning to return home anyway after she accumulated some cash, she thought,
Why not?
In return for studying the Bible, she would receive room and board and, above all, a safe haven that would keep her out of the line of sight of the Chinese police. She decided she would go through the motions of becoming a Christian—baptism, Bible study, and the like. But she did not plan to become a real Christian, and she certainly did not intend to proselytize when she returned home. “So only for the money, I decided I would stay and study,” she explained

In the end Kang Su-jin changed her mind about returning to the North. Two unexpected things happened. First, she became a real Christian. Her change of heart about Christianity was much like that of Pastor Eom's. As she tells it, the Bible study she had undertaken for pecuniary reasons took hold. “My eyes were opened to Christianity,” she said. Second, she decided to go to South Korea. She came to
realize the danger of returning to North Korea, where Christians are viewed as traitors. She put it bluntly: “I became afraid to go back.”

Kang Su-jin's escape story ends well. She met an American pastor in China who was a conductor on the new underground railroad. He found a home for her in a safe house. She spent a few months in the safe house, spending her time cross-stitching murals of the Last Supper and other religious scenes while she was waiting for her turn to leave. The pastor guided her across China and helped her cross the border into Laos; from there, she eventually made her way to South Korea. In South Korea, she has built a new life running a nonprofit agency that helps North Korean women who have been trafficked. She has been reunited with family members who also escaped from the North. She is still a Christian.

An unknown number of North Koreans have made the decision that Kang Su-jin rejected. They have returned to North Korea as Christian evangelists. The practice began in the late 1990s, when the number of North Koreans in China was at its height and Christian missionaries were hard at work in the borderlands.

Proselytizing in North Korea is life-threatening work. The government's harsh treatment of Christians is well known, and the North Koreans who make the decision to return to their country to spread their faith are keenly aware of the risks they are taking. They literally are risking their lives.

Mere possession of a Bible can be a capital crime in North Korea. So it was for Ri Hyon-ok, a thirty-three-year-old woman who was executed in 2009 for distributing Bibles in a city near the border. Ri Hyon-ok was also accused of spying and organizing dissidents. Her husband and three children were sent to the gulag.
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Her execution was public. The government was sending a message: Christianity is dangerous; stay away from it.

Worship is also an offense, as it was for twenty-three Christians arrested in 2010 in a raid on their illegal house church. The worshippers had been to China, where they became Christians before returning to North Korea. Three were executed; the others were sentenced to the infamous Yodok political prison camp.
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There is much more clandestine Christian worship in North Korea today than there was in the late 1990s or early 2000s, according to Scott Flipse of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom. “That's all I can tell you,” he said. “I don't know the numbers, and there's no way to count them.” How many Christians are there in North Korea? “You've got some people claiming there are one hundred thousand Christians in North Korea,” he replied. “You've got some people claiming ten thousand. All we know is that it is happening and that it's happening at a much larger level than it was ten years ago.”
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The late Song Jong-nam was one of the North Koreans who converted in China and returned to North Korea to spread his faith. His story was pieced together by his younger brother, Song Jong-hun, who now lives in South Korea. Song Jong-hun said his brother became a Christian in China, inspired by the example of the South Korean missionary who helped him. The missionary worked undercover as the manager of a timber mill, where he hired North Korean refugees and gave them a place to live. The elder Song returned voluntarily to North Korea in 2004 with the intention of proselytizing. In 2006, the police found Bibles at his home and arrested him, charging him with spying for South Korea and the United States. He was sentenced to execution by firing squad. Song Jong-hun, by now in South Korea, heard about his brother's sentence and launched a campaign to draw international attention to his plight. He later learned, from a man who had been incarcerated with Song Jong-nam, that his brother had died in prison.
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A North Korean teenager recounted a similar story to four thousand fellow Christians from 190 countries at the Lausanne Congress
on World Evangelization in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2010. The girl, Son Gyeong-ju, described how her family had fled to China, where they became Christians. Her father disappeared after he went back to North Korea to teach Christianity. He “chose to return to North Korea—instead of enjoying a life of religious freedom in South Korea,” she told the audience. He wanted “to share Christ's message of life and hope among the hopeless people of his homeland,” she said. The girl escaped on the new underground railroad and now lives in South Korea.
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Steven Kim's main work, as mentioned earlier, is rescuing trafficked women through 318 Partners, the nonprofit organization he set up on Long Island, New York, after his return to the United States from jail in China. But in addition to this work on the new underground railroad, he also supports a mission to send Bibles to North Korea and plant churches there. The Bible-smuggling operation was relatively easy to organize, he said. It's not difficult to find North Korean border guards who, for a price, will look the other way when a courier crosses the river with a load of Bibles. All it takes is enough money.

Planting churches is far more difficult, and far more dangerous. 318 Partners already has opened four secret house churches in North Korea and has plans to open twenty more. The churches were founded by North Korean refugees whom 318 Partners recruited and trained in China over a two-year period. The future evangelists received vocational training in addition to their religious instruction. The aim was to help them get jobs or set up small businesses on the black market once they returned to North Korea. The vocational training was an afterthought, Steven Kim said. He and his colleagues couldn't figure out how to get financial support to the evangelists after they went back to North Korea, so they hit on the idea of giving them training that would allow them to become self-sufficient.

Open Doors, founded in 1955 by a Dutchman who smuggled Bibles behind the Iron Curtain, is a Christian ministry dedicated to
helping persecuted Christians worldwide. It estimates that there are four hundred thousand secret Christians in North Korea—and that the number of Christians there is growing quickly. The organization also estimates the number of Christians imprisoned for their religious beliefs to be between fifty thousand and seventy thousand.