Escape from North Korea (7 page)

February 16 is the birthday of the late Kim Jong Il, who is respectfully known in North Korea by the title of Great General. Kim Jong Il, who died at the end of 2011, ruled North Korea as dictator after the death in 1994 of his father Kim Il Sung. Along with April 15, which is Kim Il Sung's birthday, February 16 is the most important holiday in the North Korean calendar.
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During Kim Jong Il's lifetime, his birthday was marked with a military parade in Pyongyang and displays of the robotic mass dancing for which North Korea is famous. In flush times, Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung celebrated their
birthdays by dispensing extra rations of food and soap to ordinary citizens, along with candy for the children. The elite were treated to such luxuries as long underwear from Japan, watches from Switzerland, wine from France, and, for the super-elite, Mercedes-Benzes from Germany.

On February 15, 2005, on the eve of the Great General's Birthday, the boy Joseph Kim marked the occasion in another way: He walked across the Tumen River into China. Or, rather, he ran, hoping that the border guards were too engrossed in the holiday festivities to pay close attention to their duties. It was a bitter day, with snow covering the frozen river in many spots, and he was dressed only in sweatpants, a light jacket, and a pair of sneakers. No hat. No gloves. No boots. He slipped and slid on the ice.

Joseph had made his decision the night before, when, as was often the case, he went to bed hungry. He was crashing at a friend's place because he did not have a home of his own and it was too cold to sleep outdoors. When he woke up the next morning, he almost changed his mind. He wanted to tell someone he was leaving, to say good-bye to at least one person he knew, but there was no one he trusted with such a secret. Everyone in his family had died or disappeared, and the information was too dangerous to share with a friend, no matter how close. Instead, he took a walk around town, looking at the familiar sights and bidding silent farewells to the buildings he had known all his life. He recalled his father's refusal to go to China and wondered for the thousandth time whether he was making the right decision.

Finally, in the midafternoon, hunger overcame sentimentality, and he headed toward the river on the outskirts of town. He joined a group of pedestrians who were strolling along a paved road that ran parallel to the river. When the pedestrians were looking the other way, he veered off the path, scrambled down the bank to the Tumen River, and started running. He remembers little about the actual crossing, just that his heart was pounding.

In crossing the river, the boy committed two offenses for which he could have paid with his life. It was a crime to leave North Korea without permission. It was also a crime to enter China without official papers and at other than one of the fifteen authorized border-crossing points. If he had been spotted on the ice, he could have been shot by North Korean border guards.

If Joseph had been captured on the North Korean side of the frontier he would have been arrested, interrogated, and hauled off to a detention center. If the Chinese had grabbed him on their side of the border, it would have taken a little longer, but the result would have been the same. He would have been repatriated and then imprisoned. If his jailers decided that he had fled to China for the purpose of going to South Korea—a treasonous offense—he might have faced the ultimate penalty and been hanged. The boy knew all this. It was a measure of his desperation that he was nevertheless prepared to run.

LOOK FOR A BUILDING WITH A CROSS ON IT

W
hen Joseph reached the other side of the Tumen River, he scrambled up the bank and lay very still for a few minutes, his face pressed against the frozen ground. He waited to hear boots come crashing toward him and feel hands grab him under the shoulders, wrench him to his feet, and haul him off to a police station. But nothing happened. No boots, no hands, no police. Everything was quiet. Once his heart finally stopped pounding, he lifted his head, looked around, and scrutinized the Chinese village he had observed from the North Korean side of the river. He decided to go there to beg for food.

Eventually he pulled himself to his feet and set off toward the nearest house. He knocked on the door, forced himself to smile, and made his pitch to the woman who answered. She shook her head and shut the door. He continued to the next house and then the next, each time receiving the same reply: We can't help you. After being
turned away from a dozen houses, Joseph finally found a welcome. A man opened his door wide, invited him inside, and gave him a meal. Joseph noticed that despite his generosity, the man did not appear to be any richer than the villagers who had turned him away. The man spoke Korean, and in the course of conversation he told Joseph that he was a Christian.

As Joseph was departing, the Good Samaritan advised him to walk along the bank of the Tumen River until he came to a bigger town, where, the Christian said, he would be more likely to find help. Joseph set off for the town, but night was falling and he stepped off the path and into the woods, looking for a dry place to lie down and rest. He slept for a few hours stretched out on the ground near a fire he lit with matches he had happened to bring with him. He reached the town the next afternoon and poked around until he discovered an abandoned house. The house became his home for the next three weeks. He hid there during the day, slept on the floor of a closet at night, and ventured outside in the morning and evening to beg for food. On one of his begging missions, he met an old woman who spoke Korean. If you need help, she said, go to a church. Church people help North Koreans.

“What's a church?” Joseph asked.

“Look for a building with a cross on it,” the woman told him.

So Joseph set out to find a building with a cross on it. Having never seen a church, he didn't realize that crosses were usually attached to the roofs of a church, visible against the sky, not painted on a wall or door. When he eventually found a church, with the help of another Korean-speaking person he met on the street, the pastor gave him food and enough money to pay for a bus ticket to Tumen City, a two-and-a-half-hour ride away. Go to Tumen City, the pastor advised him. He gave Joseph directions to a church not far from the bus station. Someone there will help you find a place to hide, the pastor promised.

Joseph did as he was told. He went to Tumen City and found his way to the second church. From there, the Chinese Christian network took over. The pastor arranged for him to live with an elderly Chinese woman who spoke Korean. Joseph helped her with housework in exchange for a place to stay. It was too dangerous for him to leave the house—his Chinese hosts feared he would be spotted and arrested—so he stayed indoors all day. He would slip outside behind the house at dusk and kick around a soccer ball for a little while.

A few months later the church introduced him to a South Korean missionary, who in turn linked him up with the American aid organization that helped him and two other boys seek political asylum in the American Consulate in the city of Shenyang. He lived in the consulate for four months, until China issued him an exit permit. When his departure date arrived, an American consul accompanied Joseph and the other two boys to the airport in Shenyang for their flight to Tokyo and on to Los Angeles. The friends said good-bye at LAX airport and went their separate ways. One of the boys went to Seattle; the other was heading for Utah. Joseph boarded a plane to Chicago, where he caught a flight south to his new home. The date of his arrival in America was February 15, 2007, precisely two years since he had crossed the river.

Joseph's experience parallels that of many North Koreans who cross the river. The first survival tip a North Korean learns when he reaches China is: Find a Christian.

Churches in northeastern China are meeting grounds for refugees and rescuers. The North Korean who finds his way to one is likely to be safer than one who doesn't. Church people routinely dare to defy the law against helping North Korean refugees. Christian organizations, funded by private sources in South Korea or America,
are among the few humanitarian groups that both want to help the North Korean refugees and work hard to do so. The sooner a refugee hooks up with the Christian network, the greater his chances of avoiding arrest and repatriation and of finding a way to disappear in Chinese society. If he wants to go to South Korea, church people can help him navigate his way to the underground railroad and obtain passage out of China.

Like Joseph, many North Koreans go to China without a plan. They are driven by hunger, fear of persecution, or a general sense that the path to a better, freer life lies across the border. At best, they may have vague notions of finding work or looking up a distant relative. Few are prepared for the rigors of life on the run in China. They make easy targets for the first person, honest or not, who offers help. Like Oliver Twist in Charles Dickens's novel about an orphan adrift in early nineteenth-century London, a North Korean can fall into the hands of the criminal Fagin as easily as he can come under the protection of the saintly Mr. Brownlow. What happens to him is largely a matter of luck.

Bride brokers and other unscrupulous people who prey on refugees make their living by seeking out new arrivals on the pretense of helping them. Bride brokers engage villagers who live near the river to report sightings of attractive young North Korean women. If Joseph had been a fourteen-year-old girl rather than a fourteen-year-old boy, chances are that one of the villagers who turned him away would instead have invited him in and offered to phone a “friend” who could “help.” In short order, the “friend” would arrive in the village, take charge of the girl, and pay the villager who had tipped him off. The next stop would be the home of the girl's new “husband.” As one rescuer put it, speaking of a young woman who had been sold in such a manner, it was as if the purchaser had struck a bargain for a fattened pig.

A church is unlikely to turn away a needy North Korean who knocks on its door. But its ability to provide assistance is limited by
its own, usually meager, resources and by Chinese law, which forbids helping North Koreans. More often than not—unless they have received a crackdown order from Beijing—local authorities turn a blind eye to churches that give handouts to North Koreans and send them on their way. But involvement with the underground railroad is strictly taboo, a far more serious violation than providing a meal to a starving refugee. Chinese Christians have gone to jail for buying train tickets for refugees, driving them to the station, or otherwise helping them get out of China.

The Northeast is China's Rust Belt. People there are rich by North Korean standards, but not by Chinese ones. As Joseph discovered at the first church he visited, many churches cannot afford to help refugees with more than a meal, a little money, and information.

Information is the most valuable commodity. Church people help refugees obtain jobs on the black market, direct them to safe places to stay, and provide advice on how to avoid arrest. Most useful of all, they provide introductions to a network of helping hands, including Chinese-Koreans who operate shelters funded by overseas donors. Trusted refugees receive introductions to South Koreans or Americans who can help them escape from China on the new underground railroad.

Few North Koreans who reach China have ever met a Christian or know anything about Christianity other than that it is banned in their country. Refugees old enough to recall the 1930s or '40s sometimes remember going to church in their childhood or hearing about churches or people who were Christians. Hwang Gi-suk, who was born in North Korea in 1935 and now lives in South Korea, had vague recollections from his childhood of tunes that he later realized were hymns. When he was living in a shelter run by an American missionary in China, he was surprised to find he could sometimes sing along without looking at the hymnal during worship services.
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Younger refugees may remember hearing their parents or grandparents mention Christianity or church. Eom Myong-hui, born in
1960, had never met a Christian or seen a church before she went to China. She recalls that her mother described attending church in the 1940s. “She told me about people praying, bowing down, and gazing at an empty space, meaning the altar, I later realized. So I had heard there was a religion called Christianity, but it wasn't relevant to me.”
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Christianity has a rich history in Korea. Protestant missionaries first arrived in the 1880s and began winning converts. Christianity flourished in early twentieth-century Korea, when the country was under the rule of Imperial Japan. It became associated with modernity, progress, and resistance to Japanese colonialism. As in China, many intellectuals and modernizers in Korea came from prominent Christian families. By the early 1940s, Pyongyang was home to so many Christians that it had earned the nickname “Jerusalem of the East.”