Long Road Home: Testimony of a North Korean Camp Survivor (22 page)

When the couple left me in the new apartment, they locked the door from the outside. I could hear the metal lock click sharply. The sound painfully reminded me of Camp No. 14, where they locked the prisoners in at night. Mr. and Mrs. M told me that it was for my own safety, but it made me incredibly uneasy. The couple kept coming almost every day to replenish food and other supplies for my comfort. As I observe them religiously coming and going, I kept thinking,
Are they telling me the truth about helping me to reach a safer place? Or are they buying time until the North Korean authorities arrive to arrest me?
At the very beginning of my stay in that apartment, I seriously thought of killing them and setting myself free. I often thought of various ways to do it and contemplated for hours about which weapon would serve my purpose the best. There were kitchen knives and hammers in the apartment. I could hide behind the door when they entered and stab them or break their skulls. But whenever I saw them come and prepare meals for me, I felt such sincere kindness exuded in their words and deeds that I could not move myself to act. However, not having any connection to the outside world, I was growing impatient. I had to do something and be prepared to react in case of emergency. I started saving every single razor blade the couple gave me and broke them into tiny pieces. Then I dissolved cookies in water and made dough with broken blades in it. I made small balls out of the dough, dried them, and always kept them in my pocket. I planned to swallow them if I was arrested. Having gone through the worst kind of imprisonment on earth, I would have gladly swallowed the cookie balls without a second thought. Now that I was prepared for the worst-case scenario, I felt a bit easier.

In the first two weeks, the couple seemed to have noticed my strange, suspicious behaviors and to want to do what they could to earn my trust. That made me relax a little. A few weeks later, I bluntly asked them if they had delivered the note and money to the border guide in town.

“Yes, do you want to meet him in person?” the husband asked me calmly.

“Could, could I?” I asked in a trembling voice. I had spent roughly a month in that apartment, and my patience was wearing thin.

“If you wish, we could arrange a meeting in a teahouse, but we all have to be very careful, as there are plenty of Chinese police searching for North Korean escapees everywhere.”

“Sure, sure. That would be good.”

A few days later, the couple asked me to dress in clothes they’d brought from South Korea and accompanied me to a small teahouse in the evening. There was the border guide, who told me that he had received the money and the note to be handed over to L. He was still taking care of his business, but was planning to go back to North Korea soon. I repeatedly told the guard to tell L and her husband that it would be best if they came to China to sell the celadon themselves and that I was sending this money in the meantime. As I had virtually no mobility, I knew I could not fulfill L’s expectations. I asked Mr. M if he could give me a phone number where L or her husband could contact me once they arrived in China. Mr. M gladly wrote down a number and gave it to the guide.

That turned out to be one of my two outings during six months of confinement in that apartment. Mr. and Mrs. M kept coming and told me to read the Bible and pray. I did not touch the Bible, which I’d never seen before. Nonetheless, the couple came at 5:00 a.m. and sat with me to offer early morning prayers. They also taught me how to pray. They never told me of future plans, which drove me insane. Whenever I looked impatient, they only asked me to pray sincerely. They also brought videotapes on the life of Jesus. Not having anything else to do and staying inside all day by myself, I sometimes watched them without much thought. One day, all of a sudden, the wife asked me how the Korean War had broken out.

“Of course, the American imperialists instigated the South Korean puppets to invade our brothers and sisters in the north.” I answered nonchalantly the way I knew it.

“No, the fact is, on Sunday, June 25, 1950, when most military forces were off guard, Kim Il-sung launched a sneak attack on South Korea. Because it was a sneak attack, the North Korean invaders could quickly force their way down to the far southern city of Busan in three days.” The wife replied calmly, but she was unflinching in her manner.

Ideology was a strange thing—mysteriously addictive and stubbornly unchanging. I was arrested, tortured, and sentenced to slow death by hard labor by the North Korean regime, but at that moment, I could not help but feel offended that Mrs. M challenged what I believed to be historical truth. I did not refute this kind woman, but I felt she was insulting me by distorting what I firmly believed to be a fact.

Companion in Misfortune

One day Mr. and Mrs. M came early in the morning to tell me some news from North Korea. The wife told me that the previous night, she’d received a phone call from L. She called from Tumen, the first Chinese town I’d found after crossing the border. L was temporarily staying there and had no place to go, so I asked Mrs. M to let me meet her and explain the situation. So Mr. M took me to the Korean-Chinese couple’s house where I’d stayed for five days, and Mrs. M brought L from Tumen to meet me. A month and a half had passed since we’ve seen each other in North Korea. So much had changed in her in that short period of time. She had been a confident and charming woman full of good will and energy. Now she sat in the dark room, all disheveled and disarrayed, not knowing where to start her story.

“I cannot believe what happened to me and my family … it’s really hard to believe.”

“So tell us what happened,” I said impatiently, as I had an ominous feeling that I played a major role in her current misery.

“Well, after you left with the guide, we waited and waited to hear from you, and when more than two weeks passed, we decided to find out what was going on. I have a permit to travel to China, so I came to Tumen and took care of some business and looked for you or the guide. I stayed more than ten days, to no avail. I simply had to go back home because the local elections were approaching and given my job, it would be terrible to miss them. So I got back on the train to return to Namyang, North Korea … and guess what I saw there?” She was getting agitated and started to talk faster. Everyone listened nervously.

“I ran into a group of policemen who rounded up North Korean runaways in China. I see such scenes quite often, but this time among the arrested, there was the guide who accompanied you from Namyang to Tumen. When I saw him, I froze and turned my eyes away, but he saw me too. He was careful not to talk to me or show signs of recognition. But he kept staring at me and I secretively returned his gaze from time to time. It looked like there was something he wanted to say. Soon I noticed that he was signaling with his cuffed hands. They were pointing to his right pocket. I realized that he had something to pass on to me, but I was scared to death that the police might see us communicating and arrest me as well.”

L stopped for a while and lifted her blank gaze.

“So what happened?” Mrs. M asked L, who still looked lost.

“Finally for a split second, one of the two police escorts went away, I don’t know where. And the other turned his back to us. That’s when the guide pulled a folded paper out of his pocket and made sure I saw it. I had to act quickly. I got up from my seat, walked by, and grabbed the white paper from his hand. Luckily no one saw us. I went to the next compartment, holding the paper tightly in my palms, and stood there for a while. I was shaking terribly. I did not move until the train arrived in Namyang. Only after I got off the train did I open the note and find some foreign money and a letter from you.” She looked me directly in the eye.

“You can’t imagine how nervous I felt then. You know what it means—to receive a letter from China like that, passed on by an illegal border crosser. Had the guide not gotten the letter to me and had it been discovered by the police in North Korea, that would have been a huge mess. So I tried to calm down and went back to the Rajin-Seonbong area, where the real surprise was waiting.”

She stopped her story but kept staring at me with a hollow gaze, as if looking at a specter.

“There in my hometown, I saw your face everywhere. Everywhere on the street, in the public marketplace, on the walls of schools, they glued pictures of your face with a detailed description of your crime.”

I lowered my eyes. I could not bear to meet her gaze. I knew it was about time the NSA issued an all-points bulletin, especially near the border area.

“I went straight home and found that nobody was there. A neighbor heard me and came over all flustered. She told me that my husband thought I was kidnapped by the criminal who had masqueraded as a Pyongyang official and that he, together with police, had gone to find out my whereabouts. In the meantime, this neighbor was going to take care of our children. I did not see my children because they were at school when I came home.” L was noticeably trembling while she talked about her family. Nobody interrupted her this time.

“I knew what it all meant. It was all over for us. It was all over…. My husband was probably detained by the police despite his innocence, and they would arrest me in no time when they made up their minds that we had contacts with the worst criminal on the run…. I did not spend another second in my house after the neighbor left and went straight back to Namyang, and crossed the river on foot when darkness fell. When I arrived in Tumen, I called the number written on your note, and here I am.”

I could not say anything for a while. I was listening to her story with a lowered head, not meeting her blank gaze. But soon I recovered my composure and said to Mr. and Mrs. M, “L is a relative of mine, and because she was helping me escape from North Korea, she and her family got into this huge trouble. I really don’t know what to say, but may I please beg you to let her hide in the apartment with me? She cannot go back now, and if she got caught here, it would be terrible.”

Mr. and Mrs. M did not object. They did not question what I said, but they wanted to know more about L, who was speechless after her long talk.

“Her husband is a vice director of the Maritime Department in Rajin-Seonbong,” I started to help out. Mr. and Mrs. M showed great interest in what I had to say. They wanted to hear more about her background. Having perceived this positive signal, I went on.

“Quite an influential guy on the other side. L is also well connected, because she worked as a political instructor for the military families. She knows them all very well.”

The couple was glad to know that this woman had a lot to tell about the other side of the border they could not approach. I sensed that they were sympathetic about her misery; in addition, L could be valuable for their own work of assisting refugees. In the middle of the night we all came back to the apartment where I was hiding and continued to talk. This is how I was joined by L, who never had expected that hosting an unknown guest so briefly and unsuspectingly could completely change her life.

During the six months of my stay, the couple brought three other escapees to the apartment. They were brought in sequence, but I was told not to interact with them.

“If the guest asks questions, just tell him that you are the owner of this house, okay?” the wife told me.

One of the guests told me that he was simply touring the area. But there was no deceiving each other. People on the run shared that sixth sense that could tell suspicion, uncertainty, and fear. Escapees could easily spot someone in the same situation. He later told me that he was a medical doctor from Cheongjin and was now helping the couple smuggle various medicines and first aid supplies back into North Korea. When I heard this, I felt scared that the couple and the doctor had some ties to North Korea. L was also afraid of the possibility. I still had suspicious moments about my precarious position. I modified my plans and decided to run out the front door if something went wrong. L, who was still in shock, agreed with me, and we reminded each other not to get completely relaxed.

But as vigilant as I was, deep in my heart, I was very much assured that the couple did not mean any harm. The wife would make warm meals every morning after prayers. She would mix various healthy grains with rice, and sometimes for lunch she would come back from a market with azalea-flavored noodles to stimulate my appetite. In the refrigerator, there were bananas, oranges, apples, and much more. She was really trying to restore my health with great care. Gorging on all kinds of appetizing food, I transformed from an emaciated skeleton into a fat pig. My belly started to bulge. I’d been subject to perpetual hunger for such a long time that everything tasted like honey, and I could not throw food away. I must have weighed less than 90 pounds in camp, but in six months at the apartment I put on an extra 55 pounds. Never had I thought of women in camp, but during those months of idling away, doing nothing but eating, I felt sexual desire for the first time since my arrest.

During this time of hiding, I often thought about my life in North Korea. Back in the days when I was working for the NSA and driving long hours, I set my radio to the South Korean channel in order to listen to music to stay awake. One time, I blasted South Korean music while driving with my superior D. D looked at me and asked what I was listening to. I told him that it was one of those foreign songs from a country of communist brotherhood and that it had been presented in this year’s April Festival when more than 100 countries sent musicians to commemorate Kim Il-sung’s birthday. D turned his squinting eyes toward me and said firmly, “Bullshit, it does not sound like it. You are bullshitting again.” But in spite of critical remarks delivered in a severe tone, he did not switch the channel. He just kept listening to the song, betraying his intention to stay free of bad capitalist influence. It is no secret that the North Korean leadership was very familiar with South Korean popular culture. While searching for radio signals, at times, I would inadvertently end up listening to anti–North Korean propaganda programs broadcast by the South Korean radio station. They were mostly about the fallacies of Kim Il-sung’s regime. The South Korean anchors said in their over-sweetened voices that the sufferings of the North Korean people were due to the Kim rulers’ exploitation. I always laughed at such nonsense, but later in the camp, those South Korean radio comments came back to haunt me occasionally, which made me think how easy it had been for me to dismiss them when my life was following the model of the impeccably successful revolutionary heroes.