Long Road Home: Testimony of a North Korean Camp Survivor (23 page)

While hiding, I watched many South Korean TV dramas that the missionary couple brought. I felt a sense of alienation watching these stories of romance, jealousy, and love. Unlike characters in most North Korean dramas, which were about grandiose missions and ideas that transcended individuals, such as community, country, and socialist revolution, the South Koreans seemed to be immersed in their own individual problems. Male characters were shedding tears like women, which surprised me a great deal. L could not believe it either. But these men, as effeminate and ridiculous as they seemed, freely explored their own thoughts and feelings. I thought about whether I’d ever had a moment to really give special consideration to my close ones. My wife and children always came second to my devotion to our leaders and homeland. I did not think about my personal feelings and issues as much as the people on South Korean TV. I carried a party membership card wherever I went. It had Kim Il-sung’s portrait on it, and by keeping it close to my heart I always felt physical love toward it.

The most memorable South Korean program I saw was one that arranged meetings of family members long separated by the Korean War. Even within South Korea itself, there were so many people who had been torn apart from their wives, husbands, brothers, and sisters during the war and were still living like strangers thirty or forty years after the ceasefire. The program featured a dying mother who could not recognize her middle-aged son, whom she had last seen as a toddler. Brothers and sisters would wail upon finding out that their parents had passed away without their knowledge. The same program sometimes would feature Korean orphans adopted by American families. After long years they came back to their homeland to search for their biological parents. While watching these incredible moments, a thought came to my mind. Mother had once told me about her uncle who lived in South Korea. Maybe I could find him through this channel! I quickly wrote down the contact number of the Korean Broadcasting System program producers in the back leaf of the Bible. I promised myself that as soon as I reached a safe place, I would call the number to reach out to this unknown uncle. I was greatly moved while watching these programs that gave me hope of finding a new family member in the south. But what about my family in the north? Warm tears streamed down my face, wetting my shirt, while my mind rushed through a series of questions. What were my wife and children doing? What had happened to them after my escape? Would I ever see them again?

L, who had very recently lost her family, sat and watched the program with me, sometimes crying silently, sometimes wailing out loud. She could not live with the fact that she had so easily left her children behind. Everything had happened so suddenly when she fled North Korea that she did not have any time to think about what would happen to them. At that moment, she was so afraid that if she lingered, someone would come to arrest her like so many others she’d witnessed. But poor children, they had committed no fault of their own! A terrible sense of guilt tormented her. She would have moments of outburst when she wailed and blurted out sentences broken by deep suffering.

“Even, even the wild beasts…even the beasts look after their babies! So much better! So much better than a human being like me…crazy and selfish human being like me… I am worse than the beasts! A million times worse!!!”

At these moments she insisted that she needed to go back to North Korea for the sake of the children. Although she knew there was nothing she could do for them, she had to release these thoughts aloud to relieve her pain. Was she really hoping that she could at least live with them in the camp like I did with my mother in Camp No. 18? As the culprit who’d ruined her family life, I suffered with her. That was the least I could do for her. I urged her to blame me openly if that made her feel any better. But instead, L eventually sought solace in reading the Bible and offering prayers as Mrs. M had taught her. Nevertheless, we often cried together, wiped each other’s tears, and vainly consoled each other that we would see our lost family members soon. Through the repeated process of mourning and consolation, L and I became close confidants. Most times, there was nobody but us in the shelter, and we became companions sharing everything—the sense of imminent danger, anxiety about the future, loss, self-pity, and loneliness, which all fueled carnal desire to fill the unbearable void of life.

Beijing

In the sixth month of my stay in that Yanji apartment, when I’d almost fully recovered my bodily strength, what seemed like an eternal waiting period finally came to an end. Mr. and Mrs. M came to see L and me one day to announce our impending departure. The final destination was South Korea. The couple explained that they were searching for ways to get us there as soon as possible. It had become obvious that the South Korean embassy in Beijing would not accept us and grant us asylum. South Koreans simply wanted to avoid anything that might cause conflict with China. The couple had thought about sending us on a boat crossing the Yellow Sea between China and the Korean peninsula, but that turned out to be risky as well. They had recently heard that a North Korean diplomat stationed in Beijing had disappeared with his wife, and the North Korean police were on alert in the urban and port area near the city to look for them. So the idea of a short trip from the east coast of China to the west coast of Korea had to be abandoned. The missionaries concluded that we had no choice but to get to South Korea via Mongolia. Once we arrived in Mongolia, everything would be fine, according to their explanation. We could pose as South Korean tourists who’d gotten lost in the border area and ask the Mongolian authorities to send us to the South Korean embassy in Ulaanbataar.

It promised to be a long and dangerous journey. But Mr. and Mrs. M wanted to get us out of the Yanji apartment for fear that there might be a police raid if we stayed too long. They brought us well-prepared packages, which showed that they were constantly working to ensure the safest and easiest journey to South Korea. L and I became teary when we finally realized that we were about to bid farewell to the kind couple who had taken such good care of us. They read our minds, and their eyes also welled up. The couple made us wear everything South Korean from head to toe—underwear, outerwear, watches, shoes, backpacks, currency, and wallets. Everything we carried, except our counterfeit South Korean passports, was genuinely South Korean. The couple also gave us a large sum of money—1,500 U.S. dollars and 6,000 Chinese
yuan
for each person. I packed everything, including the Bible, which I’ve started reading during the past six months of hiding. I also carefully packed my “suicide balls” made of cookie dough and broken razor blades in case I was recaptured by the police and sent back to North Korea. Next morning, Mrs. M, L, and I departed for Beijing by train; we arrived at the capital city in the evening. Having been isolated from the bustling world for over seven years, I felt quite dazzled by the pandemonium of the train station in a large city. The sense of excitement was compounded by the danger of being captured by the Chinese police and repatriated at any moment. There was quite a bit of police presence at the station, and we did everything we could to ignore them. Mrs. M asked L and me to wait for her at the station while she tried out the bus route to Erenhot, a Chinese town in Inner Mongolia bordering Mongolia, to see how strict the security was. She thought that things would be safer once we reached Mongolia. L and I decided to stay there, amid the bustling crowd, rather than go into a quiet residential area in case something were to happen to us. However, when it approached 1:00 a.m., a police patrol went around the waiting area in the station and started to check people’s ID. L and I panicked. We carried the counterfeit South Korean passports, but we could not tell how authentic they looked. So we hurriedly left the waiting area and were glad to see a woman holding a sign written in Korean: home stay. We approached her and asked how much she would charge for the night. She answered in a typical Korean-Chinese accent that 100
yuan
would do. Without a second thought, we let her lead the way through the tiny back streets near the station to a dilapidated apartment building. We spent the night there half asleep, half awake, then went back to the train station. We waited all day, but Mrs. M did not show up. When night fell, we went back to the same place as the night before. The hostess welcomed us again. The following morning, the third day of our stay in Beijing, we finally saw Mrs. M. We led her to the boarding house, and there we sat and talked about her expedition to the border area. She told us that it took a day and a half to get to Erenhot, the Chinese entry point to the Gobi Desert, and that the security checkpoints were not too strict. She thought it would be all right for us to travel there. The wife asked the hostess of the boarding house if she would escort us to Erenhot, since we didn’t speak Chinese, and offered to pay 500
yuan
. The easygoing woman agreed. Mrs. M also requested that she carry her husband’s Chinese ID for me to borrow, just to be prepared for a thorough security check. The hostess easily agreed to this as well.

Mrs. M then told us to stay at the boarding house and went out to take care of some other business. She had just come from a long bus ride and looked very tired, but she was on her way again. Sometime later in the afternoon, she returned with a woman, another North Korean escapee who was to go to Mongolia with us. She was in her early forties and, like so many other North Koreans, had suffered immensely due to economic hardship. Her husband had died of liver disease a few years before in North Korea and she had no means to support her children. So she entrusted them to her parents and traveled to seek help from her husband’s relatives, who lived in the very far northern region. She begged, but they had neither means to help nor sympathy for her. She gave up all hopes of surviving and threw herself in the Duman River. She nearly drowned, but fate did not allow her to die like that. Her floating body was discovered by Christian missionaries on the other side of the border and she was rescued. So without knowing it, she had crossed the border between Korea and China, death and life. After she recovered her health, she was brought to Beijing, just like us, to reach South Korea. She was in the same boat as we were, and we immediately became close.

The next morning, the four of us—Mrs. M, L, the new woman who had joined the party, and me—were again in the train station. This time, we were embracing one another and shedding tears. I thanked Mrs. M for the care she had given us. Were it not for this kind woman and her husband, what would have become of me? The other two women were also holding her hand and embracing her. The hostess of the boarding house also wiped her tears. Soon Mrs. M was standing outside the bus window and waving at us. We waved until she disappeared from sight, but before she did, she became a blurry figure, as my vision was clouded by tears.

The two-story bus smelled of all sorts of things—sweat, dust, gasoline, and smoked meat. It was packed with Mongolian merchants on their way home. We rode all day through the vast land, and the scenery changed as we drove out of the busy Beijing area into remote rural mountains and later to wide-open plain. The three women were chatting constantly like little girls going on a field trip, but I mostly remained silent, worrying about the security check. When night fell, as Mrs. M told us, we passed the checkpoint. We all kept silent. Before departing, we had agreed that if anybody asked us any questions, the hostess of the boarding house would reply to the security guards that we were tourists from South Korea. But the actual security check was quite cursory—a police officer got on the bus with a flashlight and stood right next to the driver’s seat, randomly glancing at sleepy faces without bothering to walk down the aisle. That was all. As worried as I was about this part of the journey, I almost felt deceived when the officer got off the bus just like that. The next day at 4:00 p.m., we arrived in Erenhot. This was the last post of the vast Chinese land, a small town on the remote outskirts. We went to the inn recommended by Mrs. M. It was the middle of summer, and the heat was scorching. The four of us got a taxi to the marketplace. There we found a noodle shop run by Korean Chinese who spoke quite good Korean. The male host seemed to have guessed why we were there. The four of us had a very nice meal at this restaurant and ended up befriending him. For some reason, I felt like I could trust him; when we were about to leave, he pulled us aside and asked if one of the women could stay with them and help out with the restaurant business. He explained that they badly needed extra hands. We politely declined and in return asked if he could accompany us to the border the next day. He wrote down the address of our inn.

The hostess of the boarding house bid us farewell and went back to Beijing the next morning. It was August 27, 2000. I remember the date because it was L’s birthday. We had a small party for her in the room where we were staying and decided that we’d better not do anything drastic or dangerous that day, according to Korean custom. So we stayed at the inn and listened to the raindrops hitting the window of our room. However, close to midnight, we heard a knock on our door. It was the host of the noodle shop. He told us that it hadn’t rained so hard in the past three years and that this was the perfect night to cross the border. So we hurriedly packed and took a taxi to the very edge of Chinese territory. We could walk to Mongolia. According to the host, if we went all the way to the border at this place, the chances of being discovered by the patrol were greater, so he advised us to walk about two miles in the direction he pointed and we would be able to enter Mongolia without running into the guards. We all gave him a huge hug for his help. Now the three of us were left in the heavy rain. It was pitch dark and there was no trace of a human being. Nothing was to be seen or heard. We started to walk, each carrying a heavy backpack into desolate uncertainty. The destination was so near, but it was not visible in the thick darkness of rain.