Stars Between the Sun and Moon (21 page)

Acknowledgements

Our heartfelt thanks
to Soohyun Nam, refugee lawyer and classical cellist, who for more than a year, sat between us nearly every Saturday morning. While Lucia actually started a diary after escaping to Mongolia, it was not used in the creation of this book. Soohyun translated Susan's questions and Lucia's responses, which culminated in this life story.

Soohyun offered her services with an unwavering commitment to raising awareness about the plight of North Korean women and children, with no expectation of compensation.

—Lucia Jang and Susan McClelland

Translator's Note

I first encountered
Lucia Jang's story in the summer of 2010 while assisting with her application to obtain permanent refuge status in Canada. Although I had become well aware of the plight of North Koreans, Ms. Jang's narrative struck me deeply with the sheer determination with which she had sought a life of freedom for her son and herself. Ms. Jang was therefore the first person I thought of when HanVoice asked for my help to connect with someone who might be interested in telling his or her story for a proposed book from Douglas & McIntyre about a North Korean refugee in Canada.

Ms. Jang, Susan and I first began to meet in the summer of 2011, and despite Ms. Jang's wonderful spirit and sense of humour, it was difficult to hear the painful details of her past. Having since met and worked with many more women in similar circumstances, and learning that such experiences can remain a permanent source of grief, shame and regret, I have come to appreciate Ms. Jang's courage in telling her story publicly even more. I have also come to discover that the heartbreaking experiences Ms. Jang has had to endure are, rather than being one person's uniquely dramatic life story, representative of an almost unanimously common experience among the numerous women who have fled North Korea.

Ms. Jang has, however, found a life for herself and her children that is free and secure, as have others who have survived their incredible journey. In this way, this book is for all those with a personal story of pain and tenacity. I hope that this story can serve as a record of, and a tribute to, the untold stories of numerous North Koreans who have attempted and continue to attempt escape to freedom, so that their lives and struggles do not go unaccounted. Even when there seems little that we can do, recognizing their struggle and their right to life is a positive first step.

Ms. Jang and I are also thankful to Ms. Catherine Bruce, Ms. Jang's immigration lawyer, who was the first person to listen to Ms. Jang's story and whose work brought it to light.

It has been my privilege to take a small part in the telling of Ms. Jang's story. I hope it can go on to achieve much in bringing forth the story of North Korean women to the world.

—Soohyun Nam, 2014

Soohyun Nam is
an immigration and refugee lawyer in Toronto, Canada. Since 2007, Soohyun has worked with North Korean refugees and North Korean human rights issues through
NGO
advocacy, journalism, law and music. Soohyun has served on the Board of Directors of HanVoice, a Canadian advocacy organization for North Korean refugee and human rights issues, and has reported on North Koreans in Canada and Canadian advocacy efforts for North Korean human rights and refugee issues for Radio Free Asia.

Afterword: Bearing Witness

Stephan Haggard

The appeal of
this affecting memoir stems in large part from its simple humanity. Some of the memories of childhood that Lucia Jang recounts are those that any adult might remember: the joys of experiencing play, family and young love; the anxieties of grumpy and demanding grandparents, lost brothers, playground slights. And we are struck, too, by familiar stories of early adulthood: memories of courting, the uncertainties of early marriage, the challenges of entering the workforce, the demands of becoming a parent. Given the charged nature of the geopolitics of the Korean peninsula, it is important to keep this common humanity in mind; it undergirds our hopes that North Koreans will someday enjoy the basic human rights they have been denied for so long.

Layered on top of this very human story are insights into a common Korean culture. We see the continuing power of Confucian ideals of familial fealty: the patriarchy—but with powerful and enduring women, respect for elders and, despite the Communist setting, worship of ancestors. We see the same resulting tensions that emerge in all such traditional cultures (and that have been themes in post-war South Korean literature): family provides protection and support, but it also demands sacrifices and places particular demands on young women seeking independence, equality and dignity.

Yet the power of this account rests not on revealing these insights but on underscoring the oppressive constraints of the Kim family regime, a silent but enduring and all-pervasive presence in the life story of every North Korean. The dynastic government that rules North Korea manages to be simultaneously omnipresent and distant, pervasively watchful and intrusive yet fatally unresponsive to the basic needs of its subjects. Were Lucia Jang's account idiosyncratic, we would find it unimaginable, fantastic. But through refugee testimony, surveys and outside research on North Korean history and political economy, we have a larger picture that gives credence to every crucial element in this harrowing memoir.
1

A pervasive theme in this book is continual insecurity with respect to food. What is striking is that this deprivation of the most basic of needs emerges not just during the great famine of the mid-1990s (the period euphemistically known as the Arduous March and described in Part II) when 600,000 to a million people, or 3 to 5 per cent of the population, died. Rather, it is a feature of Jang's very earliest memories dating back to the supposedly more prosperous 1970s. The descriptions she paints of a society experiencing mass hunger and starvation are searing, underlining not only the physical deprivation caused by the North Korean famine and accompanying general economic crisis, but the moral and social decay as well.

The “lean season” of late spring is a feature of many peasant societies. And despite the gleaming monuments in Pyongyang, North Korea was and remains a desperately poor country, particularly in the rural areas. But in North Korea, food deficits are a result of politics as much as nature. Sunhwa continually refers to the failure of work units and the public distribution system to deliver rations to her and her family, and the struggles her household and others endure to forage, barter and trade to make ends meet.

The deprivation is not equally distributed, and Sunhwa talks of the heretical rumours that those in Pyongyang were living well at the expense of those in the countryside. Repeatedly, we see evidence of unequal access to food on the basis of connections to the Party. And we see how Sunhwa's family—through her mother's side—suffers further indignities because of the infamous
songbun
system of social classification. For every family in North Korea, the Party keeps a file that contains information deemed pertinent to its political loyalty. The paramount sins are to have relatives who were collaborators with the Japanese, who were capitalists or landlords or, perhaps worse still, who defected to the South during or immediately following the Korean War. These transgressions, which are passed from generation to generation, influence not only prospects for Party membership (a continual theme in the book) but also job placement, education, marriage and, ultimately, access to food. In effect, North Korea is a caste society made up of the so-called core, wavering and hostile classes, and a family's life chances are dictated by its social position.

In my work with Marcus Noland on the famine and food economy in North Korea, we also show how the survival strategies of families give rise to an underground economy. It is a theme that comes through clearly in this memoir. The official economy is purportedly state socialist, and we see the effects of state direction throughout the book as Sunhwa, her family and acquaintances are moved from work unit to work unit as the authorities demand. Yet we also see the nascent market economy that flourishes during the lean season—and particularly during the famine.

Also striking in this account is the ambivalence of the authorities toward this market economy. The state recognizes that, for human survival, citizens need to be able to trade and barter. Yet at the same time, the state fears the movement of citizens and continually subjects them to unpredictable controls. At the lowest level, police harass street vendors, extract bribes and exploit their power in the most brutal ways, particularly with respect to women, who are the dominant players in these unofficial markets.

Yet another important theme that emerges in the book is the significant role played by China in propping up the North Korean regime. I was particularly interested to read early in the narrative—in the 1970s—that Chinese traders had already made inroads into North Korea, but they gained an even larger foothold by the time of the famine, as the cross-border trade took off during the Arduous March. We see Sunhwa drawn into a common scheme at that time, taking available North Korean products like fish and dogs to China to get rice and other staples.

However, it is during her forays into China that Sunhwa experiences some of the most degrading experiences in her difficult life. While the North Koreans are shocked to see how much better life is outside their country, to the Chinese, people from Chosun are clearly second-class non-citizens. The central factor driving this mistreatment of North Koreans in China is the failure of the Chinese government to recognize them as refugees. Refugees are citizens leaving their country of origin who fear persecution on their return as a result of race, religion, nationality, political belief or membership in a particular social group, and it has been my position, and that of other analysts, that North Koreans leaving their country are almost by definition refugees. Since the Kim regime makes it a criminal offence to exit the country—in violation of widely accepted human rights norms and conventions—
all
North Koreans who leave live in fear of return and incarceration. The deplorable treatment that North Korean women experience—being trafficked and sold into slavery, separated from their children, abused by citizens and authorities—can all be traced to the failure of the Chinese government to abide by its commitments under the Refugee Convention. The Sunhwas of the world deserve the opportunity to apply for—and be granted—refugee status that will permit their humane treatment and resettlement.

Sadly, the account that Sunhwa relates in Part III about the infamous penal system of North Korea is all too common in refugee testimony; relatively rare are those who describe a clean getaway from North Korea without detention in China or return to North Korea. As in Sunhwa's case, some are incarcerated more than once.

The ideological commitments of the Kim regime provide the foundation for the utterly dehumanizing treatment, including pervasive sexual abuse and forced abortion, of the “traitors” in the prison system. In our surveys of refugees, we were surprised to find that the treatment in the “labour training” camps, like the ones to which Sunhwa was moved, were only marginally better than in the larger political concentration camps reserved for the returnees from China who revealed more political motives for departing. More than any other feature of the North Korean political system, the abuses of its prison system—including the grisly executions described in the book—rise most easily to the status of crimes against humanity, as the UN Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in North Korea has also recently concluded in its defining report on the topic.

The indignities of the North Korean political system are not only revealed in the extremes of the prison camp scenes of the book. The effort of the regime to turn citizens against each another and to sow fear and suspicion across society as an instrument of control is a recurring theme throughout the memoir. The infamous Boweebu secret police are everywhere; it is impossible to know who can be trusted and who might be seeking advantage by revealing damning information to the authorities. Any attempts at organizing resistance are continually and self-consciously broken, not only through surveillance but by turning family against family, and even family member against family member.

I have read numerous refugee memoirs, but what never fails to amaze me is the strong theme of hope that runs through these remarkably courageous accounts. As the title of this book suggests, those who escape are often dreamers capable of imagining a different life for themselves and their children. Reading these stories of loss and deliverance should inspire all of us to work on behalf not only of the refugees—the tip of a much larger iceberg—but of those who are trapped behind as well. Just as North Koreans survive in part through acts of compassion and kindness, so the international community must continually bear witness to the indignities of the North Korean system. This memoir, and others like it, poses one of the central moral issues of our day: how to bring freedom to North Korea.

Stephan Haggard, Ph.D.,
is the Lawrence and Sallye Krause Professor of Korea-Pacific Studies, director of the Korea-Pacific Program and Distinguished Professor of Political Science at UC San Diego School of International Relations and Pacific Studies. He is the author with Marcus Noland of
Famine in North Korea: Markets, Aid and Reform
(2007) and
Witness to Transformation: Refugee Insights into North Korea
(2011). They are also authors of the Witness to Transformation blog at
http://blogs.piie.com/nk/.