The young North Korean smuggler who was guiding us across the border insisted we had to go that night. He had paid some guards to look the other way, but he couldn’t bribe all the soldiers in the area, so we had to be extremely cautious.
I wasn’t dreaming of freedom when I escaped from North Korea. I didn’t even know what it meant to be free. All I knew was that if my family stayed behind, we would probably die—from starvation, from disease, from the inhuman conditions of a prison labor camp. The hunger had become unbearable; I was willing to risk my life for the promise of a bowl of rice.
The only true “love” we can express is worship for the Kims, a dynasty of dictators who have ruled North Korea for three generations. The regime blocks all outside information, all videos and movies, and jams radio signals. There is no World Wide Web and no Wikipedia. The only books are filled with propaganda telling us that we live in the greatest country in the world, even though at least half of North Koreans live in extreme poverty and many are chronically malnourished.
My former country doesn’t even call itself North Korea—it claims to be Chosun, the true Korea, a perfect socialist paradise where 25 million people live only to serve the Supreme Leader, Kim Jong Un.
In 2009, my mother and I were rescued by Christian missionaries, who led us to the Mongolian border with China. From there we walked through the frigid Gobi Desert one endless winter night, following the stars to freedom.
I understand that sometimes the only way we can survive our own memories is to shape them into a story that makes sense out of events that seem inexplicable.
In the earliest years of my life, before the worst of the famine that struck North Korea in the mid-1990s had gripped our city, our friends would come around and we would share the noodles with them. In North Korea, you are supposed to share everything. But later, when times were much harder for our family and for the country, my mother told us to chase the children away. We couldn’t afford to share anything.
The country I grew up in was not like the one my parents had known as children in the 1960s and 1970s. When they were young, the state took care of everyone’s basic needs: clothes, medical care, food. After the Cold War ended, the Communist countries that had been propping up the North Korean regime all but abandoned it, and our state-controlled economy collapsed. North Koreans were suddenly on their own.
After the Japanese surrendered on August 15, 1945, the Soviet army swept into the northern part of Korea, while the American military took charge of the South—and this set the stage for the agony my country has endured for more than seventy years. An arbitrary line was drawn along the 38th parallel, dividing the peninsula into two administrative zones: North and South Korea.
The United States flew an anti-Communist exile named Syngman Rhee into Seoul and ushered him into power as the first president of the Republic of Korea. In the North, Kim Il Sung, who had by then become a Soviet major, was installed as leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or DPRK.
In 1953, both sides agreed to end the fighting, but they never signed a peace treaty. To this day we are still officially at war, and both the governments of the North and South believe that they are the legitimate representatives of all Koreans.
There are more than fifty subgroups within the main songbun castes, and once you become an adult, your status is constantly being monitored and adjusted by the authorities. A network of casual neighborhood informants and official police surveillance ensures that nothing you do or your family does goes unnoticed. Everything about you is recorded and stored in local administrative offices and in big national organizations, and the information is used to determine where you can live, where you can go to school, and where you can work.
If given a choice, she would have liked to have become a doctor. But only students from better families are allowed a say in what they will study. The school administration decided she would major in inorganic chemistry, and that’s what she did.
She sincerely believed that North Korea was the center of the universe and that Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il had supernatural powers. She believed that Kim Il Sung caused the sun to rise and that when Kim Jong Il was born in a cabin on our sacred Mount Paektu (he was actually born in Russia), his arrival was marked by a double rainbow and a bright new star in the sky.
It would be many years before she realized that Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il were just men who had learned from Joseph Stalin, their Soviet role model, how to make people worship them like gods.
If you grow up in the West, you may think that romance occurs naturally, but it does not. You learn how to be romantic from books and movies, or from observation. But there was no model to learn from in my parents’ time. They didn’t even have the language to talk about their feelings.
The truth was that outside our sealed borders, the Communist superpowers that created North Korea were cutting off its lifeline. The big decline started in 1990 when the Soviet Union was breaking apart and Moscow dropped its “friendly rates” for exports to North Korea. Without subsidized fuel and other commodities, the economy creaked to a halt.
Our Dear Leader had mystical powers. His biography said he could control the weather with his thoughts, and that he wrote fifteen hundred books during his three years at Kim Il Sung University. Even when he was a child he was an amazing tactician, and when he played military games, his team always won because he came up with brilliant new strategies every time. That story inspired my classmates in Hyesan to play military games, too. But nobody ever wanted to be on the American imperialist team, because they would always have to lose the battle.
This worship of the Kims was reinforced in documentaries, movies, and shows broadcast by the single, state-run television station.
Our classrooms and schoolbooks were plastered with images of grotesque American GIs with blue eyes and huge noses executing civilians or being vanquished with spears and bayonets by brave young Korean children. Sometimes during recess from school we lined up to take turns beating or stabbing dummies dressed up like American soldiers.
In North Korea, public executions were used to teach us lessons in loyalty to the regime and the consequences of disobedience. In Hyesan when I was little, a young man was executed right behind the market for killing and eating a cow. It was a crime to eat beef without special permission.
They announced his execution to the whole city, and then brought him to the market and tied him at the chest, knees, and ankles to a heavy piece of wood. Three men with rifles stood in front of him and began firing.
If you were caught smuggling or distributing illegal videos, the punishment could be severe. Some people have even been executed by firing squad—just to set an example for the rest of us.
North Koreans have two stories running in their heads at all times, like trains on parallel tracks. One is what you are taught to believe; the other is what you see with your own eyes. It wasn’t until I escaped to South Korea and read a translation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four that I found a word for this peculiar condition: doublethink. This is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in your mind at the same time—and somehow not go crazy.
It was normal to see bodies in the trash heaps, bodies floating in the river, normal to just walk by and do nothing when a stranger cried for help.
There were so many desperate people on the streets crying for help that you had to shut off your heart or the pain would be too much. After a while you can’t care anymore. And that is what hell is like.
Only the most privileged citizens are allowed to live and work in the nation’s capital. You need special permission even to visit. But Pyongyang is as familiar to ordinary North Koreans as our own backyards because of the hundreds upon hundreds of picture books and propaganda films that celebrate it as the perfect expression of our socialist paradise.
My mother told her she had tried to call my father in Pyongyang but couldn’t reach him. That’s when she found out he had been arrested for smuggling.
My father was in a shocking condition. He told her the police had tortured him by beating one place on his leg until it swelled up so badly that he could barely move. He couldn’t even get to the toilet. Then the guards tied him in a kneeling position with a wooden stick behind his knees, causing even more excruciating pain. They wanted to know how much he had sold to smugglers and who else was involved in the operation.
In “reeducation” camps, the inmates are forced to work at hard labor all day, in the fields or in manufacturing jobs, on so little food that they have to fight over scraps and sometimes eat rats to survive. Then they have to spend the evenings memorizing the Leaders’ speeches or engaging in endless self-criticism sessions. Although they have committed “crimes against the people,” these prisoners are thought to be redeemable, so they can be sent back to society once they have repented and finished an intensive refresher course in Kim Il Sung’s teachings.
my sister and I had to drop out of school. Education is supposed to be free in North Korea, but students have to pay for their own supplies and uniforms, and the school expects you to bring gifts of food and other items for the teachers. We no longer had money for these things, so nobody cared if we went to class or not.
But it was a tricky thing to buy and sell property in North Korea because everything belonged to the state. Because it was illegal, the sale of our house was never recorded and there were no deeds or other papers to sign. My mother and the buyer just made an oral agreement, and trusted that nobody would inform on them.
My father had been convicted in a secret trial and sentenced to hard labor at a felony-level prison camp. We thought that he was sentenced to seventeen years, but later found out it was ten. No matter, because hardly anyone survived very long in these places. Everybody knew this, because the regime wanted us to fear these camps. They were places where you are no longer considered a human being. Prisoners in these camps can’t even look directly at the guards, because an animal cannot look a human in the face. They normally aren’t allowed visits from family; they can’t even write letters. Their days are spent in bone-breaking labor with only thin porridge to eat, so they are always weak and hungry. At night the prisoners are crammed into small cells and forced to sleep like packed fish, head to toe. Only the strongest live long enough to serve out their sentences.
In North Korea, schoolchildren do more than study. They are part of the unpaid labor force that keeps the country from total collapse. I always had to carry a set of work clothes in my school bag, for the afternoons when they marched us off for manual labor.
In North Korea, you can’t just choose where you want to live. The government has to give you permission to move outside your assigned district, and the authorities don’t make it easy. The only good reasons are a job transfer, marriage, or divorce.
Jeans were symbols of American decadence, and if the police caught you wearing them they would take scissors and cut them up. Then you could be sentenced to a day of reeducation or a week of extra work.
When women escaped to China, the government didn’t get all that upset about it, and their relatives were usually not punished. But if a man like my father was to defect, the government would be very hard on his brother and sisters and their families. They might lose their jobs as doctors and professors, or even be sent to prison.
But once I was well enough to walk to the bathroom, I discovered that the hospital used the courtyard to store the dead. The whole time I was staying there, several bodies were stacked like wood between my room and the outhouse. Even more horrible were the rats that feasted on them day and night.
She begged me, “Just give me one chance to tell your father that I’m going. Then I’ll come back.” I wouldn’t let her leave, not even to tell my father. He would find a way to stop her, or she would change her mind. I knew if I let her out of my sight I would never see her again.
We never thought to ask why these women were helping us, and why we didn’t have to pay them anything.
It wasn’t until later that I found out what happened. The broker told my mother that he wanted to have sex with me. She had to think quickly—he couldn’t know I was her daughter and only thirteen. He might send us back to be captured by those border guards. So she explained to him I was too sick, that I had just had an operation and my stitches would tear.
He pushed my mother down on a blanket in the dirt, one he had obviously used before, and raped her.
“If you want to stay in China, you have to be sold and get married,” she told us.
My mother, who had been sold by the North Koreans for 500 Chinese yuan, the equivalent of about $65 (the value in 2007), was being bought by Zhifang for the equivalent of $650. My original price was the equivalent of $260, and I was sold to Zhifang for 15,000 yuan, or just under $2,000.
We went outside, and the bald broker told me to wait by the gate. Then he threw my mother to the ground and raped her right in front of me, like an animal. I saw such fear in her eyes, but there was nothing I could do except stand there and shiver, begging silently for it to end. That was my introduction to sex.
North Korean women were in demand in the rural areas of China because there were not enough Chinese women to go around. The government’s population control strategy prohibited most couples from having more than one child—and in Chinese culture, a male child is more valued.
Men with physical or mental disabilities were particularly unlikely to find wives, and these men and their families created the market for North Korean slave-brides. But brides weren’t cheap, sometimes costing thousands of dollars, or the equivalent of a year’s earnings for a poor farmer. Of course, trafficking and slave marriages are illegal in China, and any children that result are not considered Chinese citizens. That means they cannot legally go to school, and without proper identification papers, can’t find work when they get older. Everything about trafficking is inhuman, but it’s still a big business in northeastern China.
Finally, a family of farmers arrived with a son who was in his early thirties and still unmarried. My mother was sold to them for the equivalent of about $2,100.
She discovered that she was expected to be not just a wife to this Chinese farmer but a slave to his whole family. She had to cook and clean and work in the fields. Time after time she begged them to let her call her little daughter again, but no matter how much she cried, they didn’t care. To them, she was like one of their farm animals, not a human being at all.
Later that night, Hongwei gestured to me that he was my husband so I must sleep with him. Then he tried to rape me.
Once again he tried to rape me. He pinned my arms to the bed, but I bit him and kicked him hard and got away. I ran to the kitchen and grabbed a knife, then held it to my throat as I stood on the balcony.
If the Chinese government would end its heartless policy of sending refugees back to North Korea, then the brokers would lose all their power to exploit and enslave these women. But of course if North Korea wasn’t such a hell on earth, there wouldn’t be a need for the women to flee in the first place.
“I’m afraid there is nothing we can do,” he said. “This patient has advanced colon cancer and it has spread to all his organs.” He explained that there were so many tumors it was pointless trying to operate. My father might have three to six months to live, at the most. All we could do was try to keep him comfortable.
Looking for work in China was a crime, but escaping to South Korea was high treason, and you would either be sent to a political prison camp, from which there is no escape, or maybe just executed.
Our group was planning to cross the border into Mongolia at night, on foot, during one of the coldest times of the year, when temperatures in that part of the Gobi Desert can drop to minus-27 degrees Fahrenheit. Winter crossings were supposed to be safer because the Chinese border patrols were lighter and they wouldn’t be expecting anyone to risk freezing to death during such a dangerous trek. But there was still a real possibility that we would be arrested before we got to the border. And in that case, my mother and I had decided we were not going to be taken. My mother had stashed away a large cache of sleeping pills—the same kind my grandmother had used to kill herself. I hid a razor blade in the belt of my tweed jacket so that I could slit my own throat before they sent me back to North Korea.
I was ready to give up, to lie down and die. I couldn’t walk another step. I had started hallucinating hours ago, seeing wire fences on the horizon. “Umma, look!” I said over and over again. But when we reached the spot, nothing would be there.
they warned us how difficult it would be to compete with students who were born in South Korea. This country’s academic achievement is rated number one in the world by the Pearson Global Index, a metric that ranks the United Kingdom in sixth place and the United States in fifteenth.
I crammed twelve years of education into the next eighteen months of my life. I attended a few other special schools to help me get my general equivalency diplomas for middle school and high school. But even then, I studied best on my own. I vowed to myself to read one hundred books a year, and I did.
We had heard the “love” word used in different ways in smuggled TV shows and movies, but there was no way to apply it in daily life in North Korea—not with your family, friends, husband, or wife. But in South Korea there were so many different ways of expressing love—for your parents, friends, nature, God, animals, and, of course, your lover.
After he attacked her, my mother tried to break up with this man, but he stalked her and came to the apartment at all hours to threaten her. After a couple of months, she gave up resisting and got back together with him again. But he was a violent man, and he continued to abuse her. Sometimes I would get a text from her saying, “If I die tonight, you know he did it.”
In August, I checked the online admissions notices and learned that I had been accepted at Dongguk University in the criminal justice department.
My detective was right about at least one thing—the North Korean government had been watching me. In early 2015, the regime uploaded two separate videos calling me a liar and a “human rights propaganda puppet.”