Escape from North Korea

The Untold Story of Asia's Underground Railroad

Melanie Kirkpatrick

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781594037320
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Kommunismus, Postkommunismus & Sozialismus

From the world’s most repressive state comes rare good news: the escape to freedom of a small number of its people. It is a crime to leave North Korea. Yet increasing numbers of North Koreans dare to flee. They go first to neighboring China, which rejects them as criminals, then on to Southeast Asia or Mongolia, and finally to South Korea, the United States, and other free countries. They travel along a secret route known as the new underground railroad.With a journalist’s grasp of events and a novelist’s ear for narrative, Melanie Kirkpatrick tells the story of the North Koreans’ quest for liberty. Travelers on the new underground railroad include women bound to Chinese men who purchased them as brides, defectors carrying state secrets, and POWs from the Korean War held captive in the North for more than half a century. Their conductors are brokers who are in it for the money as well as Christians who are in it to serve God. The Christians see their mission as the liberation of North Korea one person at a time.Just as escaped slaves from the American South educated Americans about the evils of slavery, the North Korean fugitives are informing the world about the secretive country they fled. Escape from North Korea describes how they also are sowing the seeds for change within North Korea itself. Once they reach sanctuary, the escapees channel news back to those they left behind. In doing so, they are helping to open their information-starved homeland, exposing their countrymen to liberal ideas, and laying the intellectual groundwork for the transformation of the totalitarian regime that keeps their fellow citizens in chains.

PART

I

ESCAPE

Anthony had fully made up his mind that when the last day of December ended, his bondage should end also, even if he should have to accept death as a substitute. He then began to think of the Underground Rail Road and of Canada; but who the agents were, or how to find the depot, was a serious puzzle to him.

—THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD RECORD
NOVEMBER 1854

CROSSING THE RIVER

Under the terms of the armistice that suspended the Korean War in 1953, a narrow strip of land, two and a half miles wide and 155 miles long, divides the country of Korea roughly along the thirty-eighth parallel north. Since that time, that strip of land, called the Demilitarized Zone, has served as a buffer between the Republic of Korea in the south and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the north. It also has served another purpose: It has kept the people of North Korea from running away.

For more than half a century, the DMZ has been virtually impenetrable. It is seeded with land mines, surrounded by fences, barbed wire, and watchtowers, and patrolled on both sides by heavily armed soldiers. North Korea’s million-man army faces South Korea’s six hundred thousand troops, who are backed by twenty-eight thousand American ground forces. For good reason, the DMZ is often called the most militarized border in the world.

In the nearly sixty years since its creation, the DMZ has seen so little human activity that it has reverted to a natural state. It is home today to the Asiatic black bear, Eurasian lynx, red-crowned crane, and other exotic species that have fled the development accompanying East Asia’s newfound prosperity. More than one thousand plant and animal species coexist in this accidental nature preserve. Even the extremely rare Siberian tiger, the largest of its species, is said to prowl the DMZ.¹

The last human beings to cross the thirty-eighth parallel in any number were Korean War refugees. At the time war broke out on June 25, 1950, an estimated one million men, women, and children living in North Korea fled south in advance of the Communist forces led by Kim Il Sung. Since the war, the only North Koreans to have crossed the line have been regime officials en route to discussions in Seoul, infiltrators bent on assassination or other mayhem in South Korea, and a few soldier-defectors familiar with the pathways that routed them safely past the million land mines buried there. As every North Korean knows, to reach South Korea, you cannot go south. You must first go north, to China. You must cross the river.

North Korea’s boundary with China stretches 880 miles and is delineated by two rivers, the Yalu and the Tumen. The source of both rivers is on Mount Paektu, the volcanic mountain sacred to Koreans as the ancestral home of the Korean people and the location of Korea’s first kingdom some four millennia ago. The Yalu River runs along North Korea’s northwest border and empties into the Yellow Sea near the Chinese port of Dandong and the North Korean city of Sinuiju. The Tumen River separates the two countries in the Northeast. For its last eleven miles, it runs along the frontier between North Korea and Russia before finally flowing into the Sea of Japan, the body of water that the people of both Koreas prefer to call the East Sea, a rare show of cross-border unanimity in their shared detestation of the name imposed by their former colonial masters.

For North Koreans seeking to escape from their country, the Tumen River is usually the preferred crossing point. Unlike the Yalu, which is swift and wide and can defeat even expert swimmers, the Tumen is shallow and narrow. In winter, it is possible to walk across the frozen Tumen. In summer, it is easy to swim across or even wade, and there are sections where the riverbed dries up altogether.

The Christian missionaries and humanitarian organizations that assist North Koreans in China and help them navigate the new underground railroad out of that country rarely operate within North Korea itself. North Koreans who cross the river into China do so on their own initiative or with help from family members, friends, or paid professional guides. One survey of North Koreans hiding in China showed that even though a high number received assistance from Christians once they arrived in that country, barely 1 percent received any such assistance in exiting North Korea.²

Crossing the river requires an abundance of two things that are in short supply in North Korea: luck and money. A fugitive needs luck to evade border guards who think nothing of shooting a fleeing man in the back.³ Luck will also help him stay clear of the primitive but effective man-traps that are dug into the riverbanks for the purpose of snaring North Koreans who are about to cross the river to China.

Money is essential for bribing border guards to look the other way when a traveler wants to cross the river. So, too, it is needed for hiring a guide to lead the way and pay off the relevant officials. But money isn’t always enough. Some guides don’t think twice about absconding with a client’s down payment and leaving him to his fate. Nor can the border police always be trusted to live up to their promises even when their palms have been well greased. Police can play a double game. Timing is everything, and the price of crossing the river can range from one hundred dollars to $1,000 during one of Pyongyang’s periodic crackdowns, when a border guard would be risking his life if he defied orders to prevent crossings.

Some North Koreans wait for years before they accumulate the resources and summon the courage to flee. For others, the insecurity of their situation in North Korea leaves them little choice. Crossing the river is the only way to survive. It means the difference between life and death.

“If I hadn’t gone to China,” the boy said, “I would have died.”⁴

Joseph Gwang-jin Kim and I were sitting at a table in the restaurant of a hotel in Washington, D.C. It was Saturday morning, and the restaurant was doing a brisk business with the weekend brunch crowd. Joseph and his foster mother had gotten up in the early hours of the morning to drive to the capital for our interview, and they were hungry. I had offered to meet them earlier in the week at a time that might be more convenient for them, but Joseph did not want to miss a day of school, so we settled on Saturday.

Joseph looked like an ordinary American teenager. His hair was short and spiky, his jeans were skinny, and the three-quarter-length black jacket he wore over his T-shirt was the essence of cool. His look fit right in with the hotel’s chic glass-and-chrome decor. The last thing he looked like was what he in fact was: a refugee who had been granted political asylum in the United States. Joseph escaped from North Korea in 2005 and hid out in China for more than a year. In 2006, with the help of an American aid organization, he decided to flee China and go to the United States. He walked past the Chinese guards and into the United States Consulate in the city of Shenyang in northeast China and asked for sanctuary. He was fourteen years old when he left North Korea. When he finally reached the United States in 2007, he was sixteen years old. As a minor, he was assigned to live with a foster family in a small Southern city.

From where Joseph and I sat in the dining room, we could glimpse the brunch buffet in an adjacent alcove. Hotel guests passed our table carrying plates piled high with the usual American breakfast favorites: eggs, pancakes, bagels and lox, fresh fruit. This abundance sparked chitchat about food. Joseph chatted about his after-school job at a sushi restaurant. He explained that he had memorized the English, Korean, and Japanese names of dozens of kinds of fish he had never heard of, much less tasted, before he arrived in the United States. After our own trip to the buffet, we began the interview. The subject of our conversation was starvation.

Joseph was explaining his decision to leave North Korea. The famine that killed at least one million people in the 1990s had ended, but food shortages persisted and Joseph was among the many North Koreans who were still starving. Children were especially at risk. In 2006, the year after Joseph fled, UNICEF reported that almost one-quarter of North Korean children were underweight due to lack of food and poor nutrition.⁵ UNICEF also noted that child malnutrition was especially severe in the northern provinces, which included the city of Hoeryong, where Joseph lived.

That section of the country is home to many citizens who belong to the unfortunate “hostile” class, the bottom ranking in the caste system created by the regime and to which every North Korean is assigned. The caste system is based on family background and loyalty to the regime. It is a key factor in determining where a citizen may live, whether he can go to university, and what kind of job he can obtain.⁶ It can determine, too, whether he has access to food.

Joseph was a kotjebi, or “fluttering swallow.” Kotjebi is the North Korean nickname for homeless children who wander the streets, “fluttering” from place to place and begging for food. Kotjebi are usually orphans whose parents have died of starvation or abandoned them and fled to China. Kotjebi often hang out in groups. They loiter around markets during the day and sleep in train stations or other public places at night. At the markets, they take up positions a few steps away from a noodle stand or a vegetable seller, heads bowed in supplication and plastic bags held open. They wait for hours for a customer to take pity on them and dump some leftovers into their bag. Or they take matters into their own hands and snatch a bun from a customer’s hands before he has a chance to take a bite.

Joseph became a kotjebi at the age of twelve, after his father starved to death. Joseph admired his father and insisted on telling me about him, although I had not inquired. It was a sensitive subject, I inferred, so I focused on listening and not asking too many questions. I had the impression that he was still trying to come to terms with his father’s death, which started a train of events that destroyed his family and almost killed him, too.

“My father was very conventional and traditional,” he said. “What I mean is that he was a very honest person and a person with integrity.” These Confucian virtues were responsible for his death, in Joseph’s view. His father refused to beg, he would not steal, and he did not reject his country and go to China. “If you want to survive in a society like North Korea, you have to be able to deceive yourself and others,” Joseph told me. His father was unable, or unwilling, to do that.

After his father died, Joseph made a resolution: He would survive. His mother had no job and could not support him, and his beloved older sister had disappeared into China, where Joseph believed she was sold as a bride. His sister was nineteen years old when she left. She had promised Joseph that she would come back in two months, bringing food. She told him to wait for her, but she never reappeared. Once Joseph gave up hope of seeing her again, he left home and took to the streets. He begged for food during the day and slept under a bridge at night. Sometimes he was so hungry that he would resort to theft. Once in a while he would go home to see his mother and sleep in his old bed for a night.

At twelve years old, Joseph was nearly a teenager, but malnutrition had stunted his growth, and he looked much younger. He was a preteen trapped in the body of an eight-year-old. In addition to being small, he lacked street smarts, and before long he was picked up by the police and incarcerated in a youth detention center. The government set up youth detention centers during the famine years of the 1990s with the ostensible purpose of providing for orphans. Cynics said the government’s real objective was to force dying children off the streets and out of sight. Joseph was worked hard at the center. Sometimes he would be sent to the countryside to pick corn; other days he was assigned to a construction gang. At least he got fed, but the twice-a-day meals were rarely more than a watery gruel made of corn. The food was enough to keep his hunger at bay, and Joseph ate it, but he told himself as he swallowed that pigs and cows ate better than he did.

After two and a half months, he escaped. The warden liked to watch the children fight, and he came to Joseph with a proposal. Defeat the older, bigger boy who was the supervisor of the dorm, and Joseph could take his place. The job came with better food and more privileges, and Joseph jumped at the chance to improve his lot. He won the fight, although not without cuts and bruises. One evening when the warden had left him in charge, he deserted his post and slipped out into the night.

“Did you go home?” I asked the obvious question.

There was a pause, as Joseph considered his answer. Yes, he finally said. But no one was there. Neighbors told him that his mother had been looking for him for a while but then gave up and left; no one knew where she had gone. He paused again. “It seems she thought I had died.” I couldn’t tell whether Joseph really believed this interpretation of his mother’s disappearance or whether he found it simply too painful to consider that she might have abandoned him. He never saw her again.

Joseph spent another year on the street before he made the decision to go to China. “Many people would think that I left North Korea because I hated the government or because I hated my hometown,” he said. “But that was not the reason why. I was just hungry, and I was willing to risk my life to get out of there. I didn’t know how to make a living.” He repeated: “I was just hungry.”

He chalked up his escape to survival skills his father never had.

The flow of people across ...