Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

  One night Yong-su came home drunk and in a particularly ugly mood. He hit Oak-hee, knocking her down, and then delivered a kick so hard she thought she heard her rib crack. Suddenly there was a knock on the door—it was a traveler asking for directions, which happened frequently given their proximity to the station. While her husband was answering, Oak-hee got up off the floor and retreated into the kitchen. She slipped out the back door and down the steps wearing only her nightgown.

  The clock on the train station showed the time as 10:00 P.M. It was the end of August, the night warm and pleasant. When she was far enough away that she was sure her husband hadn’t followed, she stood outside contemplating her next move. Usually after fights, she would run off to her mother, who would put warm compresses on the split lips and the black eyes. The next morning, when Yong-su sobered up, he would cry and apologize and beg her to come home, which she always did. For ten years, they had been living that way. If she was ever going to change, now was the time to do it.

  Oak-hee didn’t dare enter Chongjin Station, where her husband’s co-workers might recognize her. Instead she walked along the train tracks north through the warm night out of the center of the city until she reached the first station on the outskirts, Suseong. So many people were homeless by now that nobody paid attention to a woman wearing only a nightgown.

  She remained at the station for two days. Her ribs throbbed from the beating. Hunger and dehydration gave her a blinding headache. She felt too dizzy to stand up. She saw a crowd forming around the station, people getting excited. A train was departing for the border town of Musan. She summoned up the energy to claw her way into the throng surging toward the doors and windows of the train. People grabbed the seats, then filled the aisles, stood in the toilet and on the gangways between the cars. They hung out the windows and clung to the undercarriage. The train was so crowded that the conductor couldn’t pass through to collect tickets or check travel permits. Oak-hee reached Musan after a day’s journey. She had no documents, no money, no food, no clothing.

  What she did have was the body of a relatively healthy thirty-two-year-old woman. Oak-hee had never been a great beauty. Her mother had always pegged her as the smart daughter—her middle sister was the one everyone said looked like a movie star—but Oak-hee had weathered the famine better than many. Short and buxom like her mother, she had the type of physique that gave the illusion of plumpness. Her tiny nose made her look young, and her teeth were white and straight. Even if she had been so inclined, Oak-hee was too old to be a prostitute, but that was never something she’d consider. There was, however, another way for North Korean women to sell themselves that was somewhat more palatable.

  Just across the Tumen River, walls of corn stretched for miles. The villages had plenty of food, but what ran in short supply were women. The traditional preference for sons and the restriction on family size had resulted in a lopsided birthrate of about thirteen males for every ten females. In their late teens, many young women migrated to the cities to fill the jobs at China’s booming factories, which paid better than farmwork. Bachelors in the countryside, particularly those over thirty-five and without money or great personal charm, had difficulty finding wives. They turned to marriage brokers who charged roughly three hundred dollars for their services, more if they delivered women who were good-looking and young. But looks and youth weren’t a prerequisite; healthy women into their sixties were also in demand to cook and keep house for older widowers.

  North Korean women had a certain mystique to the Chinese. Despite the toll taken by the famine on their bodies and complexions, North Korean women were thought to be among the most beautiful in Asia. South Korean men talked about buk nyeo, nam nam— northern women, southern men—which allegedly was the most desirable genetic combination. Chinese men found North Korean women more modest and obedient than their Chinese counterparts.

  Oak-hee knew all about the Chinese marriage market. When a woman in Chongjin mysteriously disappeared, people would whisper, “That whore probably sold herself to the Chinese.”

  The Musan train station was where the sales were initially brokered. A woman alone merely had to linger there before she was approached with an offer. The man who solicited Oak-hee turned out to be an old friend of her husband’s. The deal he offered Oak-hee was this: A guide would escort her safely across the river into China. She would be given clothing, underwear, food, and a place to stay until she was matched up. The broker would find her a respectable man with whom she would live as wife, even though all parties were aware that the marriage wouldn’t be recognized by Chinese law. In return, she would agree to stay with the man chosen for her. She would get no cut of the money.

  Oak-hee accepted with one condition. She insisted that the man not speak Korean. Most North Korean women preferred men from the ethnic Korean population so they could communicate, but not Oak-hee.

  “No Koreans,” she told the broker. “I want to live in a new world where nobody knows me.”

  The man selected for Oak-hee was a farmer in his mid-thirties. He was very short—about five foot one, same as she. He had a dull look that made Oak-hee suspect that he was mildly retarded and he was so shy he couldn’t look her in the eyes. No wonder he wasn’t married, she thought. They were introduced at a small restaurant on the Chinese side of the border. Another North Korean woman who was traveling with her had been sold to a man who was taller and more animated; he smiled and laughed with the other men being set up. Oak-hee felt a pang of envy, but she reminded herself that this was her choice—she wanted a man she could never love.

  Tens of thousands of North Korean women have been sold to Chinese men. By some estimates, three quarters of the roughly 100,000 North Korean refugees living in China are women and more than half of them live in arranged unions with Chinese men. Stories abound of those who were beaten, raped, held in chains, or worked like slaves. Oak-hee was far more fortunate. Oak-hee’s man, whose name was Minyuen, had none of the charm of her husband, but he had a sweetness that made him seem almost too innocent for this world. The first time he took her to bed, he carried her and washed her feet in a basin of warm water. He cooked her special meals and wouldn’t permit her to do the dishes. His parents similarly doted on her.

  Oak-hee lived with the man for more than two years. She learned enough Chinese so they were able to communicate. She pored over a children’s geography book so she could orient herself. She had been sent more than six hundred miles southwest of where she’d crossed the border, to Shandong, a fertile cotton-and-wheat-farming province west of Qingdao. She memorized the bus routes into the city. The entire time she was plotting her escape.

  She got pregnant twice, but had abortions. Although Minyuen badly wanted a child, she convinced him it would be ill-fated. The Chinese government didn’t recognize marriages to North Korean women, so the couple’s child would not be registered as a citizen and would not be able to go to school.

  “I already have two children in North Korea. I have to go back to them one day,” she told him. Minyuen nodded sadly.

  When it was time for her to go, Minyuen took Oak-hee to the bus station and gave her a hundred dollars. He cried. She expected him to beg her to stay, but he didn’t. He wasn’t as dull as she’d first thought. He told her only, “Please be careful.”

  IN FACT, OAK-HEE’S journey would be dangerous. By 2000, the Chinese were fed up with North Korean defectors. Too many, they feared, would take away jobs from Chinese citizens and upset the ethnic balance of northeastern China. Human rights advocates argued that China had a moral and legal responsibility to the people who had come in search of food and safety, but the Chinese insisted that those who’d crossed the river were illegal “economic migrants” and not entitled to protection under the UN. Convention on the Status of Refugees, to which China was a signatory. The Chinese pointed to a previously secret agreement signed in 1986 with the North Korean Ministry of State Security requiring that both countries cooperate against illegal border cros
sers.

  The Chinese launched periodic campaigns to catch North Korean defectors. They set up roadblocks near the border and did random checks of identity cards. After a few months in China, North Koreans typically fattened up and bought new clothes; they weren’t so easily distinguished from the Chinese. So the Chinese allowed North Korean police into the country to sniff out their countrymen. Defectors themselves were recruited as spies to in filtrate places where other defectors were hiding. The Chinese offered rewards of forty dollars to those who would denounce North Korean women living with Chinese men. The women would be taken from their homes, their de facto husbands, and children. The men would pay a fine, but get to keep the children. At least eight thousand women were arrested in one such roundup in March 2000. (As of 2008, the crackdown on North Korean defectors continued.)

  Oak-hee had been safe in her Chinese husband’s village because it was far enough from the North Korean border to be outside the dragnet. But in order to make money she would have to go back to the border area, where there were Korean speakers and greater opportunities. She was desperate to make money—it was her only chance to buy her independence and get custody of her children. Well fed and well rested, she figured she could get a job in a restaurant or factory, and then maybe start her own business. She took a bus north, not to where she had crossed the river, but to Dandong, the largest city on the Sino-Korean border.

  Dandong was a boom town. Its Yalu riverfront sparkled with the glass facades of new office and apartment buildings amid the tangle of cranes. Its prosperity was all the more striking in contrast to the desolation of North Korea directly across the river. Dandong, however, quickly proved an unwise choice for Oak-hee. The main rail link from Beijing to Pyongyang ran through the city, and much of the official trade was carried over the river by the China-Korea Friendship Bridge. North Korea’s state-owned trading companies had offices in Dandong. The city was crawling with undercover security agents.

  Oak-hee was arrested in January 2001 and transferred across the river to a police station in the city of Sinuiju. After two years in China, Oak-hee was shocked at the state of her country. The police station had no heat in the dead of winter. Police and prisoners shivered together in solidarity. A police officer wrote out the charges against her on a piece of wood because he had no paper. Her timing was lucky, though. An amnesty was approaching for Kim Jong-il’s birthday; thousands of low-level prisoners were to be released. Oak-hee was let go after only two weeks.

  As soon as she got out, she crossed the river again into China.

  Before her arrest, Oak-hee had worked at a brick factory, then at a restaurant. The dollar or two she earned a day seemed like a fortune—it was equivalent to one month’s wages in Chongjin—but it didn’t go very far in China. This time, Oak-hee needed work that would pay more, even if it was riskier. She decided to work for a broker like the one who had fixed her up with the farmer. Her first assignment required her to sneak back into North Korea and search for a child that had been left behind and bring him across the Tumen to be reunited with his family. Oak-hee took the job.

  The child was believed to be living in Musan, from where she had defected originally. She knew the city well and could speak the local dialect, so she thought she could wander around for a few days without attracting much attention, but she was mistaken. On her first day in Musan, a policeman picked her out of the crowd.

  “Hey, you,” he yelled at her. After more than two years of living in China, Oak-hee was pale and plump. She used scented shampoo and soap. She looked and smelled different from everyone else. Furthermore, she was also carrying a transistor radio she had purchased in China that picked up South Korean programs. The police officer confiscated the radio and (after asking her to show him the frequencies for South Korean radio and demanding her earphones) turned her over to the Bowibu.

  OAK-HEE WAS PUT in a holding room with more than one hundred other people who had been rounded up. They were told to kneel and remain motionless. Guards passed between the rows, hitting anybody who adjusted themselves to relieve pressure on their knees. After being hit once herself, Oak-hee allowed only her eyes to dart about. She studied her fellow prisoners. She could tell immediately who had already been in China. They were fairer-skinned, better-dressed, and healthier-looking, like herself. The others were gaunt, sallow, often shoeless; they were probably caught before they’d managed to make it across the river.

  Oak-hee took it as a good sign that both groups were mixed together. Her best chance of survival was if the authorities didn’t know she had been working for a broker. She hoped, too, that the policeman who confiscated her radio had kept it for himself and didn’t report it. The penalty for defection varied, depending on class background and what the defector had been doing in China. A defector who’d crossed the river in search of food got a lighter sentence than one who’d been living and working there. People accused of brokering women, of trading DVDs, of meeting with South Koreans, or of going to church in China could be charged with “betrayal of the fatherland,” which warranted execution or the gulag.

  Eventually, the guards sorted the people in the holding room by their hometowns. As it happened, many came from Chongjin. The guards didn’t have handcuffs, so they tied the prisoners in groups of three, binding their thumbs with plastic shoelaces. The lacing was wrapped so tightly it cut off circulation, turning the thumbs blue. The prisoners were escorted onto a special train where they squeezed three into a seat meant for two. Oak-hee saw a man across the aisle laboring to dig something out of his pocket. He had managed to keep his cigarette lighter. He used it to melt the laces and all three men scrambled out of a window faster than the guards could react. The women didn’t dare to move except when one had to go to the toilet; in that case all three went together, joined at their thumbs.

  As the train screeched to a halt, Oak-hee realized she was at Chongjin station. It was September 2001, nearly three years from the day she had run away in her nightgown. Now she had returned in shame, bound by throbbing thumbs like a prisoner in a chain gang.

  “Baka, baka”—Bow, bow, screamed the guards as the prisoners climbed down from the train.

  Oak-hee was all too willing to keep her head down. What if her husband or one of his co-workers saw her? They were marched through the waiting room of the station, across the plaza where her mother sold cookies, and then practically under the window of her apartment. In the past, she herself had stared at this spectacle through her window, scanning the crowd of prisoners to see if she recognized anyone.

  They were led down Chongjin’s main road, through a crowd of curious onlookers, and then over two bridges, past the industrial district and the swampy lowlands, the only place in the city with rice paddies. Turning toward the ocean, they came to a compound surrounded by concrete walls and barbed wire. The place was known as the Nongpo Detention Center, built during the Japanese occupation to imprison Korean resistance fighters. The very name Nongpo inspired dread. Now it was filled to capacity with people caught trying to defect.

  Female prisoners filled three large rooms, so crowded that the women had to sleep in rows on the floor on their sides. Those who couldn’t fit had to sleep out by the toilets. Every few days more prisoners arrived, usually about a hundred at a time. The guards strip-searched the new arrivals, separating those obviously pregnant and sending them off for abortions, no matter how advanced the pregnancy. The assumption was that the babies’ fathers were Chinese.

  At Nongpo, women outnumbered men two to one, which reflected the gender split in the defector population. As Oak-hee got to know the other women, she was struck by how similar their stories were to her own. Many had run away from husbands and children, rationalizing their actions by the thought that they could bring money and food back for their families. Oak-hee was disgusted by these women, as she was with herself. She had never forgiven herself for leaving her children.

  What bitches we’ve become. The hunger has turned us so wicked, she thought.


  She had plenty of time for reflection in the camp. Long hours of slave labor were followed by long nights of self-criticism sessions and lectures. Prisoners were fed meagerly and dealt the occasional brutality. In the scheme of things, Nongpo was probably better than other prison camps. On Saturday afternoons, women were allowed to draw water from a well in the courtyard to bathe. They would pick lice from each other’s hair. For all her time there, Oak-hee saw only one woman who was badly beaten. In a fury, she tried to climb one of the camp walls. It was more of a tantrum than a bona fide escape attempt, as she had no chance of succeeding, but the guards pulled her down, and kicked and punched her into semi-consciousness as the other prisoners watched.

  In all, the women at Nongpo appeared to Oak-hee to be less terrified than angry. As they performed their forced labor—making bricks, weeding the fields—their faces were fixed in a grimace of resentment. Our whole lives we have been told lies. Our lives are lies. The whole system is a lie, Oak-hee thought, and she was sure the other women thought as she did.

  Even the prison camp officials had given up on reeducation. They merely went through the motions, reading the lectures handed out by the Workers’ Party without enthusiasm. Everybody seemed to be in on the lie.

  One day as the women were picking corn, the camp director came to deliver an impromptu lecture in the cornfield. It was the usual fodder. He urged them to arm themselves with the ideology of Kim Il-sung against the temptations of capitalism and to commit themselves to their nation.

  Then he asked for a show of hands: Who would promise not to run away again to China? The women squatted in sullen silence. Oak-hee looked around. Not a single woman raised a hand.