Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

  Only this time when he said “Uri Abogi,” our father, he meant God, not Kim Il-sung, and when he spoke of the son, he meant Jesus, not Kim Jong-il.

  After five months at the church, the leader suggested to Hyuck that it was time for him to move on. The church was under constant surveillance by Chinese police and feared for the safety of the refugees. The man gave Hyuck 1,000 yuan (about $125) and asked him to lead a group of refugees to the Mongolian border. From there, they could try to reach South Korea.

  If Mrs. Song’s passage by airplane with doctored South Korean passports was a first-class defection, the Mongolian route was akin to going steerage class. But for someone without money, it was the best way to go. Unlike the Chinese, the Mongolians allowed the South Korean embassy in Ulaanbaatar, the Mongolian capital, to accept North Korean defectors. In fact, if North Koreans managed to sneak across the Chinese border into Mongolia, they would be arrested by Mongolian border police and turned over to be deported—to South Korea. Getting arrested in Mongolia was in essence a free plane ticket to Seoul. As a result, Mongolia had become a major depot on what had become a veritable underground railroad ushering North Koreans into South Korea.

  Hyuck and the other refugees took a train to Erenhot, the last town in China before the Mongolian border, a desert outpost with more camels and sheep than people. There were six North Koreans in all, including a three-year-old and a ten-year-old boy whose father was already in South Korea. Their plan was to hook up at a safe house with another group of North Koreans who were coming up from Dalian on a separate train. One of the people in the other group knew the terrain and would lead them across the border.

  But everything went wrong. While still on the train, Hyuck got a panicked phone call informing him that the other group had been arrested. His group had no choice—it was too late to turn back. They couldn’t go to the safe house because it was probably under surveillance. They had to throw away their mobile phones because they could give away their location to police. Hyuck and the other adults conferred. They had been briefed on the route and had a hand-drawn map. They decided they would head for the Mongolian border anyway.

  The refugees hid out near the train station in Erenhot until 9:00 P.M., waiting for the light to seep out of a long summer day so they could make their way in the dark. Their instructions were to follow the main railroad line that headed north to Ulaanbaatar, using the tracks as their guide, but keeping their distance so as not to be seen. Once they reached a deserted stretch of border, they were to slip under the seven-foot-high wire fence into the no-man’s-land that separated the countries.

  It was only five miles from the Erenhot train station to the first border fence and from there just a mile to the first Mongolian watchtower, where they were to surrender themselves to the authorities. They should have been able to make it on foot before daybreak, but the desert was disorienting by night—with only stars to guide them and an endlessly repeating pattern of thistle, rock, and sand the color of muddy coffee. The adults quarreled about which way to go.

  Were they supposed to be walking east or west of the railroad tracks? They chose east, which turned out to be a critical mistake. The border ran in a northeasterly direction then curved sharply to the north; they were walking parallel to the border without getting closer to a place to cross. Only at daybreak did they realize their mistake. The Gobi Desert temperatures were soaring into the 90s. By the time they changed direction, found the wire fences delineating the border, and slipped through, it was late afternoon. Their shoes were in tatters from the rough terrain and their feet were bleeding. They were sunburned. The six liters of water they’d brought were finished. Hyuck and the others took turns carrying the three-year-old, but when the ten-year-old started flagging, they couldn’t do anything but drag him along. They finally found an abandoned hut near a small pond. One of the women stayed with the boy while Hyuck ran off to get water. As he approached, he heard the woman screaming. The boy was dead.

  The Mongolian border police found the North Koreans in the evening. The presence of the dead boy badly complicated the handling of their case. The coroner needed to confirm that he had indeed died of dehydration and that there had been no foul play. For the ten weeks that the investigation dragged on, Hyuck and the other adults were held in a Mongolian prison. It was an inauspicious beginning to Hyuck’s life in the free world.

  Hyuck arrived in South Korea on September 14, 2001, on a flight from Ulaanbaatar with a dozen other defectors. He almost broke down when an immigration official at Incheon Airport stamped the temporary passport he’d been given in Mongolia and told Hyuck, “Welcome to the Republic of Korea.”

  As with many defectors, though, Hyuck’s elation quickly vanished. His interrogation was especially grueling because of the time he spent in prison camp. The South Korean government was increasingly wary of criminals in the defector population. Then, just as he thought he would be freed, he was sent to the Hanawon camp for a month. He couldn’t tolerate being held in confinement.

  Hyuck’s personality was as much of an impediment in South Korea as it was in North Korea. He was quick to anger. He bristled at authority. He couldn’t sit still. His stature, too, put him at a disadvantage in a height-obsessed society. His legs were underdeveloped and his head too large for his body—a physique typical of people who have been deprived of food during their formative years. When denied nutrition, the body directs its resources toward the head and torso at the expense of the limbs. In famine literature, the syndrome is called “stunting.” A 2003 study by the World Food Programme and UNICEF found that 42 percent of North Korean children were permanently damaged in this way.

  At the time of our first meeting in 2004, Hyuck was living in Buyeo, a provincial town about two hours south of Seoul. There were no other defectors around, no one to help him settle in. He said his nerves couldn’t cope with the noise and congestion of a big city. He was broke, having lost the $20,000 in resettlement money almost immediately. He’d given the money to a broker who claimed he could find Hyuck’s older brother. After more than a year of being strung along, Hyuck concluded that his brother was probably dead. “My brother was nearly six feet tall. There’s no way he could have survived,” he told me. One advantage of being short was that you needed less food.

  Hyuck flitted between jobs. He delivered ice cream for a while before he discovered that a South Korean employee of the same company was being paid more, and he quit in a huff. He took a course to be an auto mechanic and worked as a trainee for a few months, but that didn’t stick either. He then decided that his true destiny in life was to be a professional boxer, but when he went to a boxing gym in Seoul, he was rejected for being too short. That damaged his ego and made him worry he’d never be able to find a girlfriend.

  He was desperately lonely. He had a hard time connecting with new people. If South Koreans were sympathetic toward him, he found them condescending. Even though he hated the North Korean regime, he found he’d get defensive when South Koreans criticized it. This was a common predicament for defectors.

  The basics of etiquette in South Korea eluded him. North Koreans don’t have the custom of making small talk with strangers and are taken aback by those who do. Whenever Hyuck left the safety of his own apartment, he was startled by neighbors who would greet him casually. He would avert his eyes or scowl in return.

  “I didn’t know that when somebody exchanges a few words with you, you’re supposed to respond. I didn’t understand that that’s how you eventually build a friendship with your neighbors or that maybe those people could help me.” Hyuck would later laugh as he recalled his social blunders during those first years in South Korea.

  When I saw him again in 2008, he had moved to Seoul and enrolled in college, hoping to get a degree in history and business. He was twenty-six years old. Although he lamented not having a girlfriend, he had many friends, including a cousin from Musan who’d recently defected. The process of showing the ropes to somebody greener than himself
boosted Hyuck’s confidence. He told me that he’d recently met a man who owned a private school near the university that taught English. They’d just struck up a conversation on the street. Instead of running away, Hyuck told the man he was a North Korean defector, and the man invited Hyuck to study at the school for free.

  He had arrived.

  CHAPTER 20

  REUNIONS

  Jun-sang in Myongdong pedestrian market, carrying a copy of 1984, Seoul, 2007.

  THE TAINTED BLOOD THAT HAD DOOMED MI-RAN TO A MARGINAL life in North Korea proved her greatest asset once she crossed the border. The family ties to South Korea would prove invaluable. Unlike other defectors, reborn alone in a strange new world, Mi-ran had kin waiting to receive her.

  Beneath the crisp efficiency of modern life in South Korea, Confucian traditions still hold sway. Mi-ran’s father, as an only son, was the custodian of the family line, and after his passing, his offspring assumed that role.

  When Mi-ran’s family crossed the Tumen River into China in 1998, the first thing they did was telephone the municipal office in Seosan, South Chungchong province, where her father was born. Everybody had moved out of the village decades before as part of the mass migration to the cities. The village itself had mostly disappeared when the land was flooded to build a reservoir. But in Korea, home is the place where your father was born, regardless of whether or not anybody still lives there. The municipal office had the addresses of Tae-woo’s two younger sisters, still both alive and living near Seoul, and offered to forward a letter to them. Mi-ran’s twenty-three-year-old brother, although the youngest in the family, as the only male was designated to compose the letter. He wrote in formal language: I am writing as the only son of your brother. I wish to inform you that he passed from this world last year in Kyongsong county, North Hamgyong province. He included the address and phone number of a house in Yanji, a small city near the border, where they were staying.

  Within a few weeks, they got a telephone call from one of the sisters. She was skeptical. Nearly half a century had elapsed without so much as a telephone call, a letter, even a rumor that their brother had survived the Korean War. In 1961, eight years after the end of the war, the South Korean Ministry of Defense recorded him as having been killed in action in 1953. As far as the family was concerned, he had died childless at the age of twenty-one. His name was on the tablet for the war dead at the National Cemetery. How were the sisters to know that this wasn’t a hoax, a crude attempt to extort money from them? Mi-ran’s sister, who had picked up the telephone, told the aunt some of what she knew. Little tidbits of family lore, birthdays and nicknames. The South Korean relatives suggested a DNA test. Mi-ran and her siblings agreed.

  The family reunion lasted two weeks. Both aunts came to China along with assorted relatives, ten people in all. As soon as they all laid eyes on one another, they realized that the DNA testing had been superfluous.

  “We just kept on staring. We marveled at the backs of our heads, the shape of our hands, the way we talked and walked,” said Mi-ran.

  “My father’s sisters thought they’d lost their entire lineage because my father was an only son,” Mi-ran’s brother recalled. “When Father’s sisters came to China and I saw them, my body was shaking. They were women, but they looked exactly like him.”

  There was no turning back. Mi-ran’s mother had wanted to return to Chongjin to be with the two daughters who’d stayed behind and her grandchildren, but they feared that the North Korean government would discover they had met with their relatives from an enemy state while in China—a capital offense in itself. They had no place to go but South Korea.

  Their aunts went to the South Korean consulate in Shenyang, asking to have the North Korean relatives flown to Seoul—the least they could do for the widow and children of a South Korean veteran held prisoner of war for so long—but the consulate balked at the request. Kim Dae-jung, who would later win the Nobel peace prize, had taken office as South Korea’s president in February 1998 and had launched the “sunshine policy” to ease tensions with North Korea. Relations between South Korea and China, too, were sensitive. The officials feared that bringing in Mi-ran’s family could have adverse diplomatic consequences.

  The relatives fortunately had the means to take matters into their own hands. The sisters ran a small hotel, and one of their sons owned a bathhouse on the outskirts of Seoul. He flew back and forth between China and South Korea, rustling up plausible forgeries for the North Korean relatives. He got one for Mi-ran from a cousin of about the same age. Her photograph had been stripped out and replaced with Mi-ran’s. An aunt “lost” her passport so that it could be used for Mi-ran’s mother. These were illegal acts and, in fact, one of the cousins would later serve a month in jail for passport fraud, but they worked. Mi-ran, her sister, her brother, and her mother arrived safely in South Korea in January 1999.

  With family to receive her, Mi-ran wasn’t perceived as an outsider so much as a South Korean who had spent her first twenty-five years somewhere else. She was North Korean enough to be a novelty, but not enough to scare South Koreans. At five foot three she was positively statuesque for a North Korean woman and a respectable height for a South Korean. She still had those high cheekbones and the striking Romanesque nose that had stopped Jun-sang when he spotted her at the movie theater. She possessed that certain mystique North Korean women hold for South Korean men. Good looks, family connections, poise, and her natural intelligence made all the difference. She was quickly accepted into a graduate program in education. She was articulate, able to tell a story in a clear narrative style, and she was frequently asked to give talks and interviews about the North Korean school system

  Just before she turned thirty, she was introduced to a strapping young man whose broad-cheeked smile and round glasses conveyed warmth. He had a good job as a civilian military employee. With the encouragement of both families, they married. In late 2004, she gave birth to her son. They celebrated his first birthday in traditional Korean style, with a lunch for nearly a hundred friends and relatives. The upper floor of a catering hall in eastern Seoul was festooned with blue and white balloons. Mi-ran, her husband, and the baby were dressed in colorful hanbok, the costume worn for ceremonial occasions. Mi-ran’s outfit was made of a shimmering ivory silk with embroidered bands of red and black around the neckline. She was radiant and poised, a gracious hostess. She had achieved the Korean dream, actually the dream of many women I knew—the handsome husband, the baby boy, the graduate degree practically in the bag.

  In her dress and manner of speaking, she was indistinguishable from a South Korean. She had lost the guttural accent that is a telltale trait of a North Korean. She and her husband bought an apartment in Suwon, the satellite city for upwardly mobile families who can’t afford the $1 million home prices in Seoul. She lived in a housing complex that was a forest of identical concrete slabs, each high-rise distinguished only by the numbers stamped on the sides. As these compounds went, it wasn’t a bad place. The buildings were new and clean, the facades a pleasant cream color. Sunlight streamed through a picture window into the living room of Mi-ran’s second-floor apartment. It was bright and spacious inside, with a separate bedroom for the baby, a home office with a Samsung computer on the desk, and an open-plan kitchen with modern appliances.

  When I came to visit, she cooked lunch as her son, by now a chubby toddler, watched cartoons in the living room.

  “If I had him in North Korea, I’d have had to feed him rice milk with a little sugar if I could afford it,” she said.

  We chatted about the turns her life had taken. She was juggling the competing demands of her graduate studies and her family. Her in-laws expected her to be a traditional Korean wife. Child care was expensive; she found it hard to finish her work. She was taking an aerobics class in an effort to shed her pregnancy weight. Her skin often broke out from the stress. Her problems appeared to be not so different from those of all the other working mothers I knew.

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nbsp; Deep down, however, Mi-ran was the same person who had occupied the lowest rung of North Korean society, the poor, female progeny of tainted blood. She had been shaped by a thorough indoctrination and then suffered the pain of betrayal; she’d spent years in fear of speaking her mind, of harboring illicit thoughts. She had steeled herself to walk by the bodies of the dead without breaking stride. She had learned to eat her lunch, down to the last kernel of corn or grain of rice, without pausing to grieve for the children she taught who would soon die of starvation. She was racked with guilt. Guilt and shame are the common denominators among North Korean defectors; many hate themselves for what they had to do in order to survive.

  In Mi-ran’s case, the guilt was not merely an abstraction. It wasn’t until I’d known her for more than two years that she told me what had happened to the sisters left behind. During the summer of 1999, about six months after the defecting family members arrived in South Korea, national security police had arrested both sisters almost simultaneously at home. Mi-ran’s oldest sister, Mi-hee, the family beauty who’d married a military official and who had been so generous about providing food during the famine, and her sister Mi-sook had led blameless lives; they were loyal to their parents, their husbands, and their children, and loyal to Kim Jong-il. They were taken away in the middle of the night—the very same scenario of Mi-ran’s recurring nightmare, except that the children were left behind with the husbands, who were instructed to file for divorce. The sisters were presumably taken to one of the labor camps for long-term prisoners. Given the severity of the food shortage in 1999, it was likely they were dead.