Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

  The fate of the sisters weighed heavily on the family, darkening every happy moment. Even as Mi-ran gave birth to a healthy baby boy and her brother, Sok-ju, was accepted at a university in Australia, the family couldn’t rejoice. It seemed especially unfair. Defectors who came a few years later were able to send money in, and their relatives back home lived free from retaliation and better than the average North Korean. Perhaps the sisters received especially harsh treatment because Mi-ran’s family had been among the first to leave and because of their poor class background. Mi-ran’s mother, the iron-willed woman who held everything together through the famine, fell apart after she reached South Korea. Although only sixty-two years old when she arrived, her health and nerves failed her. She hired a shaman, a traditional fortune-teller, who informed her that her daughters were still alive, but it only increased her agitation.

  Mi-ran’s mother turned to religion. As a girl in Chongjin in pre-Communist times, she had attended a church, and now she rediscovered the faith of her childhood. She prayed constantly, begging forgiveness for betraying her girls.

  Not being a believer herself, Mi-ran had no such solace. Her guilt troubled her sleep and intruded on a schedule that was so busy she wasn’t supposed to have time to think. Her sisters had paid the ultimate price so she could drive a Hyundai.

  She also thought about the boyfriend she had left behind. She credited him for pushing her to resist the destiny of her low birth, of giving her confidence as a woman and as a teacher. He’d never once spoken a word to her against the North Korean regime, but he had taught her to think for herself, which in the end kept her mind open and clear.

  Mi-ran spoke frequently about Jun-sang when we met. I suspected she enjoyed reminiscing about her first love—something she couldn’t talk about with her mother and certainly not with her husband. When she recalled how Jun-sang first spotted her at the movie theater, or how they walked all night in the darkness, the words tumbled out like those of an excited schoolgirl gossiping with a friend.

  “Can you imagine? Three years to hold hands, six years to kiss? Not even a kiss, really, just a peck on the cheek.”

  We joked that unrequited, or in this case unconsummated, love affairs are the only ones that last forever. It seemed as though her longing was not so much for her ex-boyfriend as for the innocence of her earlier self.

  I asked her if she knew what had happened to Jun-sang.

  “I guess he’s married by now.” Her voice trailed off and she shrugged with affected disinterest. She didn’t regret that they weren’t still together, she told me—she loved her husband—but she was sorry she had left North Korea without an opportunity to say goodbye. She remembered that last day in Chongjin, when she thought she spotted him across the street but dared not approach for fear of blurting out her plans to leave.

  “You know, he and I, we have a special bond. I think someday we will meet again.”

  We had that conversation in mid-October 2005, shortly after her son’s first birthday party. Three weeks later, Mi-Ran called, her excitement palpable through the receiver. She announced the news:

  “He’s here!”

  WE MET UP FOR coffee a week later at a Starbucks in Seoul, a few blocks from my office.

  The way Mi-ran had described him, I had imagined a big, handsome man, larger than life. Here instead was a skinny fellow in jeans and glasses. And yet there was something extraordinary about him. His teeth gleamed white like a movie star’s. His flat cheeks and flaring nostrils gave him an exotic Tatar look that reminded me of Rudolf Nureyev. When our cappuccinos were ready, he jumped up to retrieve them from the counter. He moved lithely; he was comfortable in his body. Mi-ran, on the other hand, was visibly nervous. She wore a short denim skirt and more makeup than usual.

  I was about to remark that he seemed oddly at ease for somebody who’d just arrived from a country without coffee shops, but it turned out that Jun-sang had been in South Korea for almost a year. When he learned that Mi-ran was married—from a National Intelligence Service agent he met during his debriefing—he decided it would be best for both of them if he didn’t reach out to her. It was not for lack of interest. In fact, he had been devastated by her departure, far more than she had imagined. Her defection triggered a major crisis of confidence for him. He was tormented by the absurdity of their situation. Why had they been so secretive with each other? How was it that they had both nurtured a desire to defect but didn’t tell each other? On top of that, he felt cowardly for not defecting earlier. His pride was injured not because she’d left him, but because she had proved herself the braver one.

  “I’d always thought I was ahead of her in my thinking, but I was wrong,” he admitted. Mi-ran interrupted, for a moment, to soothe his ego. “I had doubts and mistrust of the government back then too, but he had more information than me about the outside world.” She smiled at him, then allowed him to continue his story.

  After Mi-ran left, he buried himself in his work at the research institute and was offered a permanent job and a chance to join the Workers’ Party. His parents and siblings encouraged it. This was about as good as it could get in North Korea. His life in Pyongyang was comfortable. His rented room was warm and he had enough to eat. But he resisted settling down. He didn’t date the university girls who would have made suitable matches. He didn’t attend the extra lectures that would have boosted his chances of party membership. Every night after work, he came home and drew the curtains tight so he could watch South Korean television.

  In 2001, Jun-sang asked permission to quit his job at the institute. He told his boss and his colleagues that his parents were in poor health and that as the oldest son he needed to care for them, a plausible explanation. The truth was that he wanted to be back in Chongjin, where his activities would be less monitored and where he’d be that much closer to the Chinese border. He did odd jobs and worked briefly at the nursing home near where he and Mi-ran used to walk at night. Rather than squander his money, he spent most evenings at home with his parents, even though it meant he had to endure the reproachful silence of his father, resigned now to disappointment in his once-promising son.

  Despite all the deliberating and planning, however, things did not go as smoothly for Jun-sang as they had for Mi-ran.

  Jun-sang spent three years saving money for his escape. He was a methodical person who weighed the consequences of his every word and action. He meticulously planned every detail, right down to what he would wear for the occasion—an expensive shirt with a pattern of bubbles that his uncle had sent from Japan. It was too loud to wear in Chongjin, and he figured that if he wore it in China nobody would think he was a beggar from North Korea. He put his best Japanese trousers and a backpack in a plastic bag. The crossing was set for June, when the river ran high. He had picked one of the deeper stretches, since it was less guarded. The broker who was escorting him across brought along empty plastic bottles to use as floats. Jun-sang and another defector, a forty-year-old woman, stripped down to their underwear, modestly turning away from each other even though it was pitch-dark. Jun-sang wrapped his clothing in plastic bags to keep it dry.

  The water came up to his chin and the current was stronger than he’d expected. The water came up over the other defector’s head; she didn’t know how to swim. Jun-sang gripped her hand tightly and fought the current. Suddenly his bare feet touched sand and he climbed out in his sopping underwear. The woman followed. He was in China. He looked back across the river at the jagged silhouette of the North Korean mountains emerging from the sky, touched with the first light of the morning. He felt a brief stab of grief, but couldn’t stop to dwell on it. He put on his clothing, which had gotten wet despite the plastic, and followed the broker into the mountains away from the river until they lost sight of North Korea.

  He’d never realized it could be so cold in June. His feet chafed inside his wet shoes and swelled up with blisters. When they finally reached the village where they hoped to rest and eat, it turned out that a
North Korean had been caught stealing a few days before and the locals were hostile toward defectors. They hustled out of there quickly, fearing they would be reported to the police. The woman who was traveling with Jun-sang suggested that they push on to her final destination, a village where she had been living with a Chinese farmer. During the walk, she told Jun-sang her story. She had been with the man for several years and they had a year-old baby. She’d been arrested seven months earlier and sent to a labor camp in North Korea. Now she was eager to get back to her husband and son. She assured Jun-sang that her husband would put him up until he was ready to move on.

  The farmhouse proved to be no refuge. When they arrived, the Chinese farmer kicked and slapped the woman and attacked Jun-sang with a hoe, screaming furiously. He apparently thought that Jun-sang was her lover.

  Alone and lost, Jun-sang wandered through the countryside. He finally spotted a bicycle rickshaw and hopped in, repeating the one word of Chinese the broker had taught him—shichang, market. He got out at a small outdoor market and found a woman selling kimchi. She had to be Korean, he figured, and he asked her if she knew anybody who would hire him. Her eyes flitted between his eyeglasses and his gaudy Japanese shirt.

  “You look like a young man who’s never done any hard work,” she told him dismissively. Nevertheless, after some reassurance, she introduced him to an ethnic Korean businessman who owned a brick factory and offered Jun-sang work.

  Jun-sang spent his days carrying heavy trays of bricks that were so hot they would singe his eyebrows if he stood too close. At night in the workers’ dormitory, he wrote in a notebook he’d bought. It was the first time he kept a journal—in North Korea, it had been too dangerous to confide honest thoughts to paper. He wrote about his time at the university. He wrote poems. After the mind-numbing work at the factory, the journal reminded him of the reasons he had left home.

  He spent two months at the brick factory, saving money to pursue his goal of reaching South Korea. He took a bus down to Qingdao, which had a large South Korean business community and a consular office.

  South Korean consulates in China were well guarded precisely in order to keep out people like Jun-sang, but he thought he could talk his way in if he dressed properly. He used his remaining money to buy a suit and new eyeglasses. Full of self-confidence, he showed up at the building, marched right past the security guard downstairs, got into the elevator, and pressed the button for the seventh floor, where the consulate was located. But the elevator buttons for the seventh and eighth floors didn’t work without a key. Stepping out at the sixth floor, he spotted another security guard so he ducked back into the elevator. Finally, he got off at the ninth floor and raced down the stairs. As he ran out of the building he could hear the guards talking in urgent tones into their walkie-talkies.

  He was lucky to get out of there without being arrested.

  Jun-sang had no more money and no more ideas. He thought about returning to North Korea—and just might have had he not discovered the Internet.

  Though Jun-sang had been an elite student at one of North Korea’s best universities, he had never used the Internet. His university had decent computers, IBM compatibles running Pentium 4 processors, and he’d been on the North Korean “intranet,” a closed system available only to academics to browse various academic papers and a censored encyclopedia the country had purchased, but the country remained an Internet black hole, one of the few in the world that had chosen to stay offline. At a computer club in Chongjin kids could play games, nothing more.

  Jun-sang had heard of the Internet, and once in China his curiosity about it intensified. He even had a vague idea that it could solve his problems. But how to get on? At the Qingdao bus station, he loitered, listening for a Korean speaker, and then approached a young man. The guy turned out to be a South Korean exchange student. “No problem. I’ll teach you how to use it. It’s very easy,” he told Jun-sang, leading him to an Internet café.

  The Web was a revelation to Jun-sang. With every click, the world was opening up to him. He felt certain for the first time that he had been right after all to escape to China. Here he was, a graduate of one of the best universities in the country, indeed one of the most computer-literate North Koreans, yet he was like a child in his knowledge. He typed into a South Korean search engine the words North Korean human rights and North Korean defectors.

  Over the next several weeks, Jun-sang stayed late at night at the café, eating instant noodles and reading. He learned that other North Korean defectors had similar problems getting to South Korea and studied the strategies they’d used, what worked and what failed. He educated himself about the South Korean laws governing North Koreans and about the diplomatic complications that prevented South Korea from accepting defectors at its embassy and consulates inside China. He studied maps of China, plane and train schedules, and wondered how he would get out.

  Then one day he read about a pastor in Incheon who’d written with much compassion about the underground railroad that brought defectors out through Mongolia. Jun-sang, who had set up an e-mail address with the help of the student, excitedly dashed off a message: I am in Qingdao. Can you help me get to South Korea?

  JUN-SANG’S ROUTE was the same as Kim Hyuck’s. Hundreds of others had by this time defected along these lines and the border crossings and safe houses were well mapped out. Jun-sang would need $2,500 for the journey, which his uncle in Japan wired him. He took the train to Erenhot, then crossed the desert terrain of the border into Mongolia, where the border police turned him over to the South Korean embassy. He arrived in South Korea in October 2004, whereupon he was turned over to the National Intelligence Service for debriefing.

  Then it was Jun-sang’s turn to ask questions. It was not his first question, but one of the first: Can you tell me how to get in touch with Mi-ran? He knew for sure she was in South Korea because he’d searched for her name in the Internet café in Qingdao and had read an interview she’d given. The NIS kept close tabs on North Korean defectors and would surely have information about her.

  The NIS agent hesitated. Under the rules, defectors are not supposed to be given information about other defectors for fear one might be a North Korean spy.

  “We can’t release that unless you’re immediate family. Sorry.”

  “She was my fiancée, my first love,” Jun-sang pleaded.

  The agent was sentimental, and offered to make inquiries. The next day he came in and told Jun-sang he would give him her phone number, but he felt Jun-sang ought to know that she was married.

  He was astounded. In retrospect, Jun-sang conceded that it was ridiculous for him to assume she was single and the height of arrogance to think she might be waiting for him. Mi-ran was by this time thirty-one years old. They’d had no contact for more than six years.

  “At the time, honestly, it hadn’t crossed my mind that she might be married,” Jun-sang recalled.

  He tried to comfort himself. He remembered a poem by the nineteenth-century Hungarian poet Sandor Petofi that he’d recited as he crossed the Tumen River:

  Liberty and love

  These two I must have.

  For my love I’ll sacrifice

  My life.

  For liberty I’ll sacrifice

  My love.

  The poem had moved him long ago when he’d read it in Pyongyang, and he’d memorized the words. He had sacrificed his love for Mi-ran to remain in Pyongyang. He’d never put her first in his life. He’d come to South Korea for freedom and that alone.

  OVER THE FOLLOWING MONTHS, Jun-sang went through the same rites of passage as the other defectors. He left the orientation program, got an apartment and a mobile telephone, and wandered the streets and markets in bewilderment trying not to be overwhelmed. He had only a few friends and sometimes regretted not knowing how to find Mi-ran. After he’d learned she was married, he told the national security agent that he didn’t want her phone number.

  “It’s better to leave her alone. She’s m
arried,” he told himself.

  One evening he went to the apartment of someone he’d met at Hanawon. It was an informal gathering of defectors who’d occasionally get together to drink beer. Among them was a brooding young man he recognized immediately as Mi-ran’s kid brother. Jun-sang used to slip him candies in an effort to ingratiate himself. Sok-ju was just a child at the time and now didn’t recognize Jun-sang.

  They struck up a conversation that evening and spoke again in subsequent gatherings. After a while, Sok-ju grew suspicious.

  “How do you know so much about me and my family?” he asked. Then, before Jun-sang could respond, he slapped his knee and answered his own question. “Yeah, you’re that guy who used to hang around my sister …”

  A WEEK LATER, Jun-sang was pacing the sidewalk in front of identical high-rise apartments. He and Mi-ran had agreed to meet at a subway station in eastern Seoul. When Sok-ju had figured out who he was, Jun-sang had little choice but to call her. As soon as she realized it was Jun-sang on the phone, he could hear the indignation in her voice. “How come you didn’t call me sooner?” Mi-ran said. “We could have helped you.”

  He felt foolish. He’d been in South Korea for nearly a year, a period when he was flailing about, desperately lost and lonely. He could have used a friend, particularly an old friend who knew him and understood where he came from. Though he felt himself aggrieved, a man who’d been jilted without notice, he ended up apologizing.

  Now he checked the time again and again on his mobile telephone—nobody he knew wore a watch. He wondered if he had taken the wrong subway line or was waiting at the wrong exit. He was still confused by all the subway lines that shot out from the ever-expanding nexus of downtown Seoul, each station bigger than the last, with endless tile-lined corridors and multiple exits that were indistinguishable from one another. This one was in a newly built apartment district where Mi-ran said her mother lived. Jun-sang scanned the sidewalk to see if he recognized anybody in the crowd streaming toward him. It was a clear day in that brief, perfect interlude between the soggy summer and winter. The sidewalks were crowded, mostly with women, since it was a weekday and most South Korean women don’t work after they have children. Jun-sang watched the women in their tight jeans, yakking on their mobile telephones with fuzzy toys dangling off the ends. Some pushed elaborate strollers that must have cost as much as bicycles. Strollers were almost unknown in North Korea—kids who couldn’t walk were strapped on the back with long cloths. Jun-sang wondered if Mi-ran was like these pampered young mothers. In a fleeting moment of panic, he wondered if she could have walked right by without his recognizing her. Then he heard his name called and he spun around, startled.