Naturally, we were all on edge as we boarded the train in Qingdao. We rode all day, pretending to be asleep so that nobody would talk to us. In Beijing, we switched to a bus, and our route wound through the mountains where ancient Chinese emperors had built a meandering chain of great stone walls to keep out the tribal armies of the northern steppe. The land grew flatter and emptier as we made our way along a two-lane highway into the high desert of Inner Mongolia. We were traveling without possessions except for small backpacks for bottled water, snacks, and a few personal items, which we clutched nervously in our laps as we scanned the highway for signs of roadblocks and checkpoints. Thankfully, there were none.
The long ride ended at Erlian, a tiny dust-blown border town in the middle of the vast Gobi Desert. We arrived very early in the morning, and our guide started searching for a place to hide until evening. But everywhere we went we were turned away because we didn’t have proper identification. Finally, we found a guesthouse that would accept cash and not ask questions.
We spent an uneasy day in our room while we waited for night to fall. My mother and I were very suspicious of the couple who ran the guesthouse, and even though it was freezing cold, we kept the window open in our room so that we could jump out quickly if we heard the police coming. As the sun was starting to set, our guide told us he would be dropping us off close to the border and then we’d have to carry on alone. Because the little boy’s father was the only man on our team, he was put in charge of leading us through the desert. The ethnic Korean woman at the mission had given us two flashlights and two compasses, and the guide showed the father how to find a setting. We were to walk in a northwest direction from the drop site, then pass through five barbed-wire fences before arriving at a very tall fence that meant we had reached the border. We should identify ourselves as North Korean refugees to the first person we saw in Mongolia, and turn ourselves in to be rescued. If nobody came, we should find the railroad tracks and follow them to the nearest town.
At least that was the way it was supposed to work.
A taxi pulled up in the night and drove us to a construction site a few miles outside of town. The parents of the little boy had spoken to him to make sure he didn’t cry and give away our position as he was carried through the desert. Luckily, he was a good child and didn’t make a sound, although we had sedatives ready if he needed them.
Our Chinese guide gave us some last-minute instructions while I translated them into Korean: “If you look out in the desert, the bright lights are coming from a town on the Mongolian side,” he said. “Head toward them. The lights from the town on the Chinese side are much dimmer. Stay away from them.”
Above us, a quarter moon hung in a sky blazing with stars. Our guide pointed to the brightest star of all.
“If you get separated from the group, or can’t use your compass, just look up and find the star. That will be north.”
Then he sent us on our way. After we had walked a few steps, my mother and I looked back and saw that he had dropped to his knees on the frozen ground. He had clutched his hands together and was lifting them toward the sky. I wondered: Why does this person, who doesn’t even speak our language, care so much about us that he is willing to risk his life for us? It moved us both to tears. I said a silent prayer of thanks as we became a part of the night.
There was no cover anywhere, no trees or even bushes—just miles upon endless miles of featureless sand and stone dotted with clumps of dried grass. The cold was like a living thing, stalking us as we walked. It clawed heavily at my skin and grabbed at my legs to slow them. I immediately regretted wearing the tweed wool coat I had bought in Shenyang instead of a parka. The missionaries had told us to travel light for this journey, but I had taken them too literally. I hadn’t even brought gloves and a scarf. I leaned against my mother for warmth, and she gave me her heavy coat when I couldn’t stop shivering. My mother’s shoes were too thin for the rough terrain, and she kept stumbling. So the baby’s father gave my mother an extra pair of running shoes to wear. They were too big, but she tied the laces very tight to keep them on her feet. I doubt she would have made it without his help.
• • •
It was the longest night of my life. Every time we heard a noise or saw a headlight in the distance, we panicked. After we had wriggled under the fourth barbed-wire fence, we heard the sound of engines in the distance, then we saw a huge searchlight sweeping over the desert. We threw ourselves to the ground and tried not to move. The boy’s father had been given a brand new cell phone for the journey, and he used it to call the mission in Qingdao. Could the pastor tell us whether the searchlight belonged to the Chinese or the Mongolians? And what should we do?
The pastor’s answer was “Don’t get arrested.”
We stayed on the ground and prayed until the sounds and the light faded into the distance. Now we were afraid to turn on the flashlight to look at the compass, so we used the stars to guide us as we walked and crawled through the desert. After we crossed the fifth barbed-wire fence, I thought our ordeal might be over soon. But then some clouds covered the stars, and we lost our bearings. For a while we may have been walking in circles until we came up with a plan: all of us huddled around the boy’s father to block the flashlight while he read the compass to find the right direction.
As the hours went on, it got colder and colder, and I started doubting that any of us would make it. I thought about dying out here in the desert. Would anyone find my bones or mark my grave? Or would I be lost and forgotten, as if I had never existed? To realize I was completely alone in this world was the scariest thing I’ve felt in my life, and the saddest.
I also started hating the dictator Kim Jong Il that night. I hadn’t thought that much about it before, but now I blamed him for our suffering. I finally allowed myself to think bad thoughts about him because even if he could read my mind, I was probably going to die out here anyway. What could he do, kill me again? But even in the face of death, betraying the Dear Leader was probably the hardest thing I had ever done. I was beyond the reach of his revenge, yet it felt like his hand was following me everywhere I went, trying to pull me back. My mother later told me she was thinking the same thing as we staggered through the night.
Just when I thought it couldn’t get worse, a pack of wild animals surrounded us in the darkness. I heard them scratching and panting as they passed by, and I could see the faint glow of their eyes reflecting the dim moonlight. I don’t know if they were goats or wolves, but I completely lost my mind.
“Help us! Is anybody out there? Anybody!” I screamed. At that point I didn’t care if it was Chinese or Mongolians.
But there was no one at all.
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.
Just before dawn, it got so cold that we were afraid we would all freeze to death. Out of desperation, we built a small fire with whatever dried twigs and grasses that we could glean from the desert. But the fire wasn’t big enough. We were discussing burning some of our extra clothes for fuel when suddenly we heard a train approaching. It sounded close, even though we thought we were miles out in the wilderness. But in the cold, heavy air, the sound seemed to be coming from two different places. Most of our group ran one way, but my mother and I thought it came from somewhere else, so we ran in another direction.
Minutes later, the big border fence took shape in the half-light just ahead of us. I thought it was another mirage, but then we saw the holes in the wire and bits of cloth snagged where others had crossed before us. This was it! As we scrambled through one of the holes, the heavy barbs ripped at my pants and my coat as if they were trying to rake me back into China. My mother helped me tear myself loose, and suddenly we were free.
The sun rose behind u
s, casting our long faint shadows across the desert floor as we walked into Mongolia. My mother grabbed my hand and reminded me that it was March 4—my father’s birthday.
PART THREE
South Korea
Nineteen
The Freedom Birds
We had been breathing the free air of Mongolia for only a few minutes when a soldier in camouflage gear ran up to us.
He raised his rifle and shouted something in a language we’d never heard before. This had to mean he was Mongolian. We were rescued!
“Xiexie! Xiexie!” I cried in Chinese. “Thank you! Thank you!”
The soldier kept shouting at us, but I was so happy to be captured that I was jumping up and down with my hands in the air. He tried to keep a straight face but he couldn’t help laughing.
The mood changed quickly as the rest of our group appeared in the distance with their hands above their heads, followed by several more soldiers with their weapons leveled. When they had all of us together, the Mongolian soldiers started talking into their two-way radios all at once, and the scene became very confusing. Within a few minutes, three or four military off-road vehicles came roaring across the open desert to surround us.
A high-ranking officer rode in one of the vehicles, and all eight of us were ordered to squeeze into two rows of seats behind him. As soon as we were inside, he turned to us and said in crude Chinese, “Hui zhongguo.” “Back to China.”
I was stunned. This wasn’t supposed to be happening! Without thinking, we jumped out of the vehicle. Only my mother and the father holding his son remained in their seats. The soldiers tried to push us back in, but we grabbed their uniforms, crying and begging for mercy. “Save us! Please don’t send us back! They’ll execute us!”
I felt for the razor I had hidden in my belt, ready to pull it out and slash my throat. I was completely serious. This was the end for me.
“We’ll kill ourselves before you send us back,” I cried.
“Yes, we’ll die first!” screamed another woman.
The soldiers looked scared, even ashamed. Finally, one of them said, “Okay. Let’s go to Seoul.”
That calmed us enough to get us back into the vehicle. But we panicked again when the driver pulled away in the direction of the Chinese border post.
“No! We can’t go back!” I cried. Then we all started wailing and begging again.
One of the North Korean women nudged the boy’s father and said, “Pray!” He whispered back to her, “I’m praying!”
I was too shattered to remember my prayers, but the missionaries told us when we can’t pray, just say a few words. In my mind, I kept repeating, “Jesus’ blood is my blood.” I didn’t know what that meant, but it seemed appropriate, and it was all I could think of to help us survive. Obviously, I couldn’t count on human beings at the moment, so I would have prayed to the rocks, trees, and sky if it would get us out of there.
All this time my mother had been trying to figure out a way to save her daughter. She thought about throwing me out the door so that I could escape before we got to China. In North Korea, a lot of people throw themselves off running trains to avoid arrest. Then she remembered that cars aren’t like trains—they can stop, and I would easily be recaptured. The only real option was attempting suicide. But luckily it never came to that.
The vehicle bounced through town, past the road leading to the Chinese border post, and kept going until it turned in to a Mongolian military base.
• • •
As soon as the SUV pulled through the gates, all eight of us were escorted into a one-story building that looked like a barracks or a jail. The women were taken one by one into a room and ordered by a female soldier to take off all our clothes. She even searched our hair to see if we were carrying money or drugs there. She took all the Chinese yuan my mother had left on her. They treated us like criminals instead of refugees. Still, there was a large room with bunk beds where we could sleep, and they gave us some food. We remained at this military base for more than a week, and the soldiers would frequently tell us we were being sent back to China. We didn’t know if they were serious, or just being cruel.
Once in a while, some Mongolian officers would come by to take pictures of us and ask questions, so I was called on to interpret for everyone. Except for the little boy, I was the youngest in the group, but because I could communicate with our captors, I took on the responsibility for all of us.
We were relieved when some high-ranking officers took us by train to the capital, Ulan Bator, where we transferred to another military base, and finally to a secure compound in the countryside. There were more than twenty other defectors waiting there when we arrived, and more came in as others moved out.
The men and women were divided up into two different rooms. There were no beds, just some boards piled with blankets. Once a week, the staff made hot water for us to take a bath—the men always went first, just like in North Korea. We were freezing most of the time because it was still winter, but we didn’t complain. For North Koreans, this kind of place seemed normal, even luxurious, although South Koreans would probably call it a prison camp.
We could not leave, and we had to keep strict hours for sleeping, eating, and working. The adults cleaned the building, while I mostly worked keeping up the grounds outside. About once a week, some kind of representative from the South Korean embassy would come by to ask us questions and have us write down our histories. But the embassy workers couldn’t tell us how long we would have to wait, or exactly what kind of a place this was.
Obviously, there was some kind of quiet agreement between Mongolia and the South Korean government to warehouse defectors at this camp until they could be flown to Seoul. Mongolia’s stated policy was to allow North Korean refugees from China safe passage to a third country, but events on the ground were much murkier. In fact, defectors were caught in a long-standing political and economic tug-of-war. Once a satellite state of the Soviet Union, Mongolia was now a multiparty democracy with a growing market economy. It had diplomatic and economic ties with both North and South Korea, as well as China and the United States, and its treatment of North Korean refugees seemed to reflect the relative importance of each relationship at any given moment. In 2005, about five hundred North Koreans were coming over the border every month. By 2009, when we crossed, that number had tapered off to a trickle as China increased its border patrols and Mongolia sweetened its relationship with Pyongyang. The situation got so bad that brokers and rescue missions were now steering defectors away from Mongolia to an alternate escape route through Southeast Asia.
In fact, our band of eight North Koreans was among the last groups sent to Mongolia from the mission in Qingdao. Sun Hi arrived in Mongolia with her daughter a month after our own escape. After my mother and I jumped ahead of the queue, Sun Hi, Hyong Sim, and the troublemaker Hae Soon were all assigned to a third group that left even later than we had originally been scheduled to leave for Mongolia. This turned out to be very lucky for them—every member of our original team was captured by the Chinese before they reached the border. They were all sent back to North Korea.
Sun Hi’s group departed two weeks after the original group was captured. Like us, they made it through the fence, only to be seized by Mongolian border guards who tried to send them back to China. Sun Hi actually swallowed poison before she would let them do that, and they had to rush her to a hospital to revive her. We later heard that the Qingdao mission was shut down shortly afterward. The ethnic Korean woman and our Han Chinese missionary guide were arrested and sent to Chinese prisons for the crime of helping North Koreans escape to freedom.
• • •
My mother and I didn’t know how long we would be held in Mongolia, or whether we could still be sent back to China. Our hearts withered with each day of waiting. But it helped to be working outside, because then the place didn’t feel so much like a prison and there we
re beautiful views around Ulan Bator. Sometimes my mother joined me, and we both liked to gaze at the mountains and think about being free. Several times a day, sleek silver jets flew low in the sky as they took off from an airport somewhere in the valley. As the planes gained altitude, they looked like determined birds flying away to freedom. My mother saw me staring at them and said, “We’ll be taking a plane like that to South Korea. We’ll be free soon.” I tried to imagine myself on each of them, disappearing into the sky, but it seemed impossible to me.
• • •
On April 20, 2009, a South Korean representative picked us up at the facility and drove us to Ulan Bator’s international airport. Because we had no identification, we were given South Korean passports with fake names on them to get us through Mongolian customs and immigration.
We were warned not to use any Korean words in the airport, so we waited in the departure lounge in silence, afraid to even breathe. Every time I saw a person in a military uniform, I jumped out of my skin. (Sometimes I still have that reaction.) Finally, we were escorted onto the jet, and I was so relieved that nobody stopped us. Of course, it was the first time in our lives we had been on an airplane. When we took our seats, my mother and I exchanged amazed looks, and then I high-fived her. It was a gesture I had learned from South Korean movies, and I was ready to be a South Korean. Or so I thought.
As we waited for the plane to taxi, my mother and I held each other’s hands tightly. I felt like I was in one of those movies where all kinds of thoughts race through your mind at a turning point in your life. I relived every step we took in the Gobi Desert; I remembered the frozen river we had crossed into China, and my narrow escapes from the brokers and gangsters before we finally made it to Mongolia. I saw my father, who had somehow been with me all this way, helping me stay alive, guiding me through the danger. I felt so guilty that he had died without ever tasting freedom, and now I was going without him. I felt the shame of the survivor who lives while so many friends and family members have died or are trapped in a living hell. But my sadness and guilt were eased by the thought of my mother’s happiness, and the hope that my sister would soon be found—if she wasn’t already waiting for us in South Korea.