Top Quotes: “In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl’s Journey to Freedom” — Yeonmi Park

Introduction

“On the cold, black night of March 31, 2007, my mother and I scrambled down the steep, rocky bank of the frozen Yalu River that divides North Korea and China. There were patrols above us and below, and guard posts one hundred yards on either side of us manned by soldiers ready to shoot anyone attempting to cross the border. We had no idea what would come next, but we were desperate to get to China, where there might be a chance to survive.

I was thirteen years old and weighed only sixty pounds. Just a week earlier, I’d been in a hospital in my hometown of Hyesan along the Chinese border, suffering from a severe intestinal infection that the doctors had mistakenly diagnosed as appendicitis. I was still in terrible pain from the incision, and was so weak I could barely walk.

The young North Korean smuggler who was guiding us across the border insisted we had to go that night. He had paid some guards to look the other way, but he couldn’t bribe all the soldiers in the area, so we had to be extremely cautious. I followed him in the darkness, but I was so unsteady that I had to scoot down the bank on my bottom, sending small avalanches of rocks crashing ahead of me. He turned and whispered angrily for me to stop making so much noise. But it was too late. We could see the silhouette of a North Korean soldier climbing up from the riverbed. If this was one of the bribed border guards, he didn’t seem to recognize us.

“Go back!” the soldier shouted. “Get out of here!”

Our guide scrambled down to meet him and we could hear them talking in hushed voices. Our guide returned alone.

“Let’s go,,” he said. “Hurry!”

It was early spring, and the weather was getting warmer, melting patches of the frozen river. The place where we crossed was steep and narrow, protected from the sun during the day so it was still solid enough to hold our weight — we hoped. Our guide made a cell phone call to someone on the other side, the Chinese side, and then whispered, “Run!”

The guide started running, but my feet would not move and I clung to my mother. I was so scared that I was completely paralyzed. The guide ran back for us, grabbed my hands, and dragged me across the ice. When we reached solid ground, we started running and didn’t stop until we were out of sight of the border guards.

The riverbank was dark, but the lights of Chaingbai, China, glowed just ahead of us. I turned to take a quick glance back at the place where I was born. The electric power grid was down, as usual, and all I could see was a black, lifeless horizon. I felt my heart pounding out of my chest as we arrived at a small shack on the edge of some flat, vacant fields.

I wasn’t dreaming of freedom when I escaped from North Korea. I didn’t even know what it meant to be free. All I knew was that if my family stayed behind, we would probably die — from starvation, from disease, from the inhuman conditions of a prison labor camp. The hunger had become unbearable; I was willing to risk my life for the promise of a bowl of rice.”

“Like tens of thousands of other North Koreans, I escaped my homeland and settled in South Korea, where we are still considered citizens, as if a sealed border and nearly seventy years of conflict and tension never divided us. North and South Koreans have the same ethnic backgrounds, and we speak the same language except in the North there are no words for things like “shopping malls,” “liberty,” or even “love,” at least as the rest of the world knows it. The only true “love” we can express is worship for the Kims, a dynasty of dictators who have ruled North Korea for three generations. The regime blocks all outside information, all videos and movies, and jams radio signals. There is no World Wide Web and no Wikipedia. The only books are filled with propaganda telling us that we live in the greatest country in the world, even though at least half of North Koreans live in extreme poverty and many are chronically malnourished. My former country doesn’t even call itself North Korea — it claims to be Chosun, the true Korea, a perfect socialist paradise where 25 million people live only to serve the Supreme Leader, Kim Jong Un. Many of us who have escaped call ourselves “defectors” because by refusing to accept our fate and die for the Leader, we have deserted our duty. The regime calls us traitors. If I tried to return, I would be executed.”

“Human traffickers tricked my mother and me into following them to China, where my mother protected me and sacrificed herself to be raped by the broker who had targeted me. Once in China, we continued to look for my sister, without success. My father crossed the border to join us in our search, but he died of untreated cancer a few months later. In 2009, my mother and I were rescued by Christian missionaries, who led us to the Mongolian border with China. From there we walked through the frigid Gobi Desert one endless winter night, following the stars to freedom.”

Life in North Korea

“Because electricity was so rare in our neighborhood, whenever the lights came on people were so happy they would sing and clap and shout. Even in the middle of the night, we would wake up to celebrate. When you have so little, just the smallest thing can make you happy — and that is one of the very few features of life in North Korea that I actually miss. Of course, the lights would never stay on for long. When they flickered off, we just said, “Oh, well,” and went back to sleep.

Even when the electricity came on the power was very low, so many families had a voltage booster to help run the appliances. These machines were always catching on fire, and one March night it happened at our house while my parents were out. I was just a baby, and all I remember is waking up and crying while someone carried me through the smoke and flames.”

“The country I grew up in was not like the one my parents had known as children in the 60s and 70s. When they were young, the state took care of everyone’s basic needs: clothes, medical care, food. After the Cold War ended, the Communist countries that had been propping up the N. Korea regime all but abandoned it, and our state-controlled economy collapsed. North Koreans were suddenly on their own.”

“During the 1950s and 1960s, China and the Soviet Union poured money into North Korea to help it rebuild. The North has coal and minerals in its mountains, and it was always the richer, more industrialized part of the country. It bounced back more quickly than the South, which was still mostly agricultural and slow to recover from the war. But that started to change in the 1970s and 1980s, as South Korea became a manufacturing center and North Korea’s Soviet-style system began to collapse under its own weight.”

“In North Korea, if one member of the family commits a serious crime, everybody is considered a criminal. Suddenly my father’s family lost its favorable social and political status.

There are more than fifty subgroups within the main songbun castes, and once you become an adult, your status is constantly being monitored and adjusted by the authorities. A network of casual neighborhood informants and official police surveillance ensures that nothing you do or your family does goes unnoticed. Everything about you is recorded and stored in local administrative offices and in big national organizations, and the information is used to determine where you can live, where you can go to school, and where you can work. With a superior songbun, you can join the Workers’ Party, which gives you access to political power. You can go to a good university and get a good job. With a poor one, you can end up on a collective farm chopping rice paddies for the rest of your life. And, in times of famine, starving to death.”

“There was no concept of “dating” in North Korea at that time. Our culture has always been extremely conservative about relations between men and women. If you grow up in the West, you may think that romance occurs naturally, but it does not. You learn how to be romantic from books and movies, or from observation. But there was no model to learn from in my parents’ time. They didn’t even have the language to talk about their feelings. You just had to guess how your beloved felt from the look in his eyes, or the tone of her voice when she spoke to you. The most they could do was hold hands secretly.”

“The woman follows the husband to his home. But she does not take his name. For many women, it is the only independence that remains in their lives.”

“Some people had relatives in China, and they could apply for permits to visit them. My uncle Park Jin did this at least once, but my father didn’t because the authorities frowned on it and would have paid closer attention to his business.”

“Although many families owned televisions, radios, and VCR players, they were allowed to listen to or watch only state-generated news programs and propaganda films, which were incredibly boring. There was a huge demand for foreign movies and South Korean television shows, even though you never knew when the police might raid your house searching for smuggled media. First they would shut off the electricity (if the power was on in the first place) so that the videocassette or DVD would be trapped in the machine when they came through the door. But people learned to get around this by owning two video players and quickly switching them out if they heard a police team coming. If you were caught smuggling or distributing illegal videos, the punishment could be severe. Some people have even been executed by firing squad — just to set an example for the rest of us.

Radios and televisions came sealed and permanently tuned to state-approved channels. If you tampered with them, you could be arrested and sent to a labor camp for reeducation, but a lot of people did it anyway. In the border areas those of us with receivers could sometimes pick up Chinese television broadcasts. I was mostly interested in the food commercials. There were advertisements for exotic things like milk and cookies. I never drank milk in North Korea! I didn’t even know it came from a cow until after I escaped.”

“Maybe deep, deep inside me I knew something was wrong. But we North Koreans can be experts at lying, even to ourselves. The frozen babies that starving mothers abandoned in the alleys did not fit into my worldview, so I couldn’t process what I saw. It was normal to see bodies in the trash heaps, bodies floating in the river, normal to just walk by and do nothing when a stranger cried for help.”

“North Korean society is by its nature tough and violent, and so are relations between men and women. The woman is expected to obey her father and her husband; males always come first in everything. When I was growing up, women could not sit at the same table with men. Many of my neighbors’ and classmates’ houses had special bowls and spoons for their fathers. It was commonplace for a husband to beat his wife. We had one neighbor whose husband was so brutal that she couldn’t click her chopsticks while she ate for fear he would hit her for making noise.”

“If you asked anyone in the North Korean countryside, “What is your dream?” most would answer, “To see Pyongyang in my lifetime.”

I was eight years old when that dream came true for me.

Only the most privileged citizens are allowed to live and work in the nation’s capital. You need special permission even to visit. But Pyongyang is as familiar to ordinary North Koreans as our own backyards because of the hundreds upon hundreds of picture books and propaganda films that celebrate it as the perfect expression of our socialist paradise. To us, it is a mystical shrine with towering monuments and thrilling pageantry. like Red Square, Jerusalem, and Disneyland all in one city.”

“Just about every morning we woke up to the sound of the national anthem blaring on the government-supplied radio. Every household in North Korea had to have one, and you could never turn it off. It was tuned to only one station, and that’s how the government could control you even when you were in your own home. In the morning it played lots of enthusiastic songs with titles like “Strong and Prosperous Nation,” reminding us how lucky we were to celebrate our proud socialist life. I was surprised that the radio was on so much in Pyongyang. Back home, the electricity was usually off, so we had to wake ourselves up.

At seven in the morning, there was always a lady knocking on the door of the apartment in Pyongyang, yelling, “Get up! Time to clean!” She was head of the inminban, or “people’s unit,” that included every apartment in our part of the building. In North Korea, everybody is required to wake up early and spend an hour sweeping and scrubbing the hallways, or tending the area outside their houses. Communal labor is how we keep up our revolutionary spirit and work together as one people. The regime wants us to be like cells in a single organism, where no unit can exist without the others. We have to do everything at the same time, always. So at noon, when the radio goes “beeeep,” everybody stops to eat lunch. There is no getting away from it.

After the people of Pyongyang finish cleaning in the morning, they line up for the buses and go off to work.”

“My sister and I had to drop out of school. Education is supposed to be free in North Korea, but students have to pay for their own supplies and uniforms, and the school expects you to bring gifts of food and other items for the teachers. We no longer had money for these things, so nobody cared if we went to class or not.”

“After I escaped to South Korea, I was surprised to hear that the blossoms and green shoots of spring symbolize life and renewal in other parts in the world. In North Korea, spring is the season of death. It is the time of year when our stores of food are gone, but the farms produce nothing to eat because new crops are just being planted. Spring is when most people died of starvation. My sister and I often heard the adults who saw dead bodies on the street make clucking noises and say, “It’s too bad they couldn’t hold on until summer.’”

“Even though my cousin was supposed to be healing people in the hospital, the government didn’t supply her or any of the doctors with medicines. In the cities, patients can sometimes buy their own drugs on the black market, but in the rural areas, that isn’t always possible. In Songnam-ri, the nearest jangmadang was more than five miles away and there was no direct route to get there. People had to walk over a mountain and across a river and a stream — even the oxcart couldn’t make it all the way. This left so many people helpless in emergency situations. The government encouraged everyone to be resourceful, even doctors, as part of the juche policy of self-reliance, so the doctors would make their own traditional medicines to have on hand. My cousin often took me with her into the mountains to search for plants, tree barks, and nuts to use for different treatments. I followed along like a happy puppy, learning what is useful, what is edible, what is poisonous.

The doctors in Songnam-ri had to be farmers, too. They cultivated medicinal plants, and actually grew their own cotton to have a supply of bandages and dressings. But there were always shortages of everything. Even in big city hospitals there is no such thing as “disposable” supplies. Bandages are washed and reused. Nurses go from room to room using the same syringe on every patient. They know this is dangerous, but they have no choice.”

“Saturdays, we would all meet for propaganda and self-criticism sessions. These were organized around student and work units, with students reporting to their classrooms and workers to their offices.

We began by writing out quotations from Kim Il Sung or Kim Jong Il, the way people in other parts of the world would copy Bible verses or passages from the Koran. Next you had to write down everything you had done in the previous week. Then it was time to stand up in front of the group to criticize yourself. At a typical session I might begin, “This week, I was too spoiled and not thankful enough for my benevolent Dear Leader’s eternal and unconditional love.” I would add that I had not worked diligently enough to fulfill the mission that the party ordered us to do, or did not study hard enough, or did not love my comrades enough. This last one was very important, because we were all comrades in the journey to fight against “American bastards,” or “insane Western wolves.” I would conclude, “Since then, our Dear Leader has forgiven me because of his benevolent, gracious leadership. I thank him, and I will do better next week.”

After we had finished our public confessions, it was time to criticize others. I would always jump up and volunteer. I was really good at it. Usually I would pick one classmate who would then have to stand up and listen intently while I listed his or her transgressions: He was not following what our Leader taught us. Or she was not participating in the group mission. When I was finished, my victim would have to thank me and assure everyone that he or she would correct the behavior.”

“In North Korea, schoolchildren do more than study. They are part of the unpaid labor force that keeps the country from total collapse. I always had to carry a set of work clothes in my school bag, for the afternoons when they marched us off for manual labor. In the spring we helped the collective farms with their planting. Our job was to carry stones to clear the fields, put in the corn, and haul water. In June and July we weeded the fields, and in the fall we were sent out to pick up the rice or corn or beans that had been missed by the harvesters.”

“When the economy collapsed in the 1990s, the Soviet Union stopped sending fertilizer to us and our own factories stopped producing it. Whatever was donated from other countries couldn’t get to the farms because the transportation system had also broken down. This led to crop failures that made the famine even worse. So the government came up with a campaign to fill the fertilizer gap with a local and renewable source: human and animal waste. Every worker and schoolchild had a quota to fill. You can imagine what kind of problems this created for our families. Every member of the household had a daily assignment, so when we got up in the morning, it was like a war. My aunts were the most competitive.

“Remember not to poop in school!” my aunt in Kowon told me every day.

“Wait to do it here!”

Whenever my aunt in Songnam-ri traveled away from home and had to poop somewhere else, she loudly complained that she didn’t have a plastic bag with her to save it. “Next time I’ll remember!” she would say. Thankfully, she never actually did this.

The big effort to collect waste peaked in January, so it could be ready for growing season. Our bathrooms in North Korea were usually far away from the house, so you had to be careful that the neighbors didn’t steal from you at night. Some people would lock up their outhouses to keep the poop thieves away. At school the teachers would send us out into the streets to find poop and carry it back to class. So if we saw a dog pooping in the street, it was like gold. My uncle in Kowon had a big dog who made a big poop — and everyone in the family would fight over it. This is not something you see every day in the West.”

“In North Korea, you can’t just choose where you want to live. The government has to give you permission to move outside your assigned district, and the authorities don’t make it easy. The only good reasons are a job transfer, marriage, or divorce. Even though she was born and raised in the house her brother Min Sik now owned, my mother’s official residence was still in Hyesan. Illegally changing your residence doesn’t really matter for children, but for a grown-up like my mother, it was a big problem.”

“Because there was no elevator in the building, we had to walk up eight flights in a dark stairwell to get to the apartment — that’s why in North Korea the lower-floor apartments are more desirable. The less money you have, the higher up you live.”

Crossing

“My parents asked Eunmi and me to see if we could discreetly ask around and find out how the other girls were getting into China. My father urged my mother to go with us, too, if she could find a way. He would stay behind, he said, because he didn’t think he could find work across the river. And he was worried about the family he would leave behind in North Korea. When women escaped to China, the government didn’t get all that upset about it, and their relatives were usually not punished. But if a man like my father was to defect, the government would be very hard on his brother and sisters and their families. They might lose their jobs as doctors and professors, or even be sent to prison. Even though my uncle had treated him so badly, my father still felt loyalty to his family.”

“My mother remained at my bedside. Because we had no money to bribe them, the nurses ignored me. My mother had to do everything, from keeping my incision clean to giving me whatever food she could find. The hospital was poorly equipped and filthy. To use the bathroom I had to get up and cross an open courtyard to reach the outhouse. At first I was too weak to stand. But once I was well enough to walk to the bathroom, I discovered that the hospital used the courtyard to store the dead.

The whole time I was staying there, several bodies were stacked like wood between my room and the outhouse. Even more horrible were the rats that feasted on them day and night. It was the most terrible sight I have ever seen. The first thing the rats eat are the eyes, because that is the softest part of a body. I can still see those hollow red eyes. They come to me in my nightmares and I wake up screaming.

My mother couldn’t believe the hospital just left the bodies out there in the open.

“Why can’t you take these people away and bury them!” she demanded when a nurse walked by.

The nurse shrugged. “The government won’t come and collect the bodies until there are seven of them. That’s only five,” she said, then walked away.”

“”If you want, you can cross the river tonight, the pregnant woman said.

I didn’t know until that very moment how much I wanted to leave North Korea. Even when I first knocked on the door I didn’t know. But right then and there I made up my mind. I was going to China, and my mother was coming with me. Right now. It was not our original plan. My sister and I were supposed to go ahead, without my mother. But now I knew. I could not leave my mother behind.

I grabbed my mother’s hands and said, “We must go, Umma! There may never be another chance!” But my mother tried to pull away.

“Yeonmi-ya, I can’t leave your father. He’s sick. You have to go by yourself.”

I held on to her and said, “No, if I let go of your hands, you’re going to die in North Korea. I can’t go if I leave you here!”

She begged me, “Just give me one chance to tell your father that I’m going. Then I’ll come back.”

I wouldn’t let her leave, not even to tell my father. He would find a way to stop her, or she would change her mind. I knew if I let her out of my sight I would never see her again. So I said everything I could to persuade her to go with me now. I told her that we would find Eunmi and could settle in China first, and then we would get Father to come later. I still imagined we could come back any time to wave to my father across the river, just like those Chinese kids who used to ask me if I was hungry. But the most important thing, the only thing that really mattered, was that by tomorrow we wouldn’t have to worry about food anymore. I gave her no choice.

I was still holding my mother’s hands when I said to the pregnant woman,

“I’ll go if my mother can come, too.”

“You can both go,” she said.

“What about my sister, Eunmi?” I asked. “Will we find her there?”

“I’m sure of it.” said the woman.

“Once you cross the river, all the North Korean people live in the same area so you’ll see her there.”

This made sense to us, because it’s the way North Korea would be organized, with different people assigned to different areas.

We never thought to ask why these women were helping us, and why we didn’t have to pay them anything. We didn’t think that something might be wrong. Even though my mother worked in the black market, she trusted people. As North Koreans, we were innocent in a way that I cannot fully explain.

For the rest of the day we kept changing our location, with the pregnant woman making us wait outside different buildings on the outskirts of Hyesan. Finally, in late afternoon, we ducked into a public toilet and were given some very dark, thin clothes and ordered to change. The woman told us these clothes would make us look like the porters who smuggle goods across the river. That would be our story if we got caught. We would just say that we were being paid to pick up packages in China, and we planned to come right back.

Then she disappeared and two young men came out of the house. They led me and my mother down side streets and back alleys on our way out of town. They told us that if we traveled along the road, people would see us and there could be big trouble. So they took us on footpaths through the mountains — what we called those steep foothills where we went to gather wood on a winding route back to the river. This was less than two weeks after my surgery and I was already exhausted. The boys walked really fast, and after a while I couldn’t bear the pain in my side so I slowed them down a little. At first just the two boys led us along the trails, then another one joined us. He was even younger than the other boys, but he acted like he was the boss. He gave us more instructions about what we should do when we got to China.

“When you cross the river, don’t tell anybody your real age,” he said

“We’ve told the people on the other side that you are eighteen and twenty-eight years old. They won’t take you if you’re too young or too old. And don’t let them know you are mother and daughter. They don’t expect that and it will be a problem, too.”

This seemed strange to me, but I had to trust these smugglers to know what was best to get us into China. By that time, we had walked all day, and it was getting dark. We hadn’t had any food since the morning, and they gave us nothing to eat. At some point the first two stopped and told us to follow the youngest one. He led us to the edge of a cliff. It was very dark, but we could see a big road below us, and a steep bank down to the frozen river.

“Follow me,” the boy said. “And whatever you do, don’t make any noise.””

China

“The wife, who was sitting up in her bed watching everything, finally explained what was going on.

“If you want to stay in China, you have to be sold and get married,” she told us.”

“My mother, who had been sold by the North Koreans for 500 Chinese yuan, the equivalent of about $65 (the value in 2007), was being bought by Zhifang for the equivalent of $650. My original price was the equivalent of $260, and I was sold to Zhifang for 15,000 yuan, or just under $2,000. The price would go up each time we were sold along the chain.”

“At five o’clock in the morning, with heavy snow blowing in circles around the apartment building, a taxi arrived and parked around the corner. We went outside, and the bald broker told me to wait by the gate. Then he threw my mother to the ground and raped her right in front of me, like an animal. I saw such fear in her eyes, but there was nothing I could do except stand there and shiver, begging silently for it to end. That was my introduction to sex.”

“Virtually all defectors in China live in constant fear. The men who manage to get across often hire themselves to farmers for slave wages. They don’t dare complain because all the farmer has to do is notify the police and they will be arrested and repatriated. The Chinese government doesn’t want a flood of immigrants, nor does it want to upset the leadership in Pyongyang. Not only is North Korea a trading partner, but it’s a nuclear power perched right on its border, and an important buffer between China and the American presence in the South. Beijing refuses to grant refugee status to escapees from North Korea, instead labeling them illegal “economic migrants” and shipping them home. We didn’t know any of this, of course, before we escaped. We thought we would be welcomed. And in some places we were — just not by the authorities.

North Korean women were in demand in the rural areas of China because there were not enough Chinese women to go around. The government’s population control strategy prohibited most couples from having more than one child — and in Chinese culture, a male child is more valued. Tragically, many female babies were aborted or, according to human rights groups, secretly killed at birth. China ended up with too many boys, and not enough women to marry them when they grew up. The ratio of male to female was especially unbalanced in the rural areas, where many local young women were lured to the big cities for jobs and a better life.

Men with physical or mental disabilities were particularly unlikely to find wives, and these men and their families created the market for North Korean slave-brides. But brides aren’t cheap, sometimes costing thousands of dollars, or the equivalent of a year’s earnings for a poor farmer. Of course, trafficking and slave marriages are illegal in China, and any children that result are not considered Chinese citizens. That means they cannot legally go to school, and without proper identification papers, can’t find work when they get older. Everything about trafficking is inhuman, but it’s still a big business in northeastern China.

After my mother and I and the other North Korean woman had eaten and rested, Zhifang, who had returned from Chaingbai separately, sat down with us to discuss what was going to happen next. He said another Chinese man would be coming by to take us to the countryside to match us with husbands.

“Can’t we be sold together?” my mother asked. “This girl is really my daughter, not my niece.”

The fat broker didn’t seem surprised to hear this. “I’m sorry, but you and your daughter will have to be sold separately,” he said. “I paid a price for each of you, and that’s the only way I can get my money back.”

“But my daughter can’t get married,” my mother said. “She’s only thirteen.

“Look, don’t worry. I agree she’s too young,” Zhifang said. “I’m a human being just like you! How could I sell a thirteen-year-old girl into marriage?” He told us that if my mother agreed to be sold separately, he and Young Sun would keep me with them, and raise me until I was older. Then they would make a decision.”

“I had never seen a toilet before, and she explained to me how to use it. I thought you were supposed to perch on top of it; like the drop toilets we used in North Korea. She showed me how to wash my hands in a sink, and reminded me of the proper way to use a toothbrush and toothpaste. We had been so poor after my father was arrested that we used salt on our fingers to brush our teeth. She also told me how Chinese women used disposable pads during their menstrual periods. Back in North Korea, we just used a thin cloth that we had to wash, so I had been confined to the house for days every month. When she handed me the soft cottony pad wrapped in thin plastic, I had no idea what to do with it. And it smelled so nice I wanted to save it for some other purpose. But I thought the concept was great because it gave women much more freedom.

The next day, she took me to a public bathhouse where women take showers together in one room. I had seen showers in movies, but this was my first experience. It was so wonderful to feel warm water coming down all over me. Young Sun scrubbed me from head to toe with real soap, and then she sprayed my head with something to kill the lice and put my hair in a shower cap. Everybody in North Korea had lice, and there was no way to get rid of them. So this treatment was a huge relief.”

“As the group traveled by bus and taxi deep into China, my mother had no idea where they were going. They stopped for the night at a dark, cold house in the country. An old man arrived and built a fire for them, and Hongwei gestured to my mother that this was her husband; she had to sleep with him. But they had tricked her: it was just another broker. This ring of human traffickers always used the women before they were sold, including Hongwei. My mother had no choice but to accept it.”

“She felt like a sack of potatoes in the market as they haggled over her price. The men said she was too skinny, or too old, and her price kept coming down. One woman brought her mentally damaged son to buy her, but my mother refused. (The brokers generally won’t force women to accept matches, because they know they will just try to run away, which is bad for business. But if they are unreasonable, they will beat them or turn them over to the police to be sent back to North Korea.)”

“She discovered that she was expected to be not just a wife to this Chinese farmer but a slave to his whole family. She had to cook and clean and work in the fields. Time after time she begged them to let her call her little daughter again, but no matter how much she cried, they didn’t care. To them, she was like one of their farm animals, not a human being at all.”

“My mother had been gone for only three days when Zhifang tried to rape me.

His apartment was laid out with two bedrooms separated by a hallway. I was sleeping by myself across the hall from Zhifang and Young Sun when he crawled into my bed in the dark. He smelled of alcohol and his hands were rough when he grabbed me. I was so shocked that I started kicking him and struggling out of his grip.

“Quiet!” he whispered. “You’ll wake her up!”

“If you don’t let me go I’ll scream!” I said. So he reluctantly left me alone and went back to his sleeping girlfriend.

A couple of days later, he tried it again. This time he gave Young Sun a lot of alcohol until she was passed out drunk, and then he came to my bedroom in the middle of the night. Again I fought him off by kicking and screaming and biting. I thought the only way to save myself was to act like a crazy person. I was so wild that he knew he would have to damage me badly or even kill me to finish what he started. And then I would have no value. So he gave up.

“Fine,” he said. “But you can’t stay in this house anymore. I’ll sell you to a farmer.”

“All right,” I said. “Then sell me.”

A few days later, the man who had bought and sold my mother returned to take me away.”

“I thought I could trust this girl because we were both North Koreans, and she would take pity on me. “Will you rescue me?” I asked her. “Can you help me escape and find my mother?”

She told her husband, and they agreed. We made a plan. While Hongwei was not paying attention, I slipped out the back door, jumped over a fence, and ran to a tumbledown old house in the woods. The girl’s Chinese mother-in-law soon joined me. A few hours later, a man on a motorcycle arrived to take me to a house deep in the mountains that belonged to one of their relatives.

When I got there, I realized I had been tricked. The North Korean girl and her husband had stolen me from Hongwei, and now they were trying to sell me themselves. They came to visit me in the mountains with another broker, and the girl told me, “If you agree to sleep with this man, he will find you a rich young husband in a big city. You won’t have to marry a farmer.”

I still refused. I told them I would die before I let that happen.

The North Korean girl spent a week or so visiting with me while she tried to persuade me to be sold. I had a lot of time to practice my Chinese during this time, and I picked it up quickly.

Meanwhile, Hongwei had called in some of his gangster friends to help find me. They rode their motorcycles all over the area, searching houses and sheds for my hiding place. The couple who stole me told Hongwei that I had run away, but he didn’t believe them. He tried threatening them to get me back, but they stuck to their story. The Chinese man who had taken me even offered to help in the search.

Through his connections in the trafficking world, Hongwei eventually learned where I was being hidden. He approached the couple with a deal: Unless they cooperated with him, he would report them to the police, and the girl would be sent back to North Korea. But if they returned me unharmed, he would pay to buy me back. They took the deal. So Hongwei bought me twice.”

“As we walked from the bus station to the apartment, I was feeling very strong and calm, because I had already made the decision to kill myself instead of accepting this life. I had lost control of everything else, but this was one last choice I could make. I had cried every single day since I left North Korea, so much that I couldn’t believe I had that many tears inside of me. But on the last day of my life, there would be no more crying.”

“I was raving and screaming in Korean, “If you come near me, I’ll jump!” He couldn’t understand what I was saying, but he could see in my eyes that I was ready to die.

Hongwei spoke in a soothing voice, saying “Biedong, biedong,” which means “Don’t move” in Chinese. He used simple words that I could understand, and gestures to describe a bargain he had in mind. “You be my wife,” he said. “Mama come. Papa come. Sister come.”

Suddenly, he had my attention. I slowly put down the knife.

We sat down and, still using pantomime and simple words, he laid out his offer: If I would live with him as his xiao-xifu, or “little wife” — meaning mistress — he would find my mother and buy her back. Then he would find my father in North Korea and pay for a broker to bring him to China. And he would help me find my sister.

And if I didn’t do this? He obviously couldn’t sell me, so he would turn me in to the Chinese police. I would never let this happen, of course.”

“After that business was finished, we returned to the village where he had sold my mother, and I met with her Chinese “husband.” I spoke enough Chinese by now that I was able to tell him I wanted to buy my mother back. We negotiated a price — it was my first real business transaction. Hongwei paid a little more than $2,000 to buy her back for me, and I was secretly pleased he lost money on the deal.

A few days later, we met the family in a secret location in the countryside to make the exchange. It was June, and the grass was high. My mother saw me from far away and came running down a dirt lane to hug me. She had no idea what had happened to me, or that I was coming to get her.”

“His life had never been easy. Hongwei was born on a farm west of Chaoyang, an ancient city of Buddhist temples, parks, skyscrapers, and street gangs. When he was twelve or thirteen, he ran away to the city and joined a gang that controlled a string of karaoke clubs. These weren’t the kind of friendly sing-along bars you might find in Seoul or other cities. They were places where women provided more entertainment than just serving drinks. Hongwei never had a higher education, but he could read and write and was very smart. By fifteen, he was the head of his gang with his own karaoke empire. He used his connections to get into a lot of different businesses, such as restaurants and real estate development. About two years before I escaped from North Korea, he branched out into human trafficking. For a while, that’s where the big money was.

In Chaoyang, Hongwei had a Chinese wife and two children, a son and a daughter. The daughter, I later learned, was only a year younger than I was.”

“If the Chinese government would end its heartless policy of sending refugees back to North Korea, then the brokers would lose all their power to exploit and enslave these women.”

“Most of the time Hongwei sold women as brides for Chinese men but sometimes the women asked him to sell them into prostitution, where they could make money to send back to their families.”

“I made several trips back to Huludao in the coming months, and I learned what I would have gotten myself into if I had stayed. Customers paid about $5 to sleep with the women, and the women got to keep $1. That was actually an excellent percentage for a brothel, which was why the women wanted to work there. But you had to have sex with up to a dozen men a day, some of them farmers so filthy you couldn’t wash the smell off of them. Yet there were places far worse than this.

Hongwei told me about hotels in Beijing and Shanghai where girls who wanted to leave were injected with drugs to turn them into addicts. Then they could never run away.”

“Unfortunately, Hongwei sold Myung Ok to a handicapped farmer who treated her badly. The man was so nervous about her running away that he followed her everywhere, even into the bathroom. She couldn’t take it anymore and managed to escape to the bustling northeastern city of Shenyang, where there was a large population of North Korean defectors in hiding. But Hongwei had underworld connections in Shenyang, and his men found her and beat her up. She was sent back to the farmer again. If she had succeeded in running away, Hongwei would have had to refund the farmer’s money; his women came with a limited one-year warranty, just like a car.”

Crossing to Mongolia

“I thought life would continue like this forever until my mother met a North Korean woman named Hae Soon, who was living with a South Korean man in Shenyang. Before we met Hae Soon, my mother and I had never considered escape to South Korea a possibility. But Hae Soon knew all about it and told us that the South Koreans would welcome us as citizens and help us find jobs and a place to live. She also knew how dangerous it was to try to escape from China. If you were captured and returned to North Korea, then your life would be over. Looking for work in China was a crime, but escaping to South Korea was high treason, and you would either be sent to a political prison camp, from which there is no escape, or maybe just executed.

Hae Soon told us that she knew a way out of China that had worked for others. There were Christian missionaries in the city of Qingdao who could get you through China to Mongolia, which was supposed to welcome North Korean refugees. Once you got to Mongolia, the South Korean embassy would take care of you. Hae Soon wanted to go to Qingdao and start the journey, but she didn’t have the courage to do it alone. So she asked my mother and me to go with her.

As soon as I heard this woman’s story, I knew we had to get to Mongolia. My mother was very afraid. We had a good thing in Shenyang, she said. It was too risky to leave, she said, and she tried to talk me out of it. But I felt an old hunger burning in me, one that told me there was more to life than just surviving. I didn’t know what would happen to us, but I knew I would rather die than live like this anymore-I knew in my heart that I deserved to be treated like a person, not a hunted animal. Once again, I grabbed my mother’s hands and wouldn’t let go until she agreed to come with me to Mongolia.”

“Our group was planning to cross the border into Mongolia at night, on foot, during one of the coldest times of the year, when temperatures in that part of the Gobi Desert can drop to minus-27 degrees Fahrenheit. Winter crossings were supposed to be safer because the Chinese border patrols were lighter and they wouldn’t be expecting anyone to risk freezing to death during such a dangerous trek. But there was still a real possibility that we would be arrested before we got to the border. And in that case, my mother and I had decided we were not going to be taken. My mother had stashed away a large cache of sleeping pills — the same kind my grandmother had used to kill herself. I hid a razor blade in the belt of my tweed jacket so that I could slit my own throat before they sent me back to North Korea.”

“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.”

South Korea

“The campus of redbrick buildings and green lawns surrounded by security fences was built in 1999 by South Korea’s Ministry of Unification, a cabinet-level agency created to prepare for the day when North and South would somehow be reunited. Its programs are designed to help defectors transition into a modern society — something that will have to happen on a massive scale if North Korea’s 25 million people are ever allowed to join the twenty-first century.

The Republic of Korea has evolved separately from the Hermit Kingdom for more than six decades, and even the language is different now. In a way, Hanawon is like a boot camp for time travelers from the Korea of the 1950s and ’60s who grew up in a world without ATMs, shopping malls, credit cards, or the Internet. South Koreans use a lot of unfamiliar slang, and English has crept into the vocabulary as “Konglish.” For example, a handbag in South Korea is now a han-du-bag-u.”

“While my mother and the other adults were taught how to open a bank account, use a credit card, pay rent, and register to vote, I joined the other teenagers and children in classes to prepare us for the rigorous South Korean education system. First they tested our knowledge levels. I was fifteen years old, but after missing so much school, I scored at a second-grade math level and was even worse at reading and writing.

I had to start my education over, from the beginning.”

“When I was called, on, I froze. I had no idea what a “hobby” was. When it was explained that it was something I did that made me happy, I couldn’t conceive of such a thing. My only goal was supposed to be making the regime happy. And why would anyone care about what “I” wanted to be when I grew up? There was no “I” in North Korea — only “we.

This whole exercise made me uncomfortable and upset.

When the teacher saw this, she said, “If that’s too hard, then tell us your favorite color.” Again, I went blank.

In North Korea, we are usually taught to memorize everything, and most of the time there is only one correct answer to each question. So when the teacher asked for my favorite color, I thought hard to come up with the “right” answer. I had never been taught to use the “critical thinking” part of my brain, the part that makes reasoned judgments about why one thing seems better than another.

The teacher told me, “This isn’t so hard. I’ll go first: My favorite color is pink. Now what’s yours?”

“Pink!” I said, relieved that I was finally given the right answer.

In South Korea, I learned to hate the question “What do you think?” Who cared what I thought? It took me a long time to start thinking for myself and to understand why my own opinions mattered. But after five years of practicing being free, I know now that my favorite color is spring green and my hobby is reading books and watching documentaries. I’m not copying other people’s answers anymore.”

“In the early days of the Republic of Korea, newly arrived defectors from the North were treated like heroes and were usually given big rewards, subsidies, and scholarships. But after the famine of the 1990s, a wave of refugees started pouring into South Korea, straining the resettlement system. In fact, the number of defectors in 2009 was the biggest ever, with 2,914 new arrivals.

And now, in contrast with the mostly male, highly skilled defectors of the past, about 75 percent of the refugees were poor women from the northern provinces — like my mother and me.

Over time, the resettlement packages had grown smaller and more restrictive. But they were still a lifeline for us as we adapted to our new home.

On August 26, 2009, Hanawon threw a graduation party for the members of Group 129. My mother and I were issued citizenship papers for the Republic of Korea. I felt a huge relief wash over me. I thought this was the final trial on the road to freedom. But almost as soon as we passed through the gates of Hanawon, I started missing it. I was now in the land of choices, where supermarkets had fifteen brands of rice to choose from, and I was already longing to go back to a place where they told us what to do.

As soon as we settled into our new life, I found out how painful freedom could be.

My mother and I received a resettlement package for housing and other expenses worth approximately $25,234 over the next five years. This seems like a lot of money until you consider that it’s about what most South Korean households earn in one year. Defectors have to work hard to catch up with average citizens, and many of them never do. We were told we could get a little more money if we agreed to live outside the crowded capital, so my mother and I took the deal and were sent to a small factory town near Asan, about two hours by rail south of Seoul.

Our apartment was assigned to us and paid for by the government. A bank account was set up for my mother, and we were given a one-time stipend to get us started.”

“The PC club was on the second floor, at the top of a grubby concrete stairwell. I thought it was incredibly sophisticated, with its colored lights and shiny rows of computer terminals manned by hypnotized-looking young men.

I gathered my courage and pushed open the glass door. The older man at the reception desk glanced up at me as I walked in. “I’d like to use this PC.” I said.

As soon as he heard my accent, he knew I was not from South Korea.

“We don’t allow foreigners in this place,” he said.

“Okay, I’m from North Korea, but I’m a South Korean citizen now,” I said, utterly shocked. I could feel tears stinging my eyes.

“No, you’re a foreigner,” he said. “Foreigners are not allowed here!””

“Even though my test scores placed me at the same level as South Korean eight-year-olds, I was almost twice that age and too big for elementary school. So if I wanted a public education, it had to be at the local middle school. I could have chosen a private alternative school just for defectors, but I wanted to learn to fit into South Korea as soon as possible.”

“Then I was led away to meet some of my new classmates. All the girls were wearing their smart uniforms, and I was dressed in a hand-me-down outfit given to me by a social worker. I tried to talk to a few kids, but they just looked at me and walked away.

Later, I heard some of the girls talking about me, not caring that I could overhear.

“What’s that animal-thing doing here?” said one.

“What’s wrong with her accent?” said another. “Is she a spy or something?”

At the end of the day, I walked home with my mother and never came back.”

“I crammed twelve years or education into the next eighteen months of my life. I attended a few other special schools to help me get my general equivalency diplomas for middle school and high school. But even then, I studied best on my own. I vowed to myself to read one hundred books a year, and I did.”

“My mother told me it wasn’t healthy for me to stay home reading all the time. She urged me to go back to boarding school, so in the spring of 2010, I enrolled at another Christian academy for defectors to earn my middle school GED, then switched to the Seoul campus of the Heavenly Dream School to finish high school. I still avoided going to class and did most of my work on my own. But I was scoring well on my tests.

In April 2011, just two years after my mother and I landed in South Korea, I took my high school GED exam and passed. It was a sweet victory.”

“She never pressed charges against the boyfriend. The police interrogated him and wanted to prosecute, but my kindhearted mother forgave him and asked them to let him go. I think that after her experiences with the North Korean police, she would not put anyone through that kind of torture, even someone who had tried to kill her. She didn’t know there was a difference in the way the police worked in South Korea.

After he attacked her, my mother tried to break up with this man, but he stalked her and came to the apartment at all hours to threaten her. After a couple of months, she gave up resisting and got back together with him again. But he was a violent man, and he continued to abuse her. Sometimes I would get a text from her saying,

“If I die tonight, you know he did it.”

It drove me crazy to think that my mother had endured so much suffering to be free, and now that she was finally in South Korea, she had to live in fear. Once she had refused to press charges, it seemed like the police could do nothing more to protect her.

There had to be a better way. If they couldn’t protect her, I thought, then maybe I could. I could learn the law and become a police officer, or even a prosecutor. In North Korea, the police were the ones who took your money and hauled you away to prison. In China, I froze in fear anytime I saw a uniform, because the police there would arrest me on the spot. Police officers had never protected me from anything in my life. But in South Korea, protection was their job description. And so I chose to run toward the thing I feared the most and join their ranks.

I did some research and found that the best place in the country to get a degree in police administration was Dongguk University in Seoul. So that was where I decided to apply for college.”

“As a North Korean defector, I had half of my tuition paid for by the government while the school paid the other half — as long as I kept up my grades — so cost was not an obstacle.”

“I was ready to forget my past and start fresh with a whole new identity as a South Korean college student. But then I got a call from the producer of a national cable TV show on EBS, the Educational Broadcasting System, toward the end of 2011. He wanted to interview a North Korean defector, and he had heard my name from someone connected with Hanawon. I agreed to meet with him, and I told him the story of my escape across the desert and my search for my sister who had disappeared into China. At the end of our conversation, he told me he was looking for an articulate and ambitious young defector to appear on a segment of his show. Would I be interested?

I felt a panic rising in me and I immediately answered, “No!”

“But it’s an important show, and it will be seen everywhere,” said the producer. He paused. “And maybe it will help you find your sister.”

I hadn’t thought of this possibility before. South Korean television was watched online all over China. If I were to tell Eunmi’s story on TV, then maybe she would see it and find a way to con tact us so we could help her escape.

On the other hand, I would be taking a big risk going public. There were several women other than our friends now living in South Korea who knew me and what I had done to survive in China. My hopes for a career in law or criminal justice might be destroyed if they came forward to expose me.

I discussed the offer with my mother, and we decided that it was worth taking the chance if it meant finding Eunmi.

I spent a couple of days taping the segment. Mostly they filmed me walking around beaches and amusement parks with an older defector while we talked about the generation gap between North Koreans my age, who had access to foreign DVDs, and his generation, who had a different mind-set. At one point, they brought us to an accordion academy run by a couple of North Korean defectors, and they taped me while I listened to them playing accordions and singing songs from the old country. An enormous wave of grief rolled over me, and I couldn’t stop myself from crying in front of the camera. I told them how Eunmi used to play the accordion when we were children in Hyesan. And that I hadn’t seen her in five years and missed her so much.”

“Shortly after the EBS broadcast, I received a phone call from the producer of a new cable TV show called Now on My Way to Meet You. She wanted me to make an appearance.

At the time, Now on My Way was a talk and talent show that featured a revolving cast of attractive young women who chatted with celebrities, sang, danced, and performed in comedy skits. What made this program different was that all the panelists were North Korean defectors. (It evolved to include men and older women.) The show was created to raise awareness about defectors and challenge the stereotypical image of North Koreans as grim, robotic, boring people. The sketches poked fun at some aspects of life in the Hermit Kingdom and also at the prejudices defectors had to overcome in the South. But it was run by the station’s entertainment — not educational — department, and its tone was as light and playful as its colorful, mod soundstage.

A lot of the banter was silly, and the interviews were heavily edited, but that was part of its charm.

Now on My Way was quickly developing a huge following among South Koreans, who knew next to nothing about North Korea, and surveys showed that viewers had a more positive attitude about defectors after watching.”

“Eunmi’s story belongs only to her, and she deserves her privacy. What I can tell you is that she never saw any of my television appearances while she was in China. She had no idea that we had escaped from North Korea or that we had been looking for her all this time. It was maddening to learn how physically close we had been to one another at times. As we had suspected, Eunmi and her friend had been hidden in one of the traffickers’ houses on the outskirts of Hyesan while my mother and I were searching for her and making our own escape. None of us had known that only a thin wall stood between us on that terrible day. We also compared notes and found out that Eunmi had been living in the same province when my mother and I were working in Shenyang. We were close, and yet a world might as well have separated us. There was so little chance of running into each other when everybody was hiding from the law.

Eventually Eunmi discovered the route to escape through Southeast Asia, and that is how she made it to South Korea on her own. She didn’t need us to rescue her after all.”

“First, I wanted to get back to school and finish my degree. I had chosen my major specifically to join the national police agency in order to protect my mother from her violent boyfriend. But as my mind opened up in college, so did my sense of justice, and now I expected to study law. But I didn’t expect that within a year I would become an advocate for North Koreans who had no voice and no hope — the kind of person I had once been. Or that I would be stepping into the international arena to speak out for global justice. Or that the North Korean regime would denounce me as a “human rights puppet.” And I never thought that I would reveal what had happened to me in China. But I would soon discover that to be completely free, I had to confront the truth of my past.”

“Until early 2014, most people — including South Koreans — knew North Korea only through its crazy threats of nuclear destruction and its weird, scary leaders with bad haircuts. But in February, the United Nations released a report documenting human rights abuses in North Korea, including extermination, rape, and deliberate starvation. For the first time, North Korean leaders were being threatened with prosecution in the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. But most of the three hundred or so witnesses who contributed to the report remained anonymous, while others had trouble communicating their stories. Suddenly defectors with English skills were needed to give a voice to the millions of North Koreans trapped behind a wall of silence and oppression.

My speech at the Canadian school led to other invitations to speak, which led to more speeches and media interviews from Australia to the United States. In May I coauthored an op-ed piece in The Washington Post with Casey Lartigue Jr. Until that spring, I wasn’t sure what a human rights activist was. Now suddenly people were telling me I was becoming the face of this issue.”

“It was around this time that I received a call from a South Korean police detective who had been assigned to monitor my mother and me. All defectors are paired with a police officer for five years after their arrival in South Korea to help them resettle safely. My detective usually just wanted to know my schedule and see how I was doing, But this time was different. He said he had been instructed to check on my safety, because word had come down that I was being watched closely by the North Korean government. He didn’t tell me how he got this information, only that I should be careful what I said. It could be dangerous.

If this was supposed to scare me, it worked. It had never occurred to me that the regime would think I was important enough to be a threat. Or to threaten me. The detective had spoken to my mother and frightened her, too. She wanted me to stop all this crazy activism right away. Why couldn’t I just live a normal life and finish my education before trying to save the world? But the more I thought about it, the angrier I got. I had risked my life to escape from North Korea, yet they were still trying to control me. I would never be free if I let them do that.”

“They paraded my relatives and former friends to denounce me and my family. I hadn’t seen Uncle Park Jin, my aunts, and my cousins in eight long years, and it was horrifying to watch them being interviewed on camera. The regime propagandists even tracked down Jong Ae, our kind neighbor in Hyesan, who had helped me and my sister when we were alone and desperate. It was painful to hear them all say bad things about us, but at least I knew they were alive.”