by Yeonmi Park
I was sitting in a window seat, and I couldn’t wait to take off so I could see the horizon and the ocean, which I had known only from pictures and videos. But as soon as we started barreling down the runway, I got a bad case of motion sickness. I kept my eyes away from the window for the rest of the three-and-a-half-hour flight, even when we started our descent to Incheon International Airport in South Korea. I didn’t want to ruin my first view of freedom by being sick.
We were told to stay in our seats after we landed and to wait for everyone else to get off the plane. Then a man from the National Intelligence Service, South Korea’s version of the CIA, boarded to escort us from the plane. He was soon joined by more agents to bring us through the airport. These men were so handsome and spoke with such beautiful accents, like the South Koreans I had watched on pirated videos, that my mother had to nudge my ribs to stop me from staring at them.
I stepped off the airplane onto a different planet. The first thing I saw was a cavernous white corridor bathed in brilliant light. The moving walkway rolled like a magic carpet, taking us to the main terminal. All the fancy South Korean girls gliding by in the other direction wore fine leather jackets and miniskirts and had candy-colored headphones clamped over their ears. When I saw them, I felt like crawling into a mouse hole to hide my shabby tweed coat and mended jeans. It was so embarrassing to be dressed like a poor country girl in this dazzling new place.
When the moving walkway came to an end, I was afraid to step off onto the shiny marble floor. It looked as slick as a frozen river, and I thought I would slip. Everyone waited for me as I took a trip to the public restroom. I thought I had seen modern toilets in China, but this was incomprehensible. The bowls were so shiny and clean, I thought that was where you washed your hands. And the faucets in the row of basins kept turning on mysteriously when you walked by, but then would stop unexpectedly. I was too ashamed to ask for help, and I felt very stupid and inadequate. So even before I officially entered South Korea, I felt like a failure.
• • •
The lovely NIS agents whisked all eight of us through the back corridors of the airport and onto a waiting bus.
Our first stop was a hospital, where I received the first checkup of my life. It was very strange, to be examined by doctors with so much modern equipment. But the strangest thing was being asked to pee into a cup. What? I had no idea how to do that. And they gave me such an awesome cup, I didn’t want to use it for that!
The doctors got the results back quickly, and I was okay. No TB, no contagious diseases. Soon we were all free to go on to the next step of our journey.
• • •
The National Intelligence Center is a heavily secured, restricted facility about an hour’s drive outside Seoul. As soon as we arrived, our belongings were taken away and we were given large bags filled with clothes and shampoo and other personal items for our stay. At this point, our friendly welcome was over and it became clear that this place was more like a jail than a refugee shelter. The people who processed us were rough and used very crude language, even with the children. As in Mongolia, we were each taken to a room to be stripped and thoroughly searched, which again left me feeling humiliated and violated. It was a depressing way to begin our life of freedom.
The purpose of the Center is to weed out imposters: ethnic Koreans from China trying to emigrate to South Korea, and North Korean agents disguised as defectors. It is a legitimate concern, because a few dozen defectors have been arrested for spying over the years. Yet this is a tiny fraction of the more than twenty-six thousand North Koreans who have passed through the Center and now live in South Korea.
The NIS agents explained to us that we had to be interrogated and investigated before we could enter the country. My mother and I had to decide how much of our story to tell. We were so worried after the terrible reaction from the pastor in Qingdao when he learned we had worked in a chat room. We thought that the less these South Koreans knew about our past, the better off we would be. So we tried to come up with a story that left out the fact that I had been trafficked in China when I was thirteen, or that I had lived as Hongwei’s mistress. But the story was so complicated and difficult to memorize that my mother decided it was easier and better to just tell the truth. The only thing she held back was the divorce from my father. She always thought of it as fake, anyway, because they had done it only so she could change her residence while he was in prison. She wanted to honor my father by being his wife, even in death.
After we had been searched, our little team from Qingdao was led to a room filled with twenty or more newly arrived defectors who were lying around on blankets on the floor. Each of us was given a pen and paper and told to write down everything about ourselves. After we handed in our essays, we could talk, sleep, or watch a closed-circuit television that showed only the Discovery Channel dubbed in Korean or with subtitles. I learned about life on the ocean floor, desert islands, and crocodiles in Africa. I even saw for the first time how a baby grows in its mother’s belly. It was a long wait, but very educational. The food was good, too. We were fed a lot of snacks and cookies, and we lined up for meals of delicious new foods like curry, which I’d never had before. Some of the staff in the housing units were mean to us, but most of them were extremely nice and friendly. We were given a few hours each day to stretch and exercise, but other than that, we were held in isolation as people moved on to the next stage of their interrogation and new ones arrived to take their places.
We heard a lot of frightening and sorrowful stories from the people we met. We learned that another friend of Myung Ok’s, who had been working in the chat room to pay for a passage through Southeast Asia, had drowned in the flooded Mekong River before she could get to Thailand. My mother and I had wanted to take that route as well, but it was too expensive for us. There was no safe way to escape from North Korea, and we were lucky to have made it out alive.
After about twenty days in the big waiting room, my mother and I were moved to a smaller room with a woman and her three children. She told us her husband had been arrested in China right in front of her, but she had to pretend she didn’t know him in order to save their children. She felt so guilty for leaving him behind. My mother tried to assure her she had done the right thing, but at night the woman cried out for him in her sleep.
After two more weeks, it was finally time for our individual interrogations. My mother and I were moved into solitary rooms, each outfitted with a small bed, table, chair, and tiny bathroom. At mealtimes, someone brought the food inside the room and picked up the tray after I ate.
The agent in charge of my interrogation was tall and middle-aged, and spoke with a silky accent that I found charming at first. But a lot of the questions he asked made me feel very uncomfortable, the same way I had felt in Qingdao.
He started by questioning me about what I learned in school and other things that only North Korean children would know, like the Young Pioneer oath. He had me draw a map of my neighborhood, and he asked me about what my family did in North Korea. Sometimes I was taken to his office to answer questions, and sometimes he called me on the phone to verify something my mother had said. I know it was necessary, but it made me anxious. Especially when he wanted me to talk about China.
Toward the end of the interrogation, he asked, “Do you have any tattoos?”
I knew that he was really asking, “Were you a whore?” Prostitutes in China can often be identified by tattoos on their arms or backs. My face was burning with shame that this man felt entitled to ask such a question. What did it matter anyway? He knew my past; he knew I had worked in a chat room. Now he was looking at me like I was something he just scraped off his shoe. In his eyes I was lower than an insect.
“No, I don’t have tattoos,” I said.
“Are you sure?” he insisted.
“I don’t. Why can’t you believe me?”
“You know, I can bring in a woma
n to take off your clothes.”
“Go ahead! Check it right now!”
“Okay, okay, relax,” he said. “I believe you.”
The agent tried to change the subject. “So what do you plan to do in South Korea?”
Without hesitating, I said, “I want to study and go to university.”
He snorted with surprise and said, “Oh, I don’t think you can do that.” Then he added, “But I suppose everybody should get a second chance.”
A second chance? I thought. A second chance is what criminals get. I knew I wasn’t a criminal; I did what I had to do to survive and save my family. But now my heart sank. I realized I had no hope in this place. I felt dirty and lost, just like I had when the pastor was lecturing me about sin. If this was the way people were going to treat me when they found out who I was, then I would have to become somebody else. Somebody who could be accepted and succeed in South Korea. My life so far had been all about survival. I had found a way to survive in North Korea. I had found a different way to survive in China. But I wondered whether I had the energy to survive here. I felt so very tired.
I went back to my cell-like room and looked out the window at the country where I thought I would be free. All I saw was another hell. How easy it would be to run my wrist along the sharp metal sill until I cut so deep that my life would burst open like a sudden storm and end just as quickly.
But then I remembered I had a promise to keep. Like my father, I vowed that my eyes wouldn’t close until I found my sister. I wanted to live to see her again.
During our escape from China, my mother and I asked everyone we met whether they had seen Eunmi. Nobody had. We gave her name to the NIS agents when we first arrived at the Center, but they had no record of her. I was crushed, but still I would not give up. If she was alive in China, all I had to do was let her know where to find us, and she would find a way to come.
• • •
By the beginning of June, our group of about 130 newly arrived defectors was ready to leave the Center. We had all been cleared by national security. The evening before we departed, the staff threw us a big party to welcome us to our new life. They wished us good luck, and they knew we would need it. Our next stop was a resettlement center where North Koreans were taught how to be South Koreans.
Twenty
Dreams and Nightmares
The first thing they taught us at the Hanawon Resettlement Center was how to sing the national anthem. We were all very good at it. After all, this was the sort of skill we North Koreans had been perfecting all our lives. The rest of the work was much harder.
Hanawon, located about forty miles south of Seoul, means “House of Unity.”
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. And shopping is syoping. I was amazed when I learned that people shopped for fun. There was so much more: printer, scanner, salad, hamburger, pizza, clinic. This wasn’t just a new vocabulary for me; these were code words for entry into a completely new world.
It was both mystifying and exhilarating. The staff at Hanawon tried to teach us as much as they could in the three months before we were released into our new hypercompetitive, digitalized, and democratized homeland.
• • •
As soon as we arrived, our little group from Qingdao was assigned to a team—Group 129—and issued casual uniforms of track pants, T-shirts, hoodies, and running shoes to wear during our stay. The facility was designed to house two hundred defectors at a time, but during our stay it was packed with around six hundred residents—all women and children eighteen and under. Adult men were sent to a separate facility. We slept four or five to a room, and ate meals in a communal cafeteria.
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.
A lot of us had a hard time adjusting to the classroom. Sitting still in a chair seemed uncomfortable and unnatural. And the lessons were often baffling. Our schoolbooks no longer used “American bastards” as units for addition and subtraction—now we had cute, colorful things like apples and oranges. But I still didn’t know my multiplication tables. And I needed help with basic things like the ABC alphabet. Other than Korean characters, the only alphabet I knew was the one we used to spell Russian words in North Korea. Learning a new one now seemed completely overwhelming.
The instructors spent a lot of time teaching us about the world outside the sealed borders of North Korea. It was the first time we learned that there were prosperous democracies all over the globe, and that North Korea was one of the poorest countries on the planet, and the most repressive. Every day, the instructors challenged fundamental beliefs that had been drilled into our heads from birth. Some corrections were easier to take than others. I was able to believe that Kim Jong Il lived in luxurious mansions while his people starved. But I could not accept that it was his father, the Great Leader Kim Il Sung, and not the evil Yankee and South Korean invaders, who started the Korean War in 1950. For a long time, I simply refused to believe it. Assuming that North Korea was always the victim of imperialist aggression was part of my identity. It’s not easy to give up a worldview that is built into your bones and imprinted on your brain like the sound of your own father’s voice. Besides, if everything I had been taught before was a lie, how could I know these people weren’t lying, too? It was impossible to trust anyone in authority.
At Hanawon, we also learned some rules of the society we were about to enter. For instance, the instructors told us we couldn’t beat anyone here. That would cost us a lot of money and we might end up in jail. This was shocking to the boys, but sounded very good to me. In North Korea and China there were no laws like that, and when someone hit me, I never expected them to be punished. I thought I had no choice because I was weak. So this legal system seemed very attractive to me because it protected weak people from those with more power. I’d never imagined such a concept.
I don’t know if the other defectors had the same problems, but for me the most difficult part of the program was learning to introduce myself in class. Almost nobody knew how to do this, so the teachers taught us that the first thing you say is your name, age, and hometown. Then you can tell people about your hobbies, your favorite recording artist or movie star, and finally you can talk about “what you want to be in the future.” 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 co
lor.” 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.
• • •
I believe that my teachers at Hanawon had only the best intentions when they warned us how difficult it would be to compete with students who were born in South Korea. This country’s academic achievement is rated number one in the world by the Pearson Global Index, a metric that ranks the United Kingdom in sixth place and the United States in fifteenth. We were told that South Korean kids were so obsessed with education that they studied seven days a week, and crammed their free time with tutoring courses to get ahead of their classmates. By telling us this, the Hanawon staff was trying to make sure our expectations of integrating into the public schools were realistic. But in my case, they were robbing me of hope. I almost felt like giving up before I started.