by Yeonmi Park
I never knew freedom could be such a cruel and difficult thing. Until now, I had always thought that being free meant being able to wear jeans and watch whatever movies I wanted without worrying about being arrested. Now I realized that I had to think all the time—and it was exhausting. There were times when I wondered whether, if it wasn’t for the constant hunger, I would be better off in North Korea, where all my thinking and all my choices were taken care of for me.
I was tired of being so responsible. In China, I was the breadwinner, the one who kept my mother alive. Now I didn’t know how I was supposed to go back to being the child again. When we first arrived at Hanawon, my mother and I shared a room with another woman and her daughter, who was about my age. The mother complained that I was too independent and mature, and said I should act more like a kid. But I didn’t know what that meant. Inside I felt a thousand years old.
I hated it when people didn’t like me, so I tried to act young for the mothers, and I tried to fit in with the other teenagers. I don’t know how well that worked. We saw one another every day and took field trips as a group, but I felt very much alone. The staff took us on a tour through Seoul, showed us the war museum and the Han River, and taught us how to buy a ticket and use the subway. It made me nervous, with all the noise and machines, flashing advertisements, and swarms of people everywhere. I smiled and pretended to pay attention. Outside I was a perfect kid, but inside I was churning.
One day, I was standing around the cafeteria, talking with some North Korean kids my age. One of the boys was gossiping about a teenage girl with an infant.
“You can’t trust North Korean girls,” said another boy. “They’ve all been trafficked. This one just couldn’t hide it.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about!” I told them. “What’s this trafficking?”
Whenever the subject of China came up, I brushed it aside like that. My mother and I never talked about the past, even when it was just the two of us. We would look at each other and understand what was unspoken: The birds and mice could still hear us whisper. My mother had her own challenges with this strange new world we were about to enter. But she had a better attitude about it than I did. Every day that she didn’t have to struggle to survive was a good day for her.
We both tried hard to forget the bad memories and move on. I wanted to erase my old life, but its horror would come back to visit me as soon as I fell asleep. My dreams were all nightmares and they usually had the same theme: water was flowing around me and I needed to escape across the river. Someone was always chasing me, but no matter what, I couldn’t get away. Sometimes the nightmares were so bad that I would wake myself up screaming. It took me a few moments to recognize the thick blanket on my bed, to remember I was safe, I had survived, I was out.
But sometimes, even in the middle of the day, I wondered if I was still in North Korea and everything else was just a dream.
I must have pinched myself a thousand times a day. I thought that at any moment I might wake up and find myself in my cold house in Hyesan, alone with my sister, lying on the floor and staring at the moon outside the window, wondering when our mother would come back with food.
Sometimes I pinched myself so hard that I bruised and bled, because I needed to feel pain to know that this life was real. Sometimes I did it just to be sure I could feel anything at all. A numbness lingered inside me, like a cold companion that watched me from a distance, unable to engage in the world.
In North Korea, we don’t have words for “depression” or “post-traumatic stress,” so I had no idea what those things were or whether I might be suffering because of them. The concept of “counseling” was so foreign to me that when it was offered at Hanawon, I had no idea what they were talking about. Recently I have seen studies that indicate nearly 75 percent of recent North Korean defectors in South Korea have some form of emotional or mental distress. To me, this sounds like a low estimate. All of us at Hanawon were trying to act like normal people, while inside the anguish of our past and the uncertainty of our future was eating us alive.
• • •
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. But we didn’t get it all at once. Some Chinese brokers were known to track down defectors in South Korea to collect money they were owed. And there were South Korean scam artists who would cheat defectors out of their resettlement money. That happened a lot because newly arrived North Koreans were so innocent of the ways of the world.
In North Korea, there are no written contracts, so at Hanawon they kept telling us that everything in this world happens on paper, and once you sign something you are responsible for it. You can’t change your mind. But old habits are hard to break and new ones hard to learn. So the government figured that if our payments were stretched out a bit, at least we couldn’t lose everything at once. But if they had seen our living arrangement in Asan, they would have realized my mother and I had little to lose anyway.
Our housing complex was perched on a hill at the edge of town, a short walk from a few small shops and a bus line that took you to more populated places. Rents were very low here, and our building was filled with tenants on government assistance, including the very old and disabled who had no families to care for them, several mentally ill people who should have been in an asylum, and us.
We lived in one room with a small kitchen, a mat on the floor for a bed, and a balcony for storage. The building was crawling with cockroaches, people peed in the elevator and the lobby, and there was a crazy man in the apartment next to ours who screamed at all hours of the day and night. Luckily, our neighbor on the other side was a kindly old lady who gave us a rice bowl and some pretty plates she didn’t want anymore. We bought a small refrigerator from a secondhand store. The rest of our furnishings came from a grass and concrete island in the parking lot that tenants had turned into a dump for discarded clothes and household items. My mother and I couldn’t believe our luck when we found lamps, cookware, a used mattress, and even a small TV. People were constantly moving in and out, so there were lots of new treasures every week. We decided that
these South Koreans threw out more useful things than even the Chinese.
Another great thing about South Korea was the affordable fruit in the shops. In North Korea, oranges and apples were unimaginable luxuries, so here my mother loved buying them and slicing them for us to share. She’d had such a hard time in her life, but she always managed to find something to be grateful for. She could also find humor in most things, including herself. For instance, we were always making mistakes with the unfamiliar products around us, and one time my mother squirted my perfume into her mouth, thinking it was breath spray. When she stopped gagging and cursing me, she burst out laughing. Neither of us could stop until tears ran down our faces.
One night shortly after we arrived in Asan, I woke up to the sound of my mother giggling.
“What is it, Umma?” I said. “What’s so funny?”
“The refrigerator, Yeonmi-ya!” she said. “I just heard it turn itself on.”
Twenty-one
A Hungry Mind
My first goal was to meet some real South Koreans. All the people we’d met so far were other defectors, South Korean agents, and specially trained staff. I was also keen to learn more about computers, so I decided to visit a PC Internet room I had noticed among some shops near the apartments. Unlike Internet cafés, which are open to everyone, these are more like private clubs where you pay a small hourly fee to play games and chat with friends online. I brushed my hair into a ponytail, put on some clean clothes, then walked down the hill.
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!”
I turned and ran down the stairs, and I didn’t stop running until I got back to our apartment. I felt gutted.
The next day, all I wanted to do was to lie in bed with a blanket over my head, but my mother said I had to get dressed. It was early September, and the school term had already begun. It was time for me to register for classes.
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.
The middle school was a modern brick building hung with colorful banners congratulating the students for their victories in academics and sports. My mother and I met with an administrator in his office, and the first thing he told me was how hard it would be to succeed. “You know, we had a North Korean boy here a few years ago,” he said, “but he never could catch up, and he failed.” He gave me a meaningful look, as if to send the message that I, too, was a hopeless case.
“And the uniforms are very expensive here,” the principal added. “We’ll have to get you a used one your mom can fix up for you.”
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.
• • •
After that, I was so afraid of other people that I refused to leave our apartment. If I tried to go outside, I broke into a cold sweat and my heart pounded so hard that I thought I would die. The only time I felt comfortable outdoors was late at night, when nobody else was around. My mother would walk me to a small playground for the few children who lived in the apartment complex. There I would sit on the swings and rock back and forth while my mother told me about her day or sang me some of the old songs.
“You have to be more confident, Yeonmi,” she said. “Why are you so terrified when people look at you?”
But there was no way to explain it to her.
After a month of hiding, I realized I had to force myself back out into the world. Even if many South Koreans believed I had no future, even if they thought I was stupid and backward and untrustworthy, I was going to show them. I was going to make it one way or another. And the first step was to get an education.
Before he died, my father told me about his regrets. He always wanted me to study and to bring home good grades. He knew I had wanted to go to university someday and maybe become a doctor like so many of our relatives. But once he was arrested, that dream became impossible. Now I had a way to honor my father’s wishes.
So many things I learned at Hanawon didn’t make sense at all. But there was one simple phrase I heard over and over that really struck me: “In a democracy, if you work hard, you will be rewarded.” I didn’t believe it at first. That was not the way things happened in North Korea, where working hard was rewarded only if you had a good songbun and the right connections. But I knew that I could work hard, and it excited me to think that I might be rewarded for my effort. I didn’t have a word for “justice” yet, or even understand the concept, but this was an idea that felt right to me. I had to begin working toward my goals immediately; there was not a moment to waste.
In November 2009, I enrolled in the Heavenly Dream School, a Christian boarding school that was exclusively for young North Koreans, in the nearby town of Cheonan. Almost all the special schools for defectors were run by Christians, and there weren’t many options available. This school was the closest to my mother.
I had so much catching up to do. My goal was to earn general equivalency diplomas—GEDs—for middle school and high school at the same time other kids my age would be graduating from regular schools, and then go on to college. There were about fifteen teenagers at Heavenly Dream—although the numbers would go up and down—including some girls I had met at Hanawon. But I was not a popular student. I was determined to lose the one thing that gave away my identity as a defector, so when I talked to people, I practiced speaking in a South Korean accent. The girls thought I was strange and aloof. The teachers told me that I wasn’t “opening up” enough. I wasn’t interested in spending a lot of time reading the Bible and going to church, which was very important to everybody else. All I wanted to do at the Heavenly Dream School was study. I was so thirsty to learn that I couldn’t tolerate any distractions. My nickname was “Learning Machine.”
Most of the time, I stayed in my room and read on my own. I remembered the old pleasure of reading books in North Korea, only now there was a lot more to read about than the adventures of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il.
Meanwhile, my mother was relieved that I was going to a boarding school, where I would be safe and somebody would feed me. She was planning a trip to China.
• • •
As soon as we were released from Hanawon, my mother got in touch with some brokers in China who sent a woman across the border to Hyesan to ask about Eunmi. We wanted to know if she’d been arrested in China and sent back, like so many other women we knew. But nobody had heard from my sister in the two and a half years she’d been missing.
So we spread word
through the trafficking networks in China that we were offering a $10,000 reward for any information about Eunmi. At the same time, my mother applied for a South Korean passport. We lived in poverty during our first months in Asan because we were saving all that we could for our search for my sister. As soon as my mother had her passport in hand, she booked a flight to China.
It’s hard to imagine the courage it took for my mother to make this trip by herself. She still spoke almost no Chinese and had never traveled in the country without someone to guide her. Even though she now had South Korean citizenship, there was no way to know whether she would be kidnapped and sold again, or even fall into the hands of North Korean agents who would send her back to her death. But she pushed through her fears and boarded a flight to the resort city of Dalian—because it was cheaper—and took a very long bus ride by herself to Shenyang.
She stayed with our friend Myung Ok, our chat-room boss, while she searched for Eunmi. When we were in hiding, we had been too afraid to contact my father’s relatives, who lived in the northeast Chinese city of Yanbian. We had been worried that even making phone calls to try to track them down would bring the police to our door. This time my mother located them through the bank where my father’s aunt once worked. It was wonderful to reconnect with that part of the family, but we were disappointed to learn that nobody had heard from Eunmi.