by Kenneth Bae
Lisa had even given me a chance to check my bags right before we crossed over from China. The bus had stopped at a small convenience store that also had storage lockers. “I’m going to leave my cell phone here,” Lisa had said when she got off the bus. “Do you have anything you need to leave behind before we cross the border?”
Without looking through my bags, I had said, “No, I’m good.”
How could I have been so careless? I screamed at myself. If this had been my first trip into North Korea instead of my eighteenth, I probably would have done a quick double check. But by that point I had become so comfortable that I never thought something from home that I didn’t want to take in might have been in my bags.
I replayed the scene over and over as I waited (for what, I did not know). I imagined DPRK government agents going through each and every file and all the photos on my hard drive, studying every face and making a list of everyone they were going to go after as coconspirators.
And what will happen when they translate the files? Everything about my work in both China and North Korea was in those files. I knew it was just a matter of time until they discovered the full truth about who I was and what I had been doing in Korea. Then what? I wondered. What will they do to me?
I knew what they had done to others. Growing up in South Korea, I had heard the stories of how people just disappear up here.
But I wasn’t nervous for just myself. I was nervous for everyone who had been in contact with me since I had brought my first tour group into North Korea two years earlier. Specifically, I thought of Sam, who owned the coffee shop in the hotel in Rason where I had been arrested. Born in China, he had become a Christian and had served on staff in my mission center in Dandong. He now split his time between Dandong and Rason. I hated to think what might happen to him if his cover were blown. The moment the authorities translated my files, they would investigate him because of his relationship with me.
Then there was another North Korean, Songyi. I had met her while she was in China on a visitor visa. After returning to her North Korean home, she had tried to start a Christian orphanage. Because of my hard drive, she was no longer safe. Unlike me, she did not have the protection that comes with being a United States citizen. My files put her at risk, and she would not be hard for the government to find.
My waiting ended when a doctor walked into my room. “I’m going to do a checkup,” the doctor said.
I wondered why I was being examined, but I let the doctor do the checkup. “Do you have any known medical conditions?” the doctor asked.
“I have diabetes,” I replied, “hyperlipidemia, gallstones, an enlarged prostate, and a fatty liver. I also fell fifteen years ago and hurt my back. It still causes a lot of pain for me.”
“Uh-huh,” the doctor said as he wrote everything down. “Are you on any medications?”
“I am for my diabetes, gallstones, and high cholesterol,” I replied.
“Do you have those with you?”
“They’re in my suitcase.”
The doctor took more notes. “Okay,” he said. “I think you will be fine here.”
I did not find his words reassuring.
After the doctor left, another official came and dropped off an itemized list of everything in my suitcase. Then the investigator I had met the night before came back into my room. I was seated in the same wooden chair next to the desk. I overheard another official call him by name, which is how I learned his name was Mr. Park. (He never introduced himself to me. Later, when I asked if this was his name, he denied it.)
Mr. Park seemed to be in a good mood as he sat down across from me. He placed a new spiral notebook in front of him in which to take notes. I recognized it. It had been in my suitcase the day before.
“Did you sleep well last night?” he asked.
“Yes,” I lied. I didn’t want to tell him I had tossed and turned with worry all night. That would only make me look guilty.
“Good, good,” he said. “We want you to be comfortable while you are our guest. Now I have some questions for you. If you cooperate, this shouldn’t take long.”
I nodded. At this stage I did not plan to admit to anything more than being a businessman who had contributed to the local economy through my company, Nations Tours. Yes, I would admit, I had made an honest mistake carrying into the country an external hard drive that contained materials that appear to be subversive, but I never intended to share this material with anyone.
“Now, rather than sit and talk, I find it is more helpful if you write out your answers. Take as much time as you need to really think about what you want to say,” Mr. Park said as he placed a small stack of computer paper, along with a pen, in front of me. I recognized the pen as well. It was one of mine.
“We will begin by you telling us a little more about yourself.” His tone and demeanor struck me as the complete opposite of the bujang, who had come across like a crime boss. “Please tell me about your family. Tell me a little about your relatives, where they live, what they do in their jobs, and their experiences. When you are finished writing, raise your hand, and I will come get your paper.”
That last line surprised me. I felt as though I had been kicked back down to grade school.
I picked up the pen and thought about what to include. Mr. Park stood and walked toward the door. “Take as much time as you need,” he said with a smile.
Although I am an American citizen, my family’s roots go back to Yongbyon, a small city about sixty miles north of Pyongyang, in what is now North Korea. There was only one Korea, then known as Chosun, when my family migrated there from the southern end of the Korean Peninsula more than 150 years ago. For four generations before my paternal grandfather, my family lived and worked in Yongbyon.
The country changed a great deal during that time. The first missionaries came to Korea in 1885. Today, many people in the West know about the large number of Christians and churches in South Korea. What most do not realize is that the northern part of Korea was where the gospel first took root. In 1907 a revival broke out in Pyongyang, and tens of thousands of people came to Christ.
Even as Christianity spread, times remained difficult in all of Korea. In 1904 the Japanese Empire forced the Korean king to sign an agreement that essentially stripped Korea of her independence. By 1910 Japan had annexed all of Korea. The country suffered greatly under Japanese rule. Unfortunately for my family, when Japan surrendered to the United States at the end of World War II, life did not get much better. In 1945, the United States and the Soviet Union divided the Korean Peninsula in two at the thirty-eighth parallel, which put my family’s home in Yongbyon right in the middle of the communist North.
The division into two Koreas was supposed to be temporary, lasting only until the United Nations could organize and hold free elections for all of Korea to set up a unified government. But the Soviet Union blocked the plan, and by 1948 they had installed a Marxist government in the north under the control of Kim Il Sung. He proclaimed himself the Great Leader and, over time, put in place what is basically a religious system where he was, and still is, a god for North Koreans.
The communist ideology later developed into what is called juche, which is pronounced “ju-chay.” The word means “self-reliance,” but the concept is built upon the idea that the Great Leader is all anyone really needs. When the Soviets pulled out of the country in 1949, they left Kim Il Sung with all he needed in terms of heavy artillery, tanks, airplanes for an air force, and extensive training for his troops.
My family’s fortunes turned when Kim Il Sung’s DPRK army invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950. Three days later communist troops had overrun South Korea’s capital, Seoul. American president Harry Truman immediately sent troops over from Japan, but they didn’t make much difference at first. By the end of July 1950, Kim Il Sung controlled all o
f Korea except a very small area around the port city of Pusan on the southern tip of the Korean Peninsula. Then Douglas MacArthur arrived.
On September 15 the United States Marines landed in Inchon, just south of Seoul and well behind enemy lines. Under MacArthur’s command, American and United Nations forces drove Kim Il Sung’s armies back across the thirty-eighth parallel in a matter of weeks. By the end of November, American troops had taken nearly all of Korea, all the way to the Chinese border on the Yalu River and well north of my family. Then China entered the war and the front line started moving back south.
When my paternal grandparents realized the war was moving back toward them, my grandfather loaded his family and everything they could carry into his truck and moved south to Pyongyang, which United Nations troops controlled at the time. My great-grandmother stayed home in Yongbyon to watch over the house. My great-grandfather and the rest of the family thought that if they stayed in Pyongyang for a week or two, the battle lines would push back north again and they could go home. When the UN forces retreated to the south, our family had to go with them in order to avoid the conflict, leaving behind my great-grandmother.
No one in our family ever saw her again.
Eventually my family ended up in Pusan. They later moved to Seoul after the war.
My father was only six years old when he fled North Korea with his family. He grew up in Seoul and met my mother there. My dad was a famous baseball player and later a professional manager, one of the best in all the country. I was born in 1968 and spent my first sixteen years in Seoul as well.
I did not include all of this information in the papers I wrote for Mr. Park. If he discovered my family had purposely fled from North Korea to South Korea during the war, his attitude toward me might well take a turn for the worse. I saw no sense in aggravating him if I didn’t need to. Instead, I wrote that my family’s life had been disrupted by the war and we ended up in Seoul. I also wrote of my immediate family moving to the United States in 1985, when I was sixteen, so that my sister and I could receive a better education.
We first moved to San Jose, California, where one of my uncles lived. None of us spoke much English at all, even though I took English as a Second Language classes for a few months right before we left Korea. Once we arrived in San Jose, I found I was one of very few Korean students in my high school. The teachers struggled to correctly pronounce my given name, Junho. Calling roll they always called me Juno, which is a girl’s name. (Years later, when I became a naturalized US citizen, I decided it was time to have an American name. I picked Kenneth because I had never heard anyone mispronounce Kenneth. Also, I didn’t know any other Kenneths at the time.)
After about a year we moved from San Jose to Torrance, in the Los Angeles area, which had a much larger Korean population. My English improved, and I graduated from West Torrance High School in 1988.
The summer before my family and I moved to the United States, I was a new Christian. Our youth group in Seoul had a dynamic leader who challenged us to seek God’s direction for our lives. When I heeded his challenge, I heard God say to me, Shepherd. No other words came. Just shepherd. Since shepherd and pastor are synonymous, I knew God was calling me to some kind of pastoral work.
That calling became a little clearer the summer after graduation, when I attended a retreat organized by Campus Crusade for Christ (also known as CCC or Cru), one of the largest college ministries in the world. Dr. Bill Bright, the founder, spoke and challenged a large group of us to embrace China. I felt God call me there.
Yes, Lord, I will go to China for you, I prayed.
That summer, I traveled to Seoul to visit family. I went to bookstores and bought every book I could find on China. When I went off to college at the University of Oregon, I planned on studying psychology but minoring in Chinese to further prepare me for what I believed was going to be my life’s work.
Two weeks after school started, I met a girl, and we started dating. A year later we got married. I pretty much forgot about China.
We had our first child, Jonathan, in 1990, not long after we got married. For a time I dropped out of school to support the family, but I eventually graduated from San Francisco Bible College in 1996, the same year our daughter, Natalie, was born. I received a master of divinity degree from Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis in 2002.
My marriage fell apart three years later. I ended up spending a lot of time in Kona, Hawaii, where I felt God renew my call to China. I moved to Dalian, China, in 2006, and then to Dandong, right across the Yalu River from the northwest corner of North Korea.
“I went to China to open a cultural exchange company,” I wrote, “then I moved my business to Dandong and expanded it to include a hotel and a touring company, Nations Tours.” I went on to write how I met my wife, Lydia, in 2007 in Dandong, where she owned a dress shop. We were married in 2009. “I have a stepdaughter, Sophia,” I added.
When I finished, I held up my hand. The parts of my story I felt I needed to include filled about five or six pages of paper. But there was much I had left out. I did not explain that the time I had spent in Hawaii was at a Discipleship Training School (DTS) put on by Youth With A Mission (YWAM). Nor did I tell them that I was on staff with them. I also did not include the detail that my real reason for moving to China was to start a DTS. I didn’t think the details were any of the North Koreans’ business.
Mr. Park came back into the room without anyone having to go get him. That told me they had cameras on me, watching my every move.
“Very good, Bae Junho,” Mr. Park said, calling me by my Korean name. (In Korean, the family name comes first.) “Now let’s see what you have written,” he said. He glanced over it quickly before placing more sheets of plain white paper in front of me.
“Now tell me why you brought the hard drive into our great nation,” he said in a rather relaxed tone.
I nodded. He walked out with my first essay in his hand. I sat for a moment and thought about how I should phrase this next story. Just tell the truth, I felt God whisper to me.
“I never intended to bring disruptive materials across the border,” I wrote. “Before bringing any group into the country, I always instructed them on what they could not bring or leave behind. ‘Never bring in a computer,’ I stressed. ‘Never bring in anything that may insult our gracious hosts,’ I always said. I violated my most basic rule on this, my eighteenth trip inside the country, purely by accident.
“Shortly before coming on this trip I bought a new laptop computer. I had not had a chance to transfer all my files from my old computer to my new one, which is why I purchased the hard drive. Since my trips into North Korea always begin with a twenty-one-hour train ride from Dandong to Yanji, China, I planned to switch all my files then. I planned on using the hard drive as a backup after my new laptop was up and running.
“Unfortunately, I never got around to moving the files. Instead, I spent my time getting to know the members of my tour group. When I wasn’t talking to them, I spent my time learning to use the movie editing software on my new computer. I thought I could take care of it once I arrived at the hotel in Yanji, but we went out to dinner first for a delicious barbecued duck meal as soon as we got into the city. When I got to my hotel room I called my wife on the phone. We talked until I couldn’t hold my eyes open. I ended up passing out on my bed with all the lights in my room still on.
“I did not stir until my assistant, Stream, banged on my door at five thirty the next morning, asking if I was going to come downstairs in time to catch the bus that would take us to the border, a two-hour trip. All thoughts of the hard drive left me as I jumped up from the bed, washed my face, and dashed out the door. I handed Stream my laptop before we left and asked her to have the hotel lock it up in their safe until I returned in four days. You may check it if you like,” I wrote. “You will find it has very few files
on it.
“Once I was up and around I took my group to the bus station. I never even opened my briefcase until we were already in North Korea. I did not remember I had the hard drive until I saw it in my briefcase in customs.” This was the honest truth.
I held up my hand to signal I was finished writing. Mr. Park came in and took my paper from me. “Good, good. I look forward to reading your answers,” he said. He disappeared into the other room.
I hoped this might be the end of this matter. I knew they had probably already interrogated the North Korean tour guide with whom I had worked on all my trips. He would back up everything I had said. I was a businessman with a good reputation in this city who had made an honest mistake. There was nothing more anyone needed to concern themselves with.
A guard served me lunch, but I did not feel like eating. Shortly after lunch Mr. Park stormed into the room, red faced and angry. This was not the pleasant man who had sat across the desk from me earlier that morning.
“This is no good!” he yelled. “I told you I wanted the truth, not lies! Get up, now! Go over there.” He pointed to the corner of the room. “Go stand over there until you are prepared to tell us the truth!”
I got up and did as I was told.
“Hands down to your side. Do not move!” he ordered. “You are being punished. You can come out of the corner when you are ready to tell us the real story.”
I thought about the movies where police use the good cop, bad cop technique to try to get the information they want. Mr. Park had become both the good cop and the bad cop.
While I stood in the corner, another movie played out in my head, one I hoped was about to come true. I imagined that the computer chip in my passport had been activated the moment I was taken captive. The signal would be picked up by the Marines on the other side of the thirty-eighth parallel. They would relay the signal to the White House, where President Obama would pick up the hotline phone. “Do it,” he would tell a general on the other end.