When they noticed us, the women fell silent. As she bolted the door, Mrs Shin called out from behind them, ‘Don’t worry, they’re North Koreans too, friends of my husband’s.’ I was a little worried that she might be carelessly giving away our identity.
With the arrival of the women and their conversations, Young-min and I withdrew into our smaller room and closed the door. I was curious to hear what they were saying, but with their heavy accents and Chinese words mixed in here and there, it was almost unintelligible.
Mr Shin returned an hour later. He seemed to know the women well, because the gathering burst into life when he came in, but he left them immediately and came to see us in our room and return our documents.
‘How did it go? Were you able to send our papers?’ I asked as soon as he came in.
‘Yes, I’ve sent copies of everything,’ he answered.
More than the words he said, his confident smile was reassuring. I asked who the women in the other room were, and Mr Shin checked to see if the door was closed behind him before answering. He then leaned in and spoke in a low voice.
‘They’re victims of human trafficking who have managed to escape.’
‘Human trafficking? What’s that?’ Young-min asked, and I was just as curious.
Mr Shin replied, ‘In China there are fewer women than men and some villages have no women at all. These men, they can’t get married unless they have money. And Chinese women are said to be quite daunting. Remember Empress Cixi who ruled this place a century ago? She was very fierce. Anyway, there are quite a few men who specialise in kidnapping North Korean women as soon as they cross the border into China. Lots of people who speak Korean in the border area have connections with criminal organisations.’
‘But not Chang-yong?’ Young-min asked, hoping that the answer would be no.
Mr Shin replied, ‘I’m not saying this because he’s my uncle but, really, he’s just a simple farmer who only knows about his cattle and his crops. People like him will never get on in life,’ he added bluntly. ‘You two are really lucky. If you had met the wrong kind of people, you might have been held hostage until the South Korean spies could produce enough ransom money.’
I remembered Chang-yong’s face on the way to his mother-in-law’s house, when he’d told us how lucky we were to have met a simple farmer like him. Mr Shin slid closer to us as we sat on the floor. He continued, ‘Do you know what they call North Korean women over here?’
We shook our heads.
‘Pigs. In the Chinese countryside, pigs are valuable, so people call the women pigs. They’re graded according to their age and appearance. A grade one ‘pig’ fetches around 200,000 won; grade two goes for 150,000 won; and a grade three will bring in 100,000 won. The brokers, who act as middlemen, take half the selling price as their fee. Grade one is equivalent to about US$1500. If you get sold for that amount, at least you go to a better house.
‘Below that amount, the women get taken to very remote farms or are married to disabled men who can’t find wives. They spend the rest of their lives rotting – the countryside here is a miserable place. Some women are shackled at night so they can’t run away. Think about it – a farmer who has bought a woman has made a big investment, and these North Korean women are already risk-takers who’ve crossed the border. Do you think they’d not run away? Well, they do keep running away, and because everyone knows this, they’re kept in chains, at least until they’ve had their first baby.
‘While most North Korean women get sold on, the North Korean men end up in one of two ways. Either they get caught sleeping rough and are sent back to North Korea; or, if they have enough money and meet a decent broker, they eventually make it to South Korea. But in the eyes of traffickers, the women here are worth at least 150,000 won each.’
Even as I listened, I doubted what I was hearing, and could not believe it was true. Perhaps it was better to be sold into marriage than starve to death in North Korea, but for human beings to be priced like pigs was obscene. And to think that these ‘wives’ were kept shackled – I was shaken by the idea that foreign men could treat our women in this way. I was even angrier at the brokers who made money from this. But most of all, I felt disgust for Kim Jong-il, who didn’t seem to be humiliated at all by what he had reduced his nation’s women to, or to care enough to intervene.
Young-min was shocked too. He seemed at a loss for words, and looked restless as he lay down on the floor, and then sat up again. He asked how many women were trapped in this network, and Mr Shin said that all he knew was that there were some 100,000 North Koreans caught in limbo in China. I couldn’t believe that no one in Pyongyang talked about a situation as grave as this.
Then the door opened a crack and a woman with dyed brown hair poked her head round. ‘Are you from Pyongyang?’ she asked. ‘My friend just said you were.’ Then she went back behind the door and whispered, ‘You say it – I can’t.’
I didn’t know what they wanted, but they seemed to be nudging each other. Mr Shin asked in a loud voice, ‘Alcohol? Do you want a drink?’
‘Yes!’ came the chorus of replies, and we ended up having a boozy lunch together. In Mr Shin’s small Chinese flat, there were now five North Koreans and we started by introducing ourselves in turn. The woman who had first opened the door to our room said she was from Chongjin; the woman next to her was from Hamheung. We added Sariwon, Pyongyang and Yanji in turn, and then we lifted our cups to toast all our homes. We drank three bottles of strong Chinese alcohol, eating only pickled cabbage and leftover tofu, but it made for a wonderful and rich feast when enjoyed in their company.
Perhaps because we were all North Koreans and shared our fugitive status, the topic of conversation soon turned to how we’d kept out of sight and evaded the Chinese authorities. The women all seemed to agree on the importance of dyeing their hair. In North Korea, since the idea of pure ethnic identity was strong, everyone’s hair was black, and the first thing women did after crossing the border was to dye their hair another colour. This helped them feel like someone from the outside world and not conspicuous as a North Korean on the run. That was when I realised that all the women had indeed dyed their hair different shades of brown. The woman who had the baby on her back returned after putting her baby to sleep, and her hair was brown too. When Young-min said they looked like Westerners with their light-coloured hair, the women smiled, delighted with their disguise.
For refugees, there is often more pain caused by the things we can’t take with us than by the things we are running away from. So when the conversation turned to talk of home, everyone spoke and listened solemnly. After each person’s story had ended, we toasted the memory of loved ones left behind. Then it became the turn of the youngest of the women to speak, the one with the baby. She hadn’t yet spoken and Young-min, perhaps wanting to make it easier, asked a question.
‘We missed you when we took turns to talk. How old are you?’
‘Sixteen,’ came the quiet reply.
In fact, Young-min had suspected that she was young, and had been urging her not to drink too much. But she kept sipping at her cup, and now her cheeks were bright pink.
‘You’re lucky to have got out with your little sister,’ he said. ‘Where’s your mother?’ I’m sure Young-min spoke without thinking. But the girl narrowed her eyes, shot Young-min a sharp look and tutted angrily. Then she filled her plastic cup with soju and downed it in one go.
Young-min tried to apologise, ‘Sorry, I realise your mother didn’t manage to cross with you. I hope you’ll be able to see her again …’
Before he could finish, the girl threw the empty plastic cup across the room.
‘Shut up, you arsehole!’ she shouted.
Our jaws dropped. What had Young-min done to provoke such a response? What confused us even more was that, apart from Young-min and me, the others remained silent and looked away.
As Young-min glanced around, wondering what on earth was the matter, the girl screamed at him again
. ‘I am the mother! Does that make you feel better? And the baby, she isn’t my sister – she’s my daughter. So what’s the problem? Am I a freak? Is my little girl a freak?’
Young-min’s chopsticks fell from his fingers. She probably needed a mother’s love, yet she was a mother herself with a baby to care for, and on the run at only sixteen. As if she pitied herself for this very reason, the girl suddenly grasped Mrs Shin’s hand and started to cry. ‘What am I going to do?’ she sobbed. ‘I went to the hospital yesterday. A friend took me there. Do you know what the doctor said? I don’t know what to do …’
She couldn’t finish her sentence, and beat her chest twice. Mrs Shin poured her a cup of water; she gulped it down and spoke again. ‘My little Jung-hyun, they can’t fix her eyes. She’s got to live the rest of her life blind. And do you know what else they said? They asked if something had happened when I was pregnant, if I’d ever knocked my womb or had a fall.’
I looked into the girl’s eyes, which were now clear and bright from her tears. Her trembling lips were a pale pink. This time it was I who handed her water. As if she’d lost awareness of her surroundings, she looked up and said to the ceiling, ‘I passed out. When that bastard bought me, I was fourteen. I didn’t know anything. He started to pull off my clothes. That middle-aged monster. Do you know what happened that day? I started to cry because I was scared. Then his mother and sister came into the room, those witches. They held my arms and legs down, and pulled my knickers off.’
The girl started shaking, and clutched Mrs Shin’s arm as she wailed. ‘Then, you know what, the so-called mother-in-law, sister-in-law, as they held me down, that old monster, he – you know – right in front of them.’
With her lips pursed and her eyes wet with tears, Mrs Shin held the child tight.
The girl whimpered, ‘Then I passed out. Afterwards, my poor Jung-hyun, my Jung-hyun was born blind. Because of that fucking monster.’
I tried to blink back the tears that filled my eyes. And then I could no longer hold them back. Young-min downed his cup of soju, and could no longer restrain himself either. Mrs Shin led the teenage mother into the room we had slept in, and the only sound was of the other women sobbing. That child was only sixteen. How many more like her were there out there, forgotten by the world? How wretched their lives were. As the other women began to open up and tell their own stories, my chest tightened even more.
‘At least she was able to run away,’ said the woman from Chongjin who had introduced herself first. ‘One girl I knew from back home escaped over the river too. She was sold into a Chinese village family where she was locked up and used by all the men in the family. One day the father-in-law would be the aggressor, the next the brother-in-law, all sleeping with her. So she doesn’t even know who the father of her baby boy is, whether it’s the husband or the father-in-law or the brother-in-law. In the end, they pimped her out to other men in the village, and pocketed the money. Luckily, there was one decent man who helped her escape.
‘There are many “dark children” here in China, babies abandoned by North Korean women. Because their mothers are North Korean, they have no rights and their births aren’t recognised by China. They can’t go to school or anything like that, and they live on the streets. That’s why they’re called “dark children”.’
The woman from Hamheung, who’d seemed to be lost in pain until then, took a deep breath, as if she still couldn’t quite believe that the story she had to tell was one she herself had lived through.
‘I wasn’t going to bring up my own experience, but before I was sold, I was kept prisoner by a broker. There were sixteen other women there apart from me. He said that we could earn money by working on computers, but it turned out to be sex chatting. We were forced to be naked on camera. When I resisted, he threatened to report me to the authorities. When I still resisted, he beat me. From morning to evening we were made to do sex chatting. But six months of this work only added up to around a hundred dollars in payment for us. He said it was expensive to feed us. Besides, as North Koreans without legitimate identities, we can’t open bank accounts here. So the broker said he was keeping our wages in the bank, and that he would return it all with interest. But, in the end, I never saw any of it, not even the one hundred. He said he’d lost it in a deal. After profiting from us for around a year, he was planning to sell us off as if we were new refugees who had just crossed over. He said he would kill us if we didn’t comply. And, really, I knew he’d have just killed me. That knowledge gave me the determination to escape, and then I met my friends here on the streets. We’re going to Tianjin to see if we can work in a restaurant. They say there are lots of Koreans there. Maybe we’ll meet someone who can help us get to South Korea.’
Young-min was red-eyed and visibly agitated by a combination of drink and anger, and suggested that returning home might be a better option than enduring such humiliation in China.
‘Are you really North Korean?’ one woman asked in astonishment, adding that although she could perhaps endure the hunger, she could never stomach returning to that cruel country. Others joined in, clicking their tongues in disapproval.
The woman from Hamheung, who I had thought was the most withdrawn, started cracking her knuckles nervously and said agitatedly, ‘A lot of the refugees in China have experienced repatriation. Those of us who have been sent back, knowing what the world is like over the border, usually have another go at escaping. Do you know what happens during repatriation? Even the handcuffs are different. Here in China, the handcuffs are shiny and new, but as soon as you cross the Friendship Bridge over the Yalu River and into North Korea, they change your handcuffs. North Korean handcuffs are rusty and disgusting. Besides, even though they’re foreigners, the Chinese are more humane than our own people. Before my repatriation, one of the Chinese officers even apologised, and gave me 100 yuan. But in North Korea, they’re merciless.
‘They got all of us women together, took off our clothes and groped inside our vaginas with their fingers. You know, looking for hidden money and stuff. Pregnant women are treated like animals. There was a woman who was seven months pregnant among us when I was caught. Saying that she had bastard Chinese seed in her, the North Korean officers kicked her on the stomach over and over until she passed out. She died.
‘And when you go to prison after processing, that’s when you really want to kill yourself. They keep you awake for days and beat you, and interrogate you to find out whether you might have intended to go to South Korea or the US. If they suspect you of either, you’re sent to a proper prison camp, instead of being sent to an ordinary labour camp to serve a three-year sentence. But even there, it’s hard to make it through without suffering permanent disability. I couldn’t bear the thought of going to either place. Seeing that ahead of me, I couldn’t face it. So I swallowed a hairpin to kill myself. The bastards took me to the hospital, where I overheard somebody say that someone as strong-willed as me would definitely have had South Korea as my destination and, as soon as I recovered, I should be sent for a six-month pre-trial confinement.
‘At night, when the surveillance was slack, I managed to escape and cross the river again. Even now, I can’t believe it. They had cut my stomach open to take the hairpin out and sewed it back up, and although the wound opened again, I didn’t feel any pain. Really, no pain at all.’
As I listened to their stories, I could see every scene vividly and imagined myself being taken away and repatriated. The woman who had just told us her story then asked me a question.
‘So you’re a cadre from Pyongyang. Why would you leave?’ As she spoke, all eyes in the room turned to us. It seemed that each gaze was saying, I left because I had no choice, but what hardship could you have had?
I could not think of anything to say. Young-min spoke first. ‘You’re all North Korean,’ he said. ‘You’ve heard of the Scrutiny, right?’
‘Yes,’ came the replies.
‘Well, the administrative director for that was my fath
er.’
The woman from Chongjin froze in the middle of pouring herself another cup of soju. It was as if even the liquid had turned to ice. As everyone stared at Young-min, their faces didn’t just register their shock. There was suddenly a distancing from him, as if he was an object of grotesque terror.
All over North Korea, the mere mention of the Scrutiny would be enough to silence any crying child. Every North Korean who was alive then knows about Kim Jong-il’s Scrutiny which began in August 1997, and the bloody massacre that followed.
One sweltering summer’s day in Pyongyang, an execution took place. Several hundred thousand spectators were gathered to watch it. The condemned man was a foreign spy, it was declared. But in fact, standing against the upright wooden plank – his limbs and torso bound with rope – the accused was none other than the Party’s Agricultural Secretary, Seo Gwan-hui. As the man in charge of the nation’s food supply, he had become Kim Jong-il’s scapegoat for the widespread famine that had followed the collapse of the Public Distribution System in the mid 1990s.
Seo Gwan-hui had been charged with spying for the Americans and the South Koreans. It was alleged that he had been assigned by them to systematically undermine North Korea’s principle of ‘Self-reliance’ in the sphere of agriculture. As a result, the crops had failed year after year. Accused of causing deaths among the people by starvation, he was not executed by firing squad. Instead, the crowd, whipped into hysteria, stoned him to death.
Capitalising on the widespread frenzy that followed Seo Gwan-hui’s conviction for spying, a mass purge was instigated, and war declared against The Spies Within. The campaign was to draw on the same apparatus that had been used to condemn Seo. Back then, one of the main responsibilities of the now defunct Ministry of Social Security was to oversee recordkeeping for North Koreans. Every North Korean is assigned an identification booklet at birth. This is a life-long report card that records any change of circumstances throughout his or her years of education, contributions to the workplace and efforts in the local Party branch. Even if a person is unemployed, the officer in charge of their residential area and an officer from the Ministry will jointly assign him or her a grade for behaviour; so blank years are never an option.
Dear Leader Page 19