My voice had risen. The man looked quickly round the café and said quietly, ‘If your friend hadn’t made that decision, we would have rescued him by some means or other. To be honest, my colleagues and I, we’re very sorry for your friend’s death. Mr Jang, I understand what you’ve been through, and I won’t ask you for your identification documents again. It’s time. Let’s go.’
I was surprised by the man’s gentle response to my outburst. He even took the trouble to remind me not to forget the bundle of money, which had indeed completely slipped my mind.
We walked out of the hotel through the main entrance. A black sedan immediately pulled up in front of us. It must have been waiting. The man opened the back door for me and then sat in front with the driver. We had only been moving for about two minutes when the car pulled into an alley. Before I could register what was going on, both back doors opened and two other men slid in on either side of me, trapping me into the middle of the seat.
Their brute strength was in line with the viciousness of agents from North Korea’s Ministry of State Security, whom I had constantly feared coming up against since crossing the Tumen River. I suddenly remembered the warning that Mr Shin had repeated several times as we left Yanji. He had explained that in a large Chinese city, it was not uncommon to meet a broker with connections to North Korea who might decide to betray a refugee in his care.
A faint whimper escaped my mouth and I coughed to hide it. Had South Korean spies really known all along about the details of my escape with Young-min, and even about his suicide? Why had I trusted so easily? My chest tightened with painful regret.
The two big men sitting on either side of me were probably carrying out the standard procedure used by North Korean agents to escort a criminal. I leaned slightly towards the man on my left, wondering if I might smell something distinctively North Korean about him, such as North Korean cigarettes or aftershave. If I did, I would put up a struggle. But neither he nor the man on my right smelled of anything. I noticed a scuffed patch on the knee of the man to my right. A man from a developed country such as South Korea wouldn’t wear such scruffy trousers, I thought, and I shut my eyes in despair.
I remembered something I’d been told by a friend whose father worked in North Korea’s Ministry of State Security. When their overseas agents brought home a criminal considered a flight risk, they would first break his limbs and then put him in a coffin for transport over the border. I started to believe that this car was headed not for the South Korean Embassy but for the North Korean one. There, these two men would break my limbs and my helpless body would be shipped back to North Korea in a coffin. I began to ache at the joints. I even envied Young-min, who had been able to kill himself quickly. As our vehicle hurtled towards what I was sure was hell, I considered whether I might now kill myself by biting my tongue and bleeding to death.
Perhaps fifteen minutes later, one of the men spoke to me. ‘Mr Jang, you are safe now. You can smile. Look over there – at that flag. It’s the South Korean flag.’
I looked blankly towards the voice and then ducked my head to see where he was pointing. It was the national flag of South Korea. I could really see the flag with the white background against a sky turning blue, flying from the roof of the South Korean Embassy.
I looked in disbelief at the men in the car. They were all grinning.
I cannot describe in these pages how I was able to enter the Embassy compound safely. Neither can I say how I passed through the front gate without a passport, while Chinese officers stood guard. In fact, there are many things I cannot yet explain in this book, for the sake of all North Koreans seeking freedom after me.
But what I felt when I set foot in the Embassy compound, that experience is not mine alone to savour. It belongs to freedom, and I must share it for freedom’s sake.
‘Mr Jang, you’re on South Korean soil. You’re a free man now.’
As the embassy official embraced me with those words, I asked him to please repeat them again. Even after hearing him speak the words twice, I asked again. My desperation was never so intense as at that moment, before I was really sure that I had made it through.
As I stood there nervously, glancing at the backs of the Chinese officers at their posts just outside the gates, the embassy official hugged me tight and told me again, ‘You have set foot on South Korean soil. Mr Jang, you are standing on South Korean soil.’
Only then, knowing that where I stood marked the end of my escape and the beginning of my life as a free man, I burst into tears. I had no words, only endless tears, both for myself and for Young-min.
The embassy official tried to calm me down and patted my back. But these were not my tears alone, and not for me to hold back. I cried from my heart in silence: Long live freedom. Long live freedom. Long live freedom!
EPILOGUE
TODAY, I LIVE as a South Korean citizen. It wasn’t easy to move into this world from a life that was dictated from above, and institutional in every detail.
When I was formally told that I was now a citizen of South Korea, my heart felt like bursting because I had been recognised as one among a nation of equals, rather than a subject who served one man alone. In North Korea, loyalty was the point of life; disobedience led to death. That was all.
My first day of freedom is fresh in my memory. I had spent eight months being debriefed in a safe house in Seoul, and set out on my own as a South Korean citizen on 17 December 2004. That night, I wandered the streets of Seoul into the early hours, taking in my newfound freedom.
Then, suddenly, a car screeched to a halt and a man cursed at me out of the window: ‘Fucking son of a bitch! Watch where you’re going!’ It was a taxi driver who had had to brake hard for me as I crossed on a red light. The glow of freedom I’d been basking in was dispelled in an instant. The taxi driver gestured at me and cursed some more before driving on. As the shock subsided, I could only grin as I realised that I was now truly confirmed as a free man, no more or less entitled than anyone else. On that first night out on my own I tried to call Mr Shin, but his number was no longer listed. I hadn’t been able to contact him immediately following my arrival in South Korea because I was in the safe house. Although I had no means of contacting him other than that number, we must have been destined to meet again, because three years later I ran into him unexpectedly in a public sauna in a northern Seoul district. When his North Korean refugee wife was granted asylum in South Korea, he too had been allowed to settle here. He was living in a government-sponsored flat for refugees in Seoul with his wife and two sons. He, a Korean-Chinese, and I, a North Korean, became very close: our friendship remains deep for we both live without an extended family in a foreign land.
Mr Shin didn’t have Cho-rin’s number any more. Although he couldn’t help with that, he had good news to share about his uncle, Chang-yong. With the $700 we had given him (less the $100 I had taken back from his wife), he had eventually bought not the cultivator he’d talked so excitedly about, but two fine cows.
When I got a passport the following year, I made a trip back to Shenyang, where everything had become unrecognisable. I couldn’t find Cho-rin, her uncle or her fiancé to thank them for their help. But I did meet the owner of Kyonghoeru, and was able not only to pay back my fare but to repay his kindness properly. I returned to the house of the old man in Longjing, but the building had been replaced by a modern construction and a new family had moved in. I was also able to enjoy a warm reunion with the Beijing correspondent of the South Korean newspaper. Recounting the experience, he said that he would never have dreamed of a North Korean defector reaching out to him like that, and I joked that the newspaper was very naïve.
In January 2005, I became a senior analyst at the National Security Research Institute in Seoul, which falls under the auspices of the National Intelligence Service. A former specialist on South Korea for the North, I was now in the opposite role.
While intelligence was my profession, in 2008 I decided to renew my career as
a poet. This time, though, I was a free man and a poet in exile, no longer a poet of the state. My first publication was a book of poetry titled I Sell my Daughter for 100 Won, published under my pen-name, Jang Jin-sung, and based on the manuscript I had brought with me from Pyongyang. Perhaps through the grace of its having been rescued and protected by Young-min during our escape from North Korea, the book immediately became a bestseller, taking the number one position on the lists of major bookstores. The title poem of the book has been adapted for television, as a song, and as a play that was performed in South Korea’s largest theatre at Seoul Arts Center.
More recently, I received an invitation to take part in Poetry Parnassus, hosted by the Southbank Centre as part of the London Olympic Games in the summer of 2012. One poet from each participating Olympic country was invited, and I had been chosen to represent North Korea in my exile among several other poets-in-exile. Such encounters with writers affirmed for me that a country could not truly be advanced in its human rights without also being advanced in its freedom of speech, and this strengthened my resolve to declare the truth about North Korea through the written word.
In 2010, I finally left my post and with it the world of institutions for good. I was able to spend more time writing and, with the entirety of my severance allowance, in 2011 I set up New Focus, the first news organisation run by North Korean exiles. I named it thus for two main reasons: in the hope that North Korea could pursue a new vision; and to show the outside world that there was a way of understanding North Korea beyond the way that existing frameworks of interpretation or government agendas allowed it. I wanted the knowledge and experience of North Koreans to be taken seriously into account. In April 2013, I wrote for a New York Times op-ed:
[Back home] there are two North Koreas: one real and the other a fiction created by the regime. It was after my defection … that I recognised the existence of a third North Korea: a theoretical one. This is the North Korea constructed by the outside world …
After crossing the Tumen River, I had fled from the Chinese and North Korean authorities for thirty-five days. It was little more than a month of my life, yet the pain of that experience was akin to giving birth. And why wouldn’t it be painful? Freedom is freely given to anyone born in a free land, but others have to risk their lives for it. In a free nation, freedom is a word that may be all too common and hollow in meaning; but my friend Young-min jumped from a rock face dreaming of it.
Even today, the Party brainwashes its subjects, telling them that the essence of their identity is based on their living in ‘Kim Il-sung’s homeland’ and being ‘Kim Jong-il’s people’. My mentor Kim Sang-o replaced a country with a person by praising Kim Il-sung as ‘My Homeland’, but I, his student, could not follow in his footsteps. For me, my homeland was not the country I was born into, or the man I obeyed, but the world in which I wanted to be buried; so I escaped from a system where literature was permitted to serve only one man’s legacy.
Writing the account of my escape required me to cry from the heart, Freedom is my homeland. And I was not its only author, because it was with Young-min that I made the journey. Nor am I the sole protagonist of this book. This story is also about my friend who testified to the desperation that drives millions of North Koreans who have stood, and still stand, before a cliff edge with nowhere else to go but over the precipice. It is also a tribute to those who helped me on my journey, those who helped me pull through because their loyalty was not to those in power, but to our shared humanity.
Today, there are over 25,000 North Koreans who have made it to South Korea. Some of them have had to hide out in caves for years; others have been captured and sent back to North Korea, only to make another miraculous escape. If all their stories could be put into words, my life would barely fill one page of that book.
One North Korean diplomat, captured by North Korean agents abroad and in the process of being returned to North Korea, had the good misfortune of a car accident – and was thus able to escape from the wreckage and seek asylum from the local authorities. Another, in shackles, leapt from the train taking him back to Pyongyang, and crawled back over the frozen Tumen River to reclaim his life. Risking his life once was not enough to buy his freedom, and neither was it for many others, who have been ‘repatriated’ three times and escaped three times. There are those who, innocent of any crime other than being the child of their parents, were sent to a prison camp, never given a name, yet managed to escape.
How many more North Koreans wandered through foreign lands and died namelessly? There is the tragedy of a couple who made it to South-East Asia after crossing China on foot; but in crossing the Mekong River, they entrusted the family’s fate to a floating tyre inner-tube, and only their child survived. On another occasion, a mother and daughter were separated on the threshold of a South Korean consulate as Chinese authorities seized one while the other managed to dash to a terrible freedom.
In this way, all of us exiles not only had to escape from the system, but also, by risking death, to let go of our sense of entitlement to life. This is why, like many others, I had years of nightmares after settling in South Korea. At night, our fears take hold of us, as we are returned to the oppressive surveillance, or find ourselves arrested by secret police and hauled away to a prison camp. We say among ourselves that only when our nightly dreams are set in the safety of our new country, have we truly made it out of North Korea. Even in our waking hours, especially on any occasion marking the passage of time such as New Year or an anniversary, we are seized by overwhelming emotions that paralyse us and that we cannot begin to untangle.
North Korean exiles are a living testament that there does exist a difference between freedom and tyranny. Their stories are not merely a vehicle to evoke pity. They cry for justice on behalf of all those who have died without a voice and who have been buried with the world as their dumb witness. Their insistent voices are the triumph of humanity having survived a brutal struggle with a despot.
Kim Jong-il said that the word ‘impossible’ did not exist in his dictionary. This is the dictator’s corruption of power, for whom a declaration that he wields a gun is as effective as his actually wielding it. For me, too, there is no ‘impossible’, but this is for me as an individual. The price of my survival was being lost to loved ones, and their being lost to me; and I can feel no greater pain or desolation, whatever hardships may lie ahead of me. Above all, I now know and fiercely possess my right to freedom, and that gives me the strength to rise a thousand times for every hundred times that I fall.
The North Korean regime has not finished with its persecution of me. It not only makes secret attempts to find and harm me physically, but it also threatens me openly through its media. In June 2013, for example, the Ministry of People’s Security published an official statement through the North Korean state news organ, KCNA, saying it would ‘remove my existence from this universe’. The tyranny of Kim has now been inherited by a third generation.
This is why my peace lies in waging war against despotism, until our people are freed. Without that, my privilege of freedom would be no more than selfishness. But if the regime has murder, deception and nuclear bombs in its arsenal, the weapon I wield is truth.
In freedom I have also found personal happiness. I am always accompanied by police escorts because of the North’s continuing threats of assassination, but the woman who is now my wife did not begrudge the bulky chaperones who accompanied us on our dates for the three years of our courtship. When I said we should stop dating and, instead, offered her an engagement ring, I was grateful that she accepted it without hesitation. Last year, we had a healthy and handsome baby boy. The marriage of a man from Pyongyang with a woman from Seoul has given birth to a unified Korean child. Although Korea may be divided into North and South, our child was born into a union.
Whenever I do the dishes, my wife pats me on the back and says, ‘Honey, you’re settling nicely into a free and democratic world. If you continue like this, I know y
ou’ll succeed.’ And I raise my hands in the air and confess, ‘This must be my servile fate. I was ruled over by a dictator in North Korea and now, in the South, I’m ruled over by my wife!’
AFTERWORD
The Future of North Korea
THE OUTSIDE WORLD views North Korea through an outsider’s lens. When Kim Jong-un began his rule following the death of his father, many interpreted the power hierarchy of the new regime according to the seven pall-bearers who were most visible at Kim Jong-il’s funeral. But, in reality, not a single one of those seven figures held any real power as sanctioned by the Party’s OGD.
Among the North Korean elite, real honour and power are conferred only through loyal obedience to the guidance of the Supreme Leader – with the OGD as its enforcer – and are not manifested through a formal post, but acquired through humility in the face of such guidance. As if in ironic confirmation, five of the seven pall-bearers whom the outside world saw as being North Korea’s power brokers, among them Jang Song-thaek, have since been dispensed with by the OGD. The two who remain, Chairman of the Supreme People’s Assembly Choe Tae-bok and Party Secretary for the Propaganda and Agitation Department Kim Ki-nam, are figureheads whose lives or deaths don’t matter as far as the Party is concerned.
In order to understand how the country works, the outside world must look beneath North Korea’s surface. Despite its civilian and diplomatic façades, the UFD is a highly focused operational entity specialising in counter-intelligence and psychological warfare; and the distorting influence of the OGD underpins many fundamental discrepancies between the apparent manifestations of power and its actual workings. Just as Jang Song-thaek’s bloody history caught up with him with a vengeance in 2013, so Kim Jong-un has found himself slotted into a structure controlled by his father’s men in the OGD. Even the North Korean military is an arm of the Party, and has no powers whatsoever to appoint its own staff or issue orders.
Dear Leader Page 33