Escape from North Korea (12 page)

“Because we're afraid,” the pastor replied. “If we're caught helping North Koreans, the church will be shut down.”

Kim took the two men home.

That was the start of his rescue work. Kim began to assist North Korean refugees clandestinely. He provided safe houses in southern China; he gave them food, clothing, and money; and, eventually, he organized secret passage across China to third countries. He tried unsuccessfully to find them jobs in the furniture factories with which he did business, but the Chinese factory managers were afraid to help. They knew that hiring a North Korean was a serious crime.

It wasn't long before Kim gained a reputation along the new underground railroad as someone refugees could count on for
assistance; some started coming south to seek him out. Pastors of churches in northeast China would call him and ask him to take in refugees. Many of the people he helped were women fleeing from the Chinese men who had purchased them as brides.

By his count, Kim helped more than one hundred North Koreans get out of China before he was arrested in 2003. It was a warm afternoon in late September, and he was leading a prayer meeting in his apartment. He and nine North Koreans—three men and six women—were seated in a circle on the floor. There was a knock on the door, then police burst in. Convicted of the crime of helping illegal migrants, Kim spent four years in a Chinese prison. He was released in 2007. He now runs an American nonprofit dedicated to rescuing trafficked women by spiriting them out of China on the new underground railroad.

In China, Kim named his rescue mission Schindler's List, a reference to the 1993 movie about Oskar Schindler, the Czech businessman who saved more than one thousand Polish Jews from the gas chambers at Auschwitz during World War II. Kim sees himself and other Korean-Americans who help North Koreans as modern-day Schindlers, committed to saving North Koreans from the depredations of two authoritarian governments, North Korea and China. When he worked in China, many of Kim's furniture clients in New York were Jewish, and he would ask them quietly for money to support his work helping North Koreans escape from China. “They understood what I was doing,” he said simply. Later he changed the name of his organization to 318 Partners, after Article 318 of the Chinese criminal code, the law under which he was convicted.
²

Today, Kim works out of his home on a quiet street in suburban Long Island about an hour's train ride from Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan. It is a luxurious contrast to his prison accommodations in China, where he slept on the cement floor of the cell he shared with a dozen felons.

His office is set up in a corner of the family room, where a computer sits on a small desk. But the nerve center of his operation is his cellphone, which rings repeatedly on the morning we meet. Calls come in from contacts in South Korea, China, and Southeast Asia regarding a rescue operation that is in the works. It is not until lunchtime, when most of Asia is asleep, that his phone finally goes quiet.

North Korean women are “commodities for purchase,” Kim explains. The process of recruitment, transfer, and delivery of the brides has become systematized. He describes a network of human traffickers who operate as “suppliers,” “wholesale providers,” and “retail sellers.”

The supply chain typically begins in the young woman's hometown in North Korea and ends when she is delivered to her new husband in China. The most popular marketplaces for North Korean women are in the three Chinese provinces that border North Korea—Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang—but North Korean brides are sold throughout China. The buyers are Chinese men, both ethnically Korean and majority Han. Many are farmers. Some have physical or mental disabilities that make them unsuitable as husbands in the eyes of Chinese women. In almost every case, the men are buying the one thing they want most in life: a wife.

Why would a Chinese man go to the trouble and expense of buying a North Korean bride? The answer has to do, above all, with China's long-standing population policies.

For more than three decades, China has pursued one of the world's strictest family planning policies. Most couples are allowed to have only one child. The one-child policy became part of China's constitution in 1978 and went into effect in 1979. Since then, the government has enforced it through fines, imprisonment, forced abortion, sterilization, and even, human rights groups charge, infanticide. The fertility rate has dropped to fewer than two children per
woman today compared with close to six children per woman in the early 1970s.
³

The one-child policy has had its intended effect of slowing the rate of expansion of China's population. But there has been an unwelcome side effect: an unnaturally high male-to-female ratio. A scarcity of young women is a fact of life in China today. In 2009, according to research published in the
British Medical Journal
, the number of males younger than twenty exceeded the number of females by more than thirty-two million.
⁴

Left to herself, Mother Nature will bring more boys than girls into the world. The sex ratio at birth is roughly consistent worldwide: It's between 103 and 107 boys for every 100 girls. But boys tend to be less healthy than girls and have a higher mortality rate during infanthood. By the time the newborns reach their reproductive years, the sex ratio is about even.

This pattern does not hold true in China, where sex ratios are grossly lopsided. In 2005, the birth ratio was 120 boys for every 100 girls, according to the
British Medical Journal
. In some rural provinces, more than 140 male births were reported for every 100 female births.
⁵
“Gendercide” is how the
Economist
magazine characterized the problem in a 2010 cover article.
⁶
The word appeared in bold letters over a photograph of a pair of pink-bowed baby shoes. The shoes were empty.

The obvious result of the gender imbalance is a surplus of bachelors. The Chinese have a euphemism for permanently unmarried men:
guanggun.
They are “bare branches” on the family tree. The unmarried men are often desperate—for companionship, for sex, for household help. In rural areas, the bride problem is exacerbated by young Chinese women's preference for urban life and modern-minded husbands. Young women are fleeing the farm in droves, attracted by well-paying factory jobs and more comfortable urban lifestyles. In the three provinces bordering North Korea, the ratio of
young men to young women is a staggering 14-to-1, according to an estimate from the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea.
⁷

One former North Korean bride, now living in the United States, has a matter-of-fact explanation for the appeal of North Korean brides. North Korean women have a reputation of being clean and submissive, she told me. In a society that is modernizing as quickly as China is, such traditional wifely virtues are prized, especially in rural areas, where contemporary notions about women's roles have not penetrated. Brokers take “orders” from Chinese bachelors or their families for North Korean brides.

Women may hold up half the sky, in Mao Zedong's famous phrase, but they are still treated as second-class citizens in much of modern China. Today's gender imbalance gives the lie to Mao's dictum. Chinese families' traditional preference for boys lives on. Many couples still favor sons, both to carry on the family name and support them in their old age. In rural areas, sons are prized for the value of their labor. The birth of a son heralds the arrival of an extra farmhand as soon as the boy is old enough to hold a hoe.

Not so long ago in China, an unwanted baby girl might be drowned in a bucket at birth or left unattended to die. Such atrocities might still be occurring. But abortion is the preferred method of getting rid of unwanted baby girls. “Sex-selection abortion accounts for almost all the excess males,” the
British Medical Journal
concludes. Because of the one-child policy, abortion is both widely available in China and widely accepted as a means of contraception.

Many couples take pains to make sure their one permitted child is male or, if they are allowed to have two children, that at least one is a boy. That is increasingly easy to do, thanks to ultrasound technology that allows a couple to determine the baby's sex early in the pregnancy. The first ultrasound machines were introduced in China in the early 1980s. They reached county hospitals by the end of that decade and rural hospitals by the mid-1990s. Since then, ultrasonography has become very cheap and is easily available even to the
rural poor. The popular test costs about $12, well within the means of most couples. China has laws forbidding the use of ultrasounds to determine the sex of the unborn children, but they are ignored.
⁸

China's sex imbalance has reached epic proportions. Steven Mosher, of the Population Research Institute, calls it a tale of “marital musical chairs” in which tens of millions of young men will be left standing. He paints a bleak picture of social disruption. “Rates of prostitution and homosexuality will increase as these unwilling bachelors seek alternative outlets for their urge to mate,” he cautions. “Rates of recruitment for both the People's Liberation Army and for criminal gangs will increase as these ‘excess' men seek alternative families. Crime, which is mostly committed by unattached males, will skyrocket.”
⁹

Mosher is not the only observer who is worried about the growing disparity between the sexes and how it could reshape Chinese society. Even the Chinese government has initiated programs to teach citizens about the value of girls. For now, however, one of the responses to the shortage of young women comes by way of North Korea, through the buying and selling of female flesh.

In what Steve Kim calls Stage One of the supply chain, the supplier, or recruiter, lures a woman away from her home with promises of a lucrative trip to China. Recruiters are either North Korean nationals or Korean-Chinese, and usually male. They typically hang out around urban train stations in the border regions and chat up attractive young women who pass by. Their marks are often rural women who have come to the city to sell an agricultural product they grew on an illegal private plot or scavenged from the forest.

Sometimes the recruiter targets a pretty young woman, follows her home, and tries to enlist her parents in his persuasion game. The recruiters travel from village to village, keeping an eye out for potential brides.

Kim explains what happens next. “When they see a widow with a beautiful daughter they say: ‘Why do you leave your daughter like
that? If you send her to China, then she can get money and have an education. Why don't you send her?' They keep talking and gain trust, and then—‘OK,' the mother says, ‘I trust you. Take her.'

“Then he takes the girl into China and sells her. This is one of the tricks.” Kim shudders. “Horrible.”

The recruiter's pitch is usually a variation on one of three themes: Come to China, and I'll introduce you to someone who will give you a good job. Or, I'll take you to a Chinese market where you can sell your goods for more money than you can get in North Korea. Or, I'll help you find your relatives in China.

He makes a tempting promise: You can come home after a few months with more money than you could make in a year here. For a young woman with no job prospects and whose family may be destitute, or nearly so, it can be an irresistible offer.

There is also a gullibility factor at work. In the northern reaches of North Korea, near the border with China, stories abound of girls who have gone to China and never returned. But even if they have heard such stories, many women are young enough, inexperienced enough, or desperate enough to believe that “it won't happen to me.”

One former bride I interviewed—she called herself Naomi—described how she was befriended by a traveling salesman from China who offered to guide her to the address where relatives of her father lived. She left home in the middle of the night.

“I didn't want my parents to know I was leaving,” Naomi told me. She knew she was taking a risk and didn't want them to dissuade her. “I thought I would go for a few days and come back.”
¹⁰

It wasn't until she reached China that she realized that the wares her salesman-friend were selling were human, and female. She was delivered to a Chinese farmer, exchanged for the North Korean wife he had purchased a month earlier but who had turned out to be ill. The unwritten contract under which the first woman had been purchased apparently contained a damaged-goods clause.

If trickery doesn't work, recruiters have been known to resort to kidnapping. Hannah, another former bride, described how she had been abducted and taken to China. She was a teacher in Pyongyang, and during the school vacation she accompanied the mother of one of her pupils to the border region. Hannah hoped to make a little extra money by helping her friend carry back the fashionable Chinese-made clothing she was planning to purchase from a Chinese salesman and resell in the capital.

On the evening they concluded the deal, the Chinese salesman invited the two women to dinner. The food was drugged, and the next thing they knew, both women woke up in a dark room, hands and feet bound, heads groggy from the narcotic.

As Hannah struggled to come to, she heard her friend cry out, “Teacher, I think we've been sold.”
¹¹
They were in China, destined for forced marriages. They never saw each other again.

“I never knew such things happened,” Hannah told me.

Sometimes the pseudo-marriages are voluntary—at least in the sense that the woman has the theoretical option of turning down a man's offer. It is not unusual for a North Korean woman to agree to live with a Chinese man as his wife. But it is wrong to consider it a true choice. It is “a means of survival or livelihood,” says Lee Keumsoon, a senior researcher with the Korean Institute for National Unification in Seoul. Lee has interviewed hundreds of North Korean women who have settled in the South. In many cases, she says, a voluntary marriage is indistinguishable from a forced marriage.
¹²