Escape from North Korea (28 page)

Some Korean-American churches sponsor missionaries who work covertly with North Korean refugees in China. The missionaries often are members of their own congregations. Some of the missionaries move to China to run shelters. Others serve as escorts on the new underground railroad. A few run small nonprofit organizations on the Chinese side of the Sino-Korean border that send food and medical supplies into North Korea.

Such efforts are separate acts of outreach by individual churches and individual parishioners. They are not the result of any organizational effort by the Korean-American community at large or by an umbrella group of churches. Rather, they are the result of a pastor or church member who is passionate about helping North Koreans and willing to take the lead.

These discrete efforts are linked by a shared commitment to helping the North Korean people directly, bypassing the government in Pyongyang. I. Henry Koh, a pastor in Georgia, put it this way: “Helping North Korea directly is absolutely useless,” he said, making a distinction between the country and the people. “It only perpetuates the North Korean regime. During the years of the Sunshine Policy, South Korea poured billions of dollars into North Korea with
the aim of helping. What happened?” He answered his own question: “They developed nuclear weapons.”

Like other denominations, Pastor Koh's denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America, does not have a program focused on North Korea or the refugees in China. Individual churches provide help as they choose. Pastor Koh's congregation has sent three missionaries to work with North Koreans. Two went to North Korea; one went to China. “They were disguised, of course,” he explained. That is, the missionaries' visas said they were businessmen or teachers, as indeed they were. But their primary aim was to teach the Christian message either by proselytizing or by example. Pastor Koh himself has traveled to China three times to perform baptisms and preach at an underground seminary in Beijing. A North Korean refugee who was traveling around the United States on a speaking tour stayed at his house for a week.

Not all Korean-American churches want to get involved with helping North Korean refugees in China. Within the Korean-American community, support of the new underground railroad can be controversial. Some churches eschew such work, deeming it unnecessarily provocative to the Kim family regime. They prefer to work with aid organizations that operate inside North Korea with the approval of the North Korean government, even if it means that some of the assistance they send will be diverted to the military, the Pyongyang elite, or other government uses.

The United States is home to 1.7 million people of Korean heritage, according to the 2010 Census. They are a wealthy, well-educated community. Like American Jews and also like other Asian-Americans, they are often referred to as super-immigrants. The 2000 Census put the median household income for Korean-Americans at $55,183, compared with $52,209 for the U.S. population overall.
Thirty-two percent of Korean-Americans have bachelor's degrees and 16 percent have graduate or professional degrees, compared with 17.5 percent and 10.2 percent of the American population at large.

About three-quarters of Korean-Americans are Christian,
⁶
and 2,800 churches can be called Korean-American, which is to say they have majority Korean congregations and a mostly Korean staff. The United Methodist Church identifies three hundred of its congregations as Korean-American. The Presbyterian Church USA is home to four hundred Korean-American congregations.

The Korean-American focus on helping North Koreans in China and on human rights in North Korea is relatively recent. It is a by-product of the information that is now available about North Korea thanks to the surge of refugees who have fled to China. Before the 1990s, the only way to help North Koreans was through aid organizations that worked directly with the regime, a route many Korean-Americans did not trust and refused to use.

Another reason for the recent surge in interest in helping North Koreans is generational. South Koreans who emigrated to the United States in the 1950s and '60s—the so-called first generation—were busy establishing themselves in their new country. Like other first-generation immigrants in American history, their focus was on finding jobs, building businesses, forming families. They were looking toward the future, not the past. This generation was also fleeing the turmoil of war and its aftermath. The Korean War was fresh in their memories, and they wanted to leave it behind. North Korea was often the last thing they wanted to think about or discuss with their children. “My parents never talked about the war,” is a comment one often hears from the children of Korean-American immigrants.

Donald Sung, a second-generation Korean-American, born in 1966, recounted a personal experience that reinforced this point. It was not until he had become an adult, he said, that he saw his father without socks. When he finally glimpsed his father's naked feet, he was astonished to discover that the older man was missing
several toes. When pressed, his father told him that he had lost his toes to frostbite when he was fleeing Kim Il Sung's forces during the Korean War. The elder Sung, then a teenager in South Korea, had been abducted in the South by the invading North Korean forces and conscripted into the North Korean army. When the older Mr. Sung related this story to his son, it was the first time the young man heard of his father's escape from North Korea. His father had kept silent for years. He wanted to leave his unhappy past behind him as well as spare his young son the knowledge of the suffering he had endured.
⁷

For many Korean-Americans, the crucial factor in deciding whether, or how, to help North Koreans is trust. Korean-Americans, especially those of the first generation, tend to be suspicious of people and organizations that say they are helping North Korea, said Michelle Park Steel. As vice chairman of the California Board of Equalization, a state tax commission, she is one of the highest elected Korean-American officeholders in the United States. She and her husband, Shawn Steel, a lawyer and former chairman of the Republican Party of California, are active in helping North Koreans in China through their family's church. One of their daughters spent a summer working for an aid organization in China's Tumen River area.

“Many Korean-Americans, especially the first generation, just assume that the money will go to the regime,” Michelle Park Steel said.
⁸
“They think that the North Korean government will get its hands on it. How do we know whom to trust? It's the biggest problem. There is a lot of doubt about whether the money they give will be used correctly.” In her experience, the first generation gives money to people they know—members of their church who move to China as missionaries, for example—but they are reluctant to support organizations or to give money to strangers.

Some Korean-Americans are also reluctant to speak out publicly about the abuses of the North Korean regime. Incredible as it may
seem in twenty-first century America, almost sixty years after the end of the Korean War, some Korean-Americans still fear reprisals against family members who may be alive in North Korea. They also worry that North Korea will attempt to shake them down for money in exchange for the safety of their loved ones. More than one hundred thousand Americans are believed to have relatives in North Korea.
⁹

Michelle Park Steel cites an incident in her own family. She had a great-aunt, now deceased, who tried for years to get information about her first-born son, from whom the aunt had become separated in North Korea during the war years. North Korea finally granted a visa to another son to visit the older brother he had never met. The second son flew to Pyongyang. After a few days of waiting at the hotel to see his elder brother, the second son met with government officials who told him that his brother had died. Instead, the officials introduced him to a man they said was the son of the dead man. But the visitor smelled a rat. His so-called nephew looked too old to be who the officials said he was. The second son suspected that he was an imposter and that the officials were trying to trick him into giving money to his supposed relative, from whom they would confiscate the cash. When he got home, the second son's suspicions were confirmed when he received a letter from the “nephew” imploring him to send $2,000 immediately or he would be sent to a political prison.

Other Korean-Americans tell stories of being targets of shakedowns from Pyongyang. A California millionaire paid an exorbitant sum to buy his brother out of the country. A businessman had a sister who was permitted to live in the relative comfort of Pyongyang so long as her brother in America kept sending (through China) medications, luxury goods, and money. The businessman assumed that the regime siphoned off most of the gifts.

Helie Lee, a Los Angeles writer, wrote a book about how her Korean-American family rescued her uncle and some members of his immediate family from North Korea in the late 1990s. They had
the help of a South Korean guide, Chinese-Korean gang members, and a Christian missionary. The family later learned that in-laws who had been left behind in North Korea disappeared, presumably into prison. The author applauds the courage of her North Korean relatives, who were seeking better lives for their children. But she also is appalled that her uncle was willing to leave behind family members whom he knew would be doomed by their association with him, a relative deemed to have betrayed the fatherland by his departure. “I felt both sympathy and disgust,” she wrote of her uncle's position. “A family is a high price to pay for freedom.”
¹⁰

The Korean Church Coalition is an umbrella organization of 2,500 Korean-American pastors. According to its mission statement, the coalition was formed in 2004 “to bring an end to the sufferings endured by our brothers, sisters, and orphans in North Korea as well as China and other parts of the world, through non-violent means.”
¹¹

The KCC started as a prayer movement. Since its beginnings it has held dozens of prayer vigils that have been attended by thousands of Korean-American pastors and members of their congregations. The coalition has done a good job of raising awareness in the Korean-American community, and it is an authoritative voice on the abuses perpetrated against North Koreans in North Korea and China. But when it comes to political influence, by its own admission it could do better.

Executive director Sam Kim offered a blunt assessment: “We have to speak out more forcefully,” he said. As Exhibit A, he pointed to the 2008 decision of the George W. Bush administration to remove North Korea from the list of terror-sponsoring nations. “Everyone knew that we opposed delisting,” he said, referring to the leaders of the coalition. It was a “terrible mistake,” he said. “I let a lot of
people know that in many one-on-one meetings in Washington.” Yet when the Bush administration went ahead and delisted North Korea despite the recommendation of the KCC, the coalition made no public statement. It did not issue a press release opposing the delisting. It was too difficult to reach a consensus among its members, Sam Kim explained. Some of the pastors supported the delisting; others thought it was an inappropriate subject for the coalition to address. Keeping silent was a mistake, Sam Kim said.
¹²

The Korean Church Coalition was a critical force in winning passage of the North Korean Human Rights Act of 2004. The legislation authorized the United States to accept refugees from North Korea. It increased the number of hours that Voice of America and Radio Free Asia broadcast to North Korea. And it established the part-time position of a special envoy on human rights in North Korea, a job that subsequently became full-time when the law was reauthorized in 2008. Then Senator Sam Brownback, a Republican from Kansas, proposed the original legislation in response to what he termed “one of the worst human rights disasters in the world.” It was passed unanimously by both houses of Congress and signed into law by President George W. Bush on October 18, 2004.