Escape from North Korea (36 page)

Ms. Lee had been praying for years to be reunited with her daughter. After her initial escape from North Korea in 1999, she had no contact with her husband and daughter for three years. She spent some of that period in a North Korean prison, where she was incarcerated after having been arrested in China and repatriated. When she was released from prison, she returned immediately to China.

In 2002, while in China for the second time, Ms. Lee saved enough money to hire a Chinese broker to track down her family's whereabouts and set up a phone call. The broker discovered that Ms. Lee's husband and daughter had been expelled from Pyongyang, where they had been living at the time of Ms. Lee's original departure, and assigned to live in a city in the undesirable far north of the country. Only ideologically pure citizens are permitted to live in the capital city, where they have better access to food, good housing, and jobs. That category does not include those who have a relative who left the country illegally. After the broker tracked down Ms. Lee's husband and daughter, he set up a phone call.

At the time of that first phone call in 2002, Ms. Lee tried to persuade her husband to let their daughter join her in China. But he refused: Crossing the river was too dangerous, and living in China was too full of risks. The girl was only thirteen. In China, she ran the risk of being sold as a bride or pressed into service in the sex industry. If she was captured and repatriated, she might not survive the inevitable stay in a detention center. The husband's fears were not without basis.

Once Ms. Lee reached South Korea later that year, she tried again to persuade her husband to let their daughter leave. He continued to refuse. So she gave up. “I was living my own life in South Korea, and she was living her life in the North,” she said. She continued to send money to her daughter, and they would talk on the phone once in a while. But she did not again raise the subject of the girl joining her in the South.

One day in early 2009, she was surprised to answer the phone and hear her daughter's voice. The young woman, now nineteen years old, was calling from the home of the broker Ms. Lee had been using in North Korea to send money and arrange phone calls. Her daughter had traveled to the broker's house in a border town several times in the past to receive calls from her mother, and she had memorized the address. This time she went to the broker's house on her own initiative and asked him to place the call for her. She did not tell her father what she was doing.

Once she had her mother on the line, she made an announcement. “I want to go to South Korea,” she told Ms. Lee. “What should I do?”

Ms. Lee sprang into action. She had been working with the broker in North Korea for a decade and believed she could trust him to get her daughter out of North Korea safely. With the help of her Christian contacts, she lined up another broker in Seoul who specialized in extractions from China. She gave the two brokers each other's phone numbers and instructed them to come up with an exit plan. The North Korean broker agreed to manage the girl's crossing into China. He would get her as far as Yanji City in China, close to the North Korean border. After that, a Chinese guide hired by the broker in Seoul would take over. The guide would escort the young woman across the country to Southeast Asia.

One of the decisions the broker in South Korea had to make, in consultation with Ms. Lee, was what third country the daughter should use as her springboard to South Korea. Ms. Lee's broker worked in three countries: Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand. They decided on Cambodia, where the broker had a reliable team and where, they believed, the political climate was welcoming at the time and the South Korean Embassy would not turn her away. The Chinese guide would see the girl to the Laotian border. She would walk across that border on her own and then meet up by prearrangement with a local guide. The Laotian guide would escort her to the Mekong
River and put her on a boat that would take her to Cambodia. At that point a local Cambodian guide would take over. He would take her to Phnom Penh and drop her off at the South Korean Embassy. The entire operation, from Yanji City in the northeast of China to Phnom Penh in south-central Cambodia, would take a week.

Bringing her daughter to Seoul was not cheap. The portion of the journey from North Korea to China would cost $2,000, Ms. Lee was told. The journey from China to Phnom Penh would require an additional $3,000. Ms. Lee did not blink at the costs. She had done her research and knew that these fees were in the normal range, in line with what others were paying for the same services. “There are set prices for getting people out of North Korea and for getting them out of China,” she explained. “These are separate operations.”

Although Ms. Lee had high confidence in the brokers handling her daughter's extraction, she knew that the trip was hazardous and that even with the best planning, something could go wrong. For the mother, the scariest part of the journey was the week her daughter stayed in China. “There was nothing to worry about in North Korea,” she said with a dismissive wave of the hand, referring to the planned escape from that country. The corruption that infuses every aspect of life in North Korea provided her some measure of comfort in these circumstances. Just about everything in North Korea can be had for a price, she said. “As long as there is money, any problem can be solved in North Korea.”

China was a different story. Ms. Lee knew from her personal experience that China is an extremely dangerous place for a North Korean refugee. You couldn't count on the corruptibility of Chinese officials. Many would accept bribes, but not all, and not all officials were corruptible. Money didn't always get you out of a fix. “My daughter could be caught and repatriated,” she said. “I knew that as soon as she left China, she would be safe.”

Her biggest fear was that her daughter would be arrested in China and repatriated. Springing someone from jail in North Korea
was possible, but it cost a lot of money, it took time, and the prisoner might not survive. If her daughter were accused of a political crime—such as planning to go to South Korea—and sent to a political prison, it would be even harder to spring her.

Before the girl departed from North Korea, Ms. Lee gave her some advice. Trust the guides and follow their instructions completely, she told her. Second, get new clothes. The guides would probably give her Chinese-made clothes, but if they didn't, she instructed the girl to insist on them and to throw away her North Korean ones. She needed to be as inconspicuous as possible.

Ms. Lee had two conversations with her daughter during her week in China and one thereafter. The first call was from a safe house in Beijing—the girl used her guide's phone to call her mother. She placed the second call when she was about to cross the border into Laos. They had one final phone conversation before their reunion in Seoul—the daughter called right after arriving in Cambodia. She phoned her mother to say that she was safe.

After those three phone conversations, Ms. Lee had no word for seven months. She later learned that her daughter spent four months in Cambodia waiting for an exit visa and three months in Seoul being vetted by the National Intelligence Service. The daughter then was released to Hanawon, where she finally was reunited with her mother.

Ms. Lee's daughter was nine years old when they parted in 1999; she was twenty when the two met again in 2009. As Ms. Lee entered the large conference room where they were to meet, she looked at the sea of faces and had a sudden flash of anxiety that she would not recognize the young woman who had been a child when she last saw her. Then she spotted her daughter across the room, and her anxiety melted away in an instant. “I could tell from a distance that she was my daughter,” Ms. Lee said. “And my daughter also recognized me.”

Ms. Lee's daughter represents a new wave of arrivals in the South: North Koreans who arrive straight from the North after only brief stays in China. Their numbers are growing as more North Koreans settle in South Korea and save enough money to buy their relatives out of both countries.

According to Youn Mi-rang, director general of Hanawon, almost 30 percent of the North Koreans who reached the South in 2009 arrived within a year of leaving North Korea. She believes this is a record and predicts that the trend will continue.
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Many of these new-wave arrivals were the teenage or adult children of refugees who previously had escaped to South Korea. Their escapes were organized and paid for by relatives, usually their mothers. Women who set the goal for themselves of bringing their children to the South “have a purpose in life,” Director Youn said. They often work harder than other refugees, with the objective of saving enough money to free their relatives.

In Youn's view, refugees who come straight from North Korea tend to exhibit fewer psychological problems than refugees who have spent time in China. About 25 percent of the refugees who reach South Korea suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, she said. Women who were sold as brides or into the sex industry in China are especially vulnerable to lingering psychological disorders. Many refugees also have to cope with the guilt they feel about deserting their families in China or North Korea, especially if they left behind children. Hanawon has a psychiatrist on staff and also provides guidance in how to handle stress.

North Koreans who come directly to the South from North Korea, with only short stays in China, are less likely to display symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, according to Youn. Of course,
some do suffer from lasting stress. “Some of them witnessed executions, or some might have experienced imprisonment or torture,” and they have a hard time dealing with those memories, she said. But as a general matter, according to Youn, the shorter the period of escape, the less the disorder. Refugees in the new wave have another advantage if they have a family member to show them the ropes and provide emotional support in South Korea

Not everyone who works with displaced North Koreans shares Youn's view. Others observe that refugees who experience the relative freedoms of China before settling in free countries often fare better than those coming directly from the North. The North Koreans get used to making decisions for themselves in China, they say. This gives them an edge when they reach their final destination.

North Koreans who have made it to safety in South Korea or elsewhere do not always have an easy time persuading their family members to join them. Relatives can be reluctant to leave, said Lee Keum-soon, of the Korean Institute for National Unification, a government-sponsored think tank in Seoul.
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In addition to fears of being shot, captured, arrested, or repatriated, they also are sometimes afraid of moving to South Korea or the United States. These countries are portrayed in venomous ways by the North's propaganda machine. Even though their relatives assure them otherwise, it's hard for some North Koreans to believe that the American “jackals” or their South Korean “lackeys” won't execute them after they arrive in South Korea. Making the decision to leave North Korea is not easy, even when a family member encourages the relative to depart, makes all the arrangements, and pays the bill.

The story of two sisters—call them “Sun-mi” and “Bo-mi”—is a case in point. I met the sisters in a safe house in Southeast Asia run by LiNK. They had escaped from North Korea three months earlier.
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The sisters, ages seventeen and nineteen, lived in a city in a northern province of North Korea. One day in the summer of 2010,
they heard a knock on the front door. Sun-mi opened it to find a stranger who said she was an emissary from the girls' father, who had disappeared from home three years earlier. The girls assumed their dad had gone to China, but they had not been able to confirm this. They had heard no word from him since he left, and they didn't know whether he was alive or dead. He could be in China, or he could have been caught or killed while attempting to cross the river. Now, three years after his disappearance, the woman at their front door said their father was safe and wanted to talk to Sun-mi on the phone. The courier wanted to take Sun-mi to a location nearer the border so they could capture a Chinese phone signal and Sun-mi could place a call to her father.

Sun-mi refused. “I didn't trust her,” she said. “I thought she was going to take me away and then I'd be kidnapped, taken to China, and sold to a Chinese man.”

Five days later the woman returned, and this time Sun-mi's curiosity got the better of her. Maybe her father really did want to get in touch with them. The woman knew the sisters' names and seemed to know all about them. So perhaps she really was a messenger from their father. She decided to take the risk and go with the woman.

The woman turned out to be legitimate. She took Sun-mi to a town near the border and placed the call to her father. It was the first time Sun-mi had heard her father's voice in more than three years. He was as gruff and as blunt as she remembered. “Get off the phone and go to China,” he ordered.