Escape from North Korea (5 page)

Money is essential for bribing border guards to look the other way when a traveler wants to cross the river. So, too, it is needed for hiring a guide to lead the way and pay off the relevant officials. But money isn't always enough. Some guides don't think twice about absconding with a client's down payment and leaving him to his fate. Nor can the border police always be trusted to live up to their promises even when their palms have been well greased. Police can play a double game. Timing is everything, and the price of crossing the river can range from one hundred dollars to $1,000 during one of Pyongyang's periodic crackdowns, when a border guard would be risking his life if he defied orders to prevent crossings.

Some North Koreans wait for years before they accumulate the resources and summon the courage to flee. For others, the insecurity of their situation in North Korea leaves them little choice. Crossing the river is the only way to survive. It means the difference between life and death.

“If I hadn't gone to China,” the boy said, “I would have died.”
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Joseph Gwang-jin Kim and I were sitting at a table in the restaurant of a hotel in Washington, D.C. It was Saturday morning, and the restaurant was doing a brisk business with the weekend brunch crowd. Joseph and his foster mother had gotten up in the early hours of the morning to drive to the capital for our interview, and they were hungry. I had offered to meet them earlier in the week at a time that might be more convenient for them, but Joseph did not want to miss a day of school, so we settled on Saturday.

Joseph looked like an ordinary American teenager. His hair was short and spiky, his jeans were skinny, and the three-quarter-length black jacket he wore over his T-shirt was the essence of cool. His look fit right in with the hotel's chic glass-and-chrome decor. The last thing he looked like was what he in fact was: a refugee who had been granted political asylum in the United States. Joseph escaped from North Korea in 2005 and hid out in China for more than a year. In 2006, with the help of an American aid organization, he decided to flee China and go to the United States. He walked past the Chinese guards and into the United States Consulate in the city of Shenyang in northeast China and asked for sanctuary. He was fourteen years old when he left North Korea. When he finally reached the United States in 2007, he was sixteen years old. As a minor, he was assigned to live with a foster family in a small Southern city.

From where Joseph and I sat in the dining room, we could glimpse the brunch buffet in an adjacent alcove. Hotel guests passed
our table carrying plates piled high with the usual American breakfast favorites: eggs, pancakes, bagels and lox, fresh fruit. This abundance sparked chitchat about food. Joseph chatted about his after-school job at a sushi restaurant. He explained that he had memorized the English, Korean, and Japanese names of dozens of kinds of fish he had never heard of, much less tasted, before he arrived in the United States. After our own trip to the buffet, we began the interview. The subject of our conversation was starvation.

Joseph was explaining his decision to leave North Korea. The famine that killed at least one million people in the 1990s had ended, but food shortages persisted and Joseph was among the many North Koreans who were still starving. Children were especially at risk. In 2006, the year after Joseph fled, UNICEF reported that almost one-quarter of North Korean children were underweight due to lack of food and poor nutrition.
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UNICEF also noted that child malnutrition was especially severe in the northern provinces, which included the city of Hoeryong, where Joseph lived.

That section of the country is home to many citizens who belong to the unfortunate “hostile” class, the bottom ranking in the caste system created by the regime and to which every North Korean is assigned. The caste system is based on family background and loyalty to the regime. It is a key factor in determining where a citizen may live, whether he can go to university, and what kind of job he can obtain.
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It can determine, too, whether he has access to food.

Joseph was a
kotjebi
, or “fluttering swallow.”
Kotjebi
is the North Korean nickname for homeless children who wander the streets, “fluttering” from place to place and begging for food.
Kotjebi
are usually orphans whose parents have died of starvation or abandoned them and fled to China.
Kotjebi
often hang out in groups. They loiter around markets during the day and sleep in train stations or other public places at night. At the markets, they take up positions a few steps away from a noodle stand or a vegetable seller, heads bowed in supplication and plastic bags held open. They wait
for hours for a customer to take pity on them and dump some leftovers into their bag. Or they take matters into their own hands and snatch a bun from a customer's hands before he has a chance to take a bite.

Joseph became a
kotjebi
at the age of twelve, after his father starved to death. Joseph admired his father and insisted on telling me about him, although I had not inquired. It was a sensitive subject, I inferred, so I focused on listening and not asking too many questions. I had the impression that he was still trying to come to terms with his father's death, which started a train of events that destroyed his family and almost killed him, too.

“My father was very conventional and traditional,” he said. “What I mean is that he was a very honest person and a person with integrity.” These Confucian virtues were responsible for his death, in Joseph's view. His father refused to beg, he would not steal, and he did not reject his country and go to China. “If you want to survive in a society like North Korea, you have to be able to deceive yourself and others,” Joseph told me. His father was unable, or unwilling, to do that.

After his father died, Joseph made a resolution: He would survive. His mother had no job and could not support him, and his beloved older sister had disappeared into China, where Joseph believed she was sold as a bride. His sister was nineteen years old when she left. She had promised Joseph that she would come back in two months, bringing food. She told him to wait for her, but she never reappeared. Once Joseph gave up hope of seeing her again, he left home and took to the streets. He begged for food during the day and slept under a bridge at night. Sometimes he was so hungry that he would resort to theft. Once in a while he would go home to see his mother and sleep in his old bed for a night.

At twelve years old, Joseph was nearly a teenager, but malnutrition had stunted his growth, and he looked much younger. He was
a preteen trapped in the body of an eight-year-old. In addition to being small, he lacked street smarts, and before long he was picked up by the police and incarcerated in a youth detention center. The government set up youth detention centers during the famine years of the 1990s with the ostensible purpose of providing for orphans. Cynics said the government's real objective was to force dying children off the streets and out of sight. Joseph was worked hard at the center. Sometimes he would be sent to the countryside to pick corn; other days he was assigned to a construction gang. At least he got fed, but the twice-a-day meals were rarely more than a watery gruel made of corn. The food was enough to keep his hunger at bay, and Joseph ate it, but he told himself as he swallowed that pigs and cows ate better than he did.

After two and a half months, he escaped. The warden liked to watch the children fight, and he came to Joseph with a proposal. Defeat the older, bigger boy who was the supervisor of the dorm, and Joseph could take his place. The job came with better food and more privileges, and Joseph jumped at the chance to improve his lot. He won the fight, although not without cuts and bruises. One evening when the warden had left him in charge, he deserted his post and slipped out into the night.

“Did you go home?” I asked the obvious question.

There was a pause, as Joseph considered his answer. Yes, he finally said. But no one was there. Neighbors told him that his mother had been looking for him for a while but then gave up and left; no one knew where she had gone. He paused again. “It seems she thought I had died.” I couldn't tell whether Joseph really believed this interpretation of his mother's disappearance or whether he found it simply too painful to consider that she might have abandoned him. He never saw her again.

Joseph spent another year on the street before he made the decision to go to China. “Many people would think that I left North
Korea because I hated the government or because I hated my hometown,” he said. “But that was not the reason why. I was just hungry, and I was willing to risk my life to get out of there. I didn't know how to make a living.” He repeated: “I was just hungry.”

He chalked up his escape to survival skills his father never had.

The flow of people across the Sino–North Korean border did not become a problem until the early 1990s. Before then, it wasn't worth the risk for a North Korean to leave without permission; the potential rewards weren't big enough to matter. Unless he had family there, or was on the lam for some crime, why would anyone want to cross the river? Mao Zedong's China was as poor as Kim Il Sung's North Korea and nearly as repressive. A North Korean who was crazy enough to dream about going to South Korea would first have to figure out how to get out of China. That would take a miracle, and miracles were in short supply.

Then two things happened: China's economy was liberalized in the 1980s under Deng Xiaoping's reforms, leading it to quickly outpace the economy of North Korea, and the Chinese became far richer than their Korean neighbors. In North Korea, the failure of collectivist agricultural policies, bad weather, and the collapse of the Soviet Union (North Korea's patron state) combined to create a famine. Hungry North Koreans, especially those who lived in the northern reaches of the country, were faced with a choice: Stay home and starve to death, or go to China and live.

In 1991, South Korean journalist Koo Bum-hoe traveled to the border area in China and wrote a series of articles about what he learned. Reporting from Tumen City, a few miles from the North Korean border, Koo described severe food shortages that were driving families across the Tumen River into China in search of something to eat. His articles were among the first to report the coming
famine and the outpouring of North Koreans to China. The trickle of refugees that he described would soon become a flood.
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The articles also provided rare glimpses of ordinary life in North Korea, where many were starving. He wrote about North Koreans who ate “red noodles,” an imitation noodle made by grinding up the bark of a pine or acacia tree and mixing it with a small amount of corn powder. Red noodles tasted like sawdust and lacked nutrition, but they were filling.

Koo Bum-hoe also reported the North Korean government's campaign to encourage citizens to eat less for spurious “health” reasons. A person who ate sparingly was less susceptible to stomach cancer and other diseases, the hungry people were informed. Not long after Koo's articles appeared, Pyongyang introduced the campaign's macabre slogan, “Let's eat two meals a day.”

While staying in Tumen City, Koo Bum-hoe picked up rumors about a North Korean family of four who had fled across the river and were arrested by the Chinese police. It was a grotesque story, and at first he didn't believe it. He finally tracked down the arresting officer, who told him what had happened. The officer, a Chinese citizen of Korean heritage, said he took pity on the family and tried to help them. Seeing that they were famished, he ordered that a Korean-style dinner of rice and an array of side dishes be served to them in jail. The officer then took the father aside and told him he would not turn the family over to the North Korean security agency if the North Korean promised to take his wife and children back to their country the next day on his own accord. The officer knew that North Korea treated repatriated refugees severely, and he wanted to spare the family from punishment.