Escape from North Korea

The boys and girls we are en route to visit are the children of North Korean brides and their Chinese husbands. They represent the most vulnerable subgroup of the North Korean humanitarian crisis in China—abandoned children. Caring for these children is a growing focus of Christian missionaries in China, and small, secret house orphanages have sprung up across the Northeast. They usually are set up and paid for by American or South Korean Christians and staffed by local Chinese Christians. The orphanage I am about to visit is run by Crossing Borders, a small Christian nonprofit based in Illinois and dedicated to serving North Koreans in China. Crossing Borders operates several orphanages there.

The children aren’t strictly orphans, but given that both parents are absent, they are effectively so. Their mothers have been arrested and repatriated to North Korea, or they’ve left of their own accord on the new underground railroad. The fathers either don’t want the children or don’t have the means to care for them. Aid workers estimate that there are tens of thousands of half-Chinese, half–North Korean children in that part of China.² Like other demographic issues involving North Korean refugees, there are no reliable statistics, only informal estimates. No one really knows how many half-and-half children exist overall or what percentage of these kids are abandoned.

Half-and-half children pose a special set of ethical and legal problems for those who want to care for them—especially for activists who are contemplating whether to help them get out of China on the new underground railroad. Does anyone have the moral right to remove a child from his country of birth without the consent of at least one of his parents and in contravention of Chinese law? What is best for the child?

Even if a half-and-half child were to make it safely out of China to a neighboring country, his chance of reaching South Korea or another country is slim. There is a high risk that the host government of the country where he took refuge would return him to China. This has happened. Half-and-half children usually lack documentation of any sort. They seldom have birth certificates or proof of citizenship. Seoul is willing to accept half-and-half children when they are accompanied by their North Korean mothers, but it is understandably reluctant to take unaccompanied children whom China might claim as citizens. Neither the South Korean government nor the Christian rescuers want to be accused of kidnapping Chinese children.

The bottom line is that many aid workers reckon they can help more children more effectively by taking care of them in China. In most cases, the aid workers opt to care for the children in place rather than take them out of the country. In the words of an American missionary whose organization shelters half-and-half children in China, “We hope they’ll grow up to be productive citizens.”

The five children I am about to visit are typical of the half-and-half children. In every case, the child’s mother disappeared. Either she was arrested and repatriated to North Korea or she left home voluntarily in search of the underground railroad and a new life in South Korea or another country. But the reason for her absence matters less to the child she has left behind than the absence itself. “The children miss their mothers very much,” I am told. Many bear emotional scars.

When Chinese police arrest a North Korean woman who is living with a Chinese man, they leave her children behind. Refugees tell stories of half-Chinese children being ripped from their mothers’ arms by Chinese policemen. It’s possible that Beijing’s policy is motivated in part by a recognition of the Chinese father’s parental rights. But another reason for leaving the children in place is practical: Beijing knows that North Korea will reject these children if China tries to repatriate them with their mothers. Because the children are half-Chinese, the North Koreans deem them to be of “impure” blood and unworthy of entering their country. Both North Korea and China are in violation of the international Convention on the Rights of the Child, which prohibits separating children from their mothers.

Chinese racism against North Koreans, as bad as it is, is overshadowed by the virulence of North Korean racism against Chinese. In the view of many North Koreans, theirs is the “cleanest race,” possessing a unique moral purity. The worst invective is reserved for Americans—official propaganda describes Yankees as animals with “snouts,” “paws,” or “muzzles”—but North Korea’s Chinese allies are also denigrated.³

This attitude is exemplified by an anecdote told by a South Korean professor who conversed with a North Korean scholar at a conference in Beijing. In his presentation at the conference, Mo Jongryn, the South Korean professor, made passing reference to the growing number of South Koreans who are marrying foreigners. Later, the North Korean scholar approached Professor Mo. He was aghast. “You are diluting the purity of our race,” he wailed.⁴

Nowhere is North Korea’s attitude about racial purity more apparent than in its treatment of pregnant women repatriated from China. For the perceived crime of carrying “Chinese seed,” their North Korean jailers force the repatriated women to undergo abortions, even in the final weeks of pregnancy. There are numerous eyewitness reports of pregnant women being beaten or required to work at hard labor until they abort spontaneously. One such technique is called the Pump. The pregnant woman is forced to stand up and squat down repeatedly until she aborts or collapses of exhaustion. In cases where the repatriated woman gives birth, her newborn is taken away from her. The infant is drowned, smothered, left outside in the elements, or clubbed to death.⁵

The South Korean government debriefs every refugee who arrives in Seoul and reports its findings in an annual publication. Many of the refugees have spent time in North Korean prisons, and the section on pregnant women is a parade of horrors. The matter-of-fact, staccato language of the government report only heightens the atrocity:

• “Gave birth to a baby . . . but they put vinyl cover [over the baby’s face] and left it to die, accusing the baby of [being] Chinese.”⁶

• “Gave birth to a baby on way to hard labor. Baby died.”⁷

• “Hospital aborted baby at seven-month pregnancy because she had lived with a Chinese man.”⁸

• “The agents forced her to run one hundred laps around a track because she had a Chinese seed in her. She collapsed after sixty laps and the baby was aborted.”⁹

The five children I visit at the tiny orphanage in China all come from a remote rural village in Heilongjiang Province in the extreme northeast of China. Their mothers fled to China in the late 1990s and were sold as brides. Heilongjiang, which translates as Black Dragon River, is the Chinese name for the Amur River. The province borders the Russian Far East on the north and the Chinese autonomous region of Inner Mongolia on the west. It is the northernmost part of China, subject to sub-Arctic weather in winter and harsh living conditions for much of the year. China’s economic miracle hasn’t reached most parts of Heilongjiang yet, and the children’s home village is very poor. Indoor plumbing was new to at least one of the children when he arrived at the orphanage. Another child, accustomed to being hungry, was amazed to find rice served at every meal. He had to learn how not to overeat.

These motherless children are fatherless as well, or the fathers are as good as dead to the children. The kids are in the orphanage in the first place because their fathers either cannot afford to take care of them or they do not want to. Centuries-old racial prejudices remain strong, and if the father is Han Chinese, he can be ashamed of having a half-Korean child. Once a man’s North Korean wife is gone, some husbands want nothing further to do with their children. Whatever the reason, in the case of the five little ones at the orphanage I visit, the men handed their sons and daughters into the care of the village church. The church in turn delivered them to the American couple who are my guides.

Mary and Jim—they asked me to use pseudonyms—are a retired couple from the Midwest. They never told me their last name, and I never asked. We were introduced through an associate of theirs in New York City. Our first meeting took place in Seoul, where we rendezvoused at a prearranged time at the information desk of a popular mega-bookstore on the city’s main avenue. It was a get-acquainted meeting, and I must have passed inspection, for they later agreed to meet again in China and take me to one of their foster homes. Crossing Borders, with which Mary and Jim work, had turned down my first request, made directly to the group’s board of directors a few months earlier.

Back home, Mary was an accountant and a homemaker and Jim worked in a trading company. Their children are grown. Like most of the Americans working with North Koreans in China, they are of Korean heritage and speak fluent Korean. Despite that ethnic background, neither would be mistaken for Chinese or even South Korean. Their jeans, backpacks, and sneakers are giveaways, as is Jim’s long hair, which sweeps across his forehead in a Ringo Starr–like bob. Both look American through and through. I easily spot them coming through the crowd when we meet near a congested train station in a city in northeast China.

Mary is effervescent and outgoing and acts as the couple’s unofficial spokesperson. “After our younger child graduated from college, we decided we wanted to do mission work together,” she tells me. “It was the right moment for us. We were thinking of going to Africa, but then this opportunity came up. We realized that this is the way God is leading us.”

The couple is in China on work visas, and Jim’s official job is with a company owned by a relative in South Korea. But their real work is with Crossing Borders. They manage a string of foster homes located in two cities in the northeast and divide their time traveling among them. The foster homes care for orphaned North Korean children as well as children whose mothers are North Korean. The couple also runs a shelter for young North Korean women who are in danger of being sold as brides.

This kind of second career is not for everyone. The work is far from home, poorly paid, and dangerous. If they are caught, there is a good chance they will go to jail; they would certainly be deported and barred from returning to China. “We thought about it carefully,” Mary says, while Jim nods his assent. “We thought that after a life of work, we wanted to spend the rest of our lives helping someone. The U.S. is wonderful, and we had a good life, but there’s not a lot of time left for us, and we want to use it well.”

The Chinese foster parents who staff the orphanages are hazarding much more than Mary and Jim are. They face a constant risk of exposure by a nosy neighbor, a suspicious friend, or even a child in their care who reveals information to someone he shouldn’t trust. If the foster parents are arrested and sent to prison, putting the pieces of their lives back together won’t be easy. They will always be under suspicion. The foster parents also are putting their own biological families at risk. All the foster parents are married couples. If they’re parents as well, they’ll be separated from their child if they are arrested and jailed.

In the mid-2000s, aid workers in China began sounding the alarm about the special difficulties surrounding half-Chinese, half-North Korean children. This was about the time that the first wave of such children was reaching school age, their mothers having arrived in China during the famine years. The children are in legal limbo. As far as the Chinese government is concerned, they’re invisible because they aren’t listed on the family’s official household registration card known as a hukou. Without a hukou, children can’t attend school or obtain medical care.

Under Chinese law, a child born in China is entitled to citizenship if one parent is a Chinese citizen. But there is a catch. To obtain the right of citizenship for their child, parents must register their newborn, a process that requires them, among other things, to identify themselves, their address, and their citizenship. The hukou is a passport-like document, containing personal information about every member of a household. The data recorded in the hukou include gender, date and place of birth, ethnicity, current address, previous address, citizen ID number, height, blood type, education level, occupation, and work address. The hukou is an essential document, required for virtually every interaction with the state. Students are required to present copies of their hukou to enroll in school. Adults must show their hukou when they change jobs or move to a new residence. A hukou is required to obtain medical treatment.

The father of a Chinese–North Korean child is thus compelled to make a wrenching choice: Does he register the baby, an act that will expose the nationality and location of the child’s mother? If he does so, his wife will be vulnerable to arrest and deportation, and he and his family will be susceptible to shakedowns by authorities. Or does he forego the registration, making it difficult, if not impossible, for the child to receive health care and an education? It is a kind of Sophie’s Choice: the life of the mother or the well-being of the child.

Fathers who care about their half–North Korean children sometimes take desperate measures to make sure they receive an education. Officials at an elementary school sometimes can be bribed to admit a child without a hukou. But the enrollment is unofficial, and the school will not keep formal records of the child’s work; when it comes time for junior high school, it again will be as if the child did not exist. Parents also have been known to borrow or buy the hukou of a full-Chinese child. There is even a market in counterfeit hukou. But all these options are expensive, risky, and unreliable. They also require proactive steps on the part of a responsible father.

If they can afford it, Chinese fathers sometimes apply for hukou for their children after their North Korean wives have left or been arrested. There is a fine for late registration, and the authorities sometimes demand to see a police document verifying that the North Korean mother is gone, a piece of paper that requires yet more bribes.

Mary and Jim have managed to obtain hukou for all the children under their care, thanks to funding from Crossing Borders. Real IDs are preferable, because the children will use them for the rest of their lives, and Mary and Jim are willing to pay a premium for government-issued registration cards. If a child has a Chinese father who is identifiable and willing to put his half–North Korean child on his family’s hukou, their organization will ante up the funds for the late registration fee and attendant bribes. If the father is absent or unwilling to add his half–North Korean child to the family hukou, Mary and Jim will purchase fake IDs on the black market. There are a few fully Korean children in their orphanages, and obtaining fake IDs for them costs the most—up to $8,500 per child.

Mary and Jim are extremely careful about security, and with good reason. The legal status of their foster homes is at best ambiguous. Under Chinese law, foreigners are not permitted to perform these kinds of social services, and, in any case, proselytizing is forbidden. Teaching Christianity to the children is against the law.

The explanation given to neighbors of their house orphanages or to inquiring officials is that the foster parents are operating a jun tag business. That is, they are taking care of the children of ethnic Korean-Chinese who have temporarily moved to South Korea. There are more than four hundred thousand Korean-Chinese working in South Korea, so this is a plausible scenario. Korean-language newspapers run ads for jun tag, which are often run by retired teachers. The foster father of the orphanage I visited used a variation on the jun tag story, telling neighbors that he was caring for the children of relatives who had gone to South Korea to work. He instructed the children to call him and his wife “Uncle” and “Auntie.” The families worship at home on Sundays, preferring not to call attention to themselves by attending a local church. The children are warned not to talk about Jesus outside their home.

The network of foster homes that Mary and Jim supervise operates on a monthly budget of about $10,000. This covers rent, a small salary for the foster parents, food, school supplies, and clothes for the thirty children under their care. There is little left over for extras. The children go without dental care or birthday presents. At Christmas, Jim dresses up as Santa Claus and gives each child one gift.

Mary and Jim learned the hard way about the need for tight security. Early in their stay in China, one of the foster parents threatened to expose them. He said he would turn them over to the police and reveal the location of their apartment and all the house orphanages if they did not pay him a bribe. Mary and Jim immediately called home for advice, and the board of Crossing Borders dispatched one of its directors to China, where he negotiated hush money with the foster parent. Since that episode, Mary and Jim keep their home address secret. They each carry two cellphones—one for talking to foster parents, the other for talking to each other. Sensitive matters are saved for face-to-face conversations. They also took the precaution of opening two foster homes in a second city so that they have bolt-holes for the children in case of another such emergency. The couple says the trust issue is the hardest part of their job. “We want to trust everyone, but we can’t,” Mary says. “That kind of stress is the worst.”

Their focus on security extends to our meeting. When I connect with Mary and Jim at the train station in China, it’s just after six o’clock in the evening and still light. Mary suggests that we kill forty-five minutes at a nearby McDonald’s while we wait for dusk. We are going to take a cab to the foster home, and she wants us to arrive after dark so we’ll avoid prying eyes. Every Chinese neighborhood has an official busybody, a government watchdog who reports to the local authorities. The last thing the foster parents need is for a neighbor to spot me walking into the apartment and start asking questions about what a gweilo, a foreigner, is doing there.

A little before seven, Mary glances out the window at the darkening sky and says, “Let’s go.” She hails a cab, negotiates a price with the driver, and we pile in. It is fully dark by the time we reach Korea-town; there are no streetlights, and it’s hard to make out the faces of the people on the sidewalk. Jim called the foster father a few minutes before our arrival, and he is waiting for us as we get out of the car. We don’t linger. Introductions will come later. He and Jim lead us quickly through a maze of alleyways between blocks of identical high-rise apartment buildings. Eventually we enter a doorway, someone flips on a light, and we start to climb the stairs. The stairway and landings are clean and tidy. We know we are in Korea-town by the huge brown earthenware pots outside the doors. They hold kimchi, or pickled cabbage, a staple of every Korean meal and the culinary accomplishment by which every Korean housewife is judged.

When we reach the fourth floor, the foster father sprints ahead, opens the door to his apartment, and pandemonium erupts. Five children race to the vestibule and shout “hello!” in English, the “l’s” sounding more like “r’s.” One child helps us remove our shoes and shoves slippers onto our feet; two others grab the bags from our grip; and the other two run to the kitchen to fetch boxes of cookies, which they thrust into our hands the moment we step up from the vestibule into the living room. I am ushered to a white plastic chair that one of the children has put out for me. Mary, Jim, and the foster father sit nearby.

After greeting each child by name, Mary takes charge. She has the children sit cross-legged on the floor in front of me. One by one, each child rises, bows formally, and introduces himself. The children are suddenly tongue-tied, too shy to answer questions with more than a word or two. Later Mary describes each child’s background for me, and I am able to piece together their stories based on her information along with what the children told me.

The children have been living in the house orphanage for a year now, and they look well fed, energetic, and healthy. Mary says they were malnourished when they first arrived. To my American eyes, they look like they are only nine or ten years old even though their real ages are twelve and thirteen. The emotional deficits are harder to notice or remedy.

“Kuon” lost his mother when he was six. The police raided his home on a cold night in December after the family had gone to bed. They handcuffed her and took her away while Kuon remained asleep. When he awoke, she was gone. After his mother left, Kuan stayed home alone all day while his father went to work. He eventually went to school for a while, but his father was too poor to buy even a notebook for his son, so the boy dropped out. Kuon is luckier than many of the half-and-half children: His father is a good man, I am told, and loved his North Korean wife. He called Mary and Jim angels from heaven for welcoming his son into their orphanage.

The other two boys were less fortunate in their families. “Sung Hoon” has no memory of his mother, who was arrested and sent back to North Korea when he was only seven months old. His father was too poor to take care of him, so the boy went first to an uncle’s house and then to a state orphanage before finding his way to Mary and Jim’s foster home. “Hak Chul’s” father died of cancer when he was ten, and his North Korean mother left home shortly after that. The boy went to live with an uncle, but the uncle abused him and was only too happy to turn him over to Mary and Jim. Hak Chul’s chubby face is round and cute, but it belies his unhappiness. He cries frequently and won’t join in games with the rest of the children.

The two girls are polar-opposite personalities. “Eun Hee” has a ballerina’s body. She is tall, slender, and perfectly proportioned. Mary says she likes clapping games, but on the evening we meet, it is hard to imagine her loosening up enough to take part in any such lively activity. She sits with her hands folded in her lap, and her eyes never leave my face. She is silent and serious and doesn’t smile. Her mother, who was arrested when Eun Hee was six, was abusive, and Eun Hee has a nightmarish memory of being nearly strangled to death by her. Her father is disabled and cannot work. Her grandfather took care of her before handing her over her to Mary and Jim. When I ask her what she wants to do when she grows up, she thinks a moment and then gives a surprising reply: She wants to be a scientist.

“Kim Sun” also comes from an abusive home, but she somehow seems the child most capable of rising above it. Of all the children they care for, she is the one in whom Mary and Jim place the most hope. She is quick-witted and intelligent. She is already second in her class at a Korean-language elementary school even though she is a native Chinese speaker and doesn’t understand Korean very well yet. When Mary and Jim and I speak English together, I hear her softly repeating some of our words. “Thank you” comes out “sank you” and “sixty-seven” is “sixty-seben.”

Like many of the half-and-half children, Kim Sun comes from a violent home. She was abused by both her father and her uncle, who took her mother as his “wife” after her father died, when Kim Sun was five. She retains vivid memories of her mother, who left home when Kim Sun was ten, abandoning the girl to her violent uncle. Shortly after that, the uncle agreed to send her to Mary and Jim’s orphanage. Although most of the other children in the foster homes make occasional holiday visits back to their home villages, Kim Sun has nowhere to go and spends her holidays in the foster home or with Mary and Jim.

Mary and Jim think Kim Sun is smart enough to go to university one day, and they are committed to seeing her and the other half-and-half children through to adulthood. If, that is, they can afford it. The children are only in fourth or fifth grade now, but the Americans are already worried about paying for junior high school and high school, should the children qualify. Schooling is ostensibly free in China, but parents are obligated to pay for books, supplies, and uniforms. These costs add up as children reach higher grades. If a child needs special attention, teachers expect “extra” payments. In addition, the half-and-half children often need after-school tutoring to help them keep up. Many have not attended school full time before moving to their foster homes and are a grade or more behind. Others have emotional problems that interfere with studying. Foster parents usually don’t have time to provide the necessary tutoring, or they are poorly educated themselves and can’t keep up with the curriculum after the early grades.

For the meantime, Crossing Borders can pay the bills, though just barely. One day, after the children are older, Mary and Jim may decide to send them out of China on the new underground railroad, they told me. They and other Christian aid organizations that work in China are also exploring ways to get half-and-half children out of China legally and have them adopted in the West. For this to happen, the children’s legal guardians would need to be identified and agree to give up their rights.

It’s getting late, way past the children’s bedtime. We have been talking a long time, and the children are getting sleepy. But before Jim and the foster father walk me out to the street to find a taxi, Mary wants to tell me one more story about the half-and-half children. “Usually they don’t talk about their mothers,” she said. It’s too painful. But sometimes the subject comes up naturally in conversation, as it did with one little girl Mary supports in a foster home in another city. Mary was reading the children a bedtime story, when the child told her that Cinderella was her favorite fairy tale. The girl saw herself in the story of the impoverished, motherless child rejected by her stepfamily. The girl liked the story, Mary said, not because Cinderella married a prince or became rich. She liked it because Cinderella was happy even though she didn’t have a mother.