Escape from North Korea

Angel represents a new generation of Korean-American activists. They are angry, fervent, and plainspoken. Unlike their immigrant parents and grandparents, they want to address the issue of North Korean abuses head-on. Nor do they have the regional prejudices and other cultural baggage that afflict the older generation. This younger cohort, now in their twenties and thirties, is outraged and driven. Kevin Park, a Korean-American from Seattle who became an activist on North Korea when he was a student at Pepperdine University, says older Korean-Americans have chastised him: You’re “wasting your time,” they say. The younger generation is different. “I’ve never met a second-generation Korean-American who said, ‘I don’t care about it,’ ” Park states.²

Raising awareness is a primary goal, and student activists are doing so on a growing number of campuses, where North Korea is becoming an increasingly popular concern. It is not up there yet with Darfur and Tibet as campus causes, but events about North Korea are turning up with increasing frequency on bulletin boards in student unions. The awareness campaigns aim to increase student understanding of life in North Korea and the atrocities that the Kim family regime is committing against the North Korean people. Many American students are ignorant about North Korea’s totalitarian system. Their knowledge of the country may not go beyond Team America, the cult comedy film that lampoons Kim Jong Il, the easily lampoonable late dictator.

Kim Ju-song, an alias for a high-ranking North Korean military defector, spoke at a student forum at Yale University. He opened his remarks by imploring his listeners to shed their preconceptions. North Korea is nothing like anything any American student has experienced, he told them. “If you do not abandon your knowledge of the place where you are living right now, if you do not abandon your way of thinking, you will not be able to understand how North Korea works,” he said. “I have visited a lot of countries. There is no country in the world that is like North Korea. The regime controls and represses its people.”

When a Yalie asked the defector what his trial had been like in North Korea before he was sent to jail, the defector looked at him as if he were crazy. There was no trial, he told the student. That’s not the way the system works in North Korea. “You need to think outside of the system you grew up with here,” he repeated. “It’s different in North Korea. If the government wants to arrest you, it will.” The reason Kim Ju-song was able to make the decision to leave North Korea, he said, was that he was privy to information about what life was like outside his country. He knew that an alternative existed.³

At the University of Connecticut gathering, Angel picked up a microphone and explained to the assembled students how she had become the voice of the voiceless North Koreans. By telling her personal story, she hoped to encourage other young people to support the same cause. “I’m from New Orleans,” she began. “I went to Louisiana State University. In the summer of 2008, I worked in Seoul at a school for refugees.”

Every summer she was in college, Angel went on a service trip to a different place in the United States or another country. She would find the placements through the international mission board of the Southern Baptist Church. In early 2008, as she was researching her choices for the coming summer, she heard about an opening on a mission to South Korea. The job was working at a school for refugee youth from North Korea. Angel thought it would be interesting to spend a couple of months in her mother’s native country and visit members of her extended family. “At the time I didn’t know much about the issue of North Korea at all,” she said. “I went in blindly.”

The students at the school for refugees were around her age or a few years younger. “They were young and vibrant,” she said. “They seemed just like me,” she said, “until I started to get to know them and to hear all their stories.” Then “it was heartbreak after heartbreak.”

As she heard more about life in North Korea, Angel was surprised and outraged by what she learned: “the human abuse, the famine, the food issues, how strict Communism was.” This was not something that her Korean relatives talked about or that she learned at school in the United States. Most of the North Korean students she worked with were alone in South Korea, having escaped from China on the new underground railroad without family members. Their parents were either dead, still living in North Korea, or they had been caught in China and repatriated and were now presumably serving terms in prison. A few students had parents hiding in China. One fortunate boy had a brother with him in Seoul.

There was an enigmatic girl who especially tugged at Angel’s heartstrings. The girl was fourteen years old and had severe emotional problems. If Angel moved close to her or tried to hug her, the girl would push her away and sometimes even bite. Her back was covered with scars, and it was obvious that she had been abused. Yet no one knew her story. She appeared to have no family. The girl had been hiding in China for nine years and had forgotten how to speak Korean, so it was difficult to communicate with her. When she was asked, through an interpreter, what had happened to her parents, she refused to answer. She just looked down at the floor.

Angel told this story to the university audience, but then, to end on an upbeat note, she closed with an anecdote about a boy to whom she had taught English. At the conclusion of her summer in South Korea, when she was about to return home to the States, the boy came up to her and said shyly in English, “Very thank you.” Angel gave a little laugh as she told that part of her story, and the audience laughed along with her. As she finished, someone in the audience shouted out, “Very thank you.”

Angel was traveling the country as a volunteer spokesman for the nonprofit, grassroots organization, Liberty in North Korea. LiNK has run many missions on the new underground railroad—including the aborted Shenyang Six escape in 2006, when six North Koreans and three LiNK activists landed in jail. LiNK is dedicated to two goals: raising awareness on college campuses about the humanitarian crisis in North Korea and helping the North Korean refugees in China. It was founded at Yale University in 2004 by two Korean-American students who were appalled by the plight of North Koreans in China and outraged at the silence of the Korean-American community. Today the organization has one hundred chapters on American campuses along with a chapter in South Korea and several in the United Kingdom. It dubs its spokesmen “Nomads,” because they wander from campus to campus. LiNK is nonsectarian, but, like Angel, many of its members are Christian, inspired by their faith to help North Korean refugees. It does not proselytize.

LiNK is a results-oriented organization. Part of its appeal to college students is that their contributions and volunteer work will have direct results. LiNK workers shelter North Koreans hiding in China, guide them on the new underground railroad to third countries, and help them arrange for permanent resettlement in South Korea or the United States. It runs a shelter in Southeast Asia for refugees who are waiting to be processed for exit visas. In the United States, it operates an outreach program to assist North Korean refugees who are trying to establish new lives there.

Also unlike most of the humanitarian organizations that assist North Koreans in China, LiNK is not publicity-shy. Just the opposite. It’s up front and vocal about its rescue missions, although it is careful not to reveal operational details. It has a robust website, and—in an effort to reach its college-age target audience—it’s active in social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Several of the refugees it has rescued now speak out on LiNK’s behalf to student and church groups in the United States and appear at fund-raisers. Hannah Song, LiNK’s PR-savvy president, left a high-profile job in advertising in Manhattan to work for the nonprofit.

In 2009, LiNK launched the Hundred Campaign, with a goal of rescuing one hundred North Koreans hiding in China. Each rescue costs an estimated $2,500, and LiNK challenged every chapter to raise enough money to pay for one North Korean refugee to escape from China. As part of its fund-raising effort for the Hundred Campaign, it produced a short documentary film that chronicled the actual rescue of five refugees in China in August 2010. The film, called Hiding, was shot in China with hidden cameras. It follows LiNK’s vice president, Justin Wheeler, as he prepares the refugees for the trip and then guides them across China to an unspecified country in Southeast Asia. It features interviews with North Koreans hiding in China, including a wrenching one with a twentysomething woman who had been pressed into service in a brothel. Her face was obscured, but you could see her hand moving up to her eyes every once in a while to wipe away tears. She declined Wheeler’s offer to help her escape on the new underground railroad. She was too scared. She couldn’t take the risk of being repatriated, she explained. Life in North Korea was too awful.

As a LiNK Nomad, Angel spent the autumn of 2010 spreading LiNK’s message at events at colleges and universities from Maryland to Maine. She was a member of a three-person team, which included Lindsay Capehart from Kansas City, Kansas, and Stefan Hutzfeld from Dusseldorf, Germany.⁵ The three Nomads traveled in a white van on which the yellow-and-black LiNK logo was painted in big, bold letters. They carried sleeping bags with them, and their hosts provided overnight accommodation, which usually meant a space on the floor of someone’s dorm room. If there wasn’t a LiNK chapter on campus, the Nomads’ visits were sponsored by the local Korean Students Association, Asian-American Students Association, or a charitable organization. In three months on the road, the Northeast Nomads made dozens of presentations.

Neither Lindsay nor Stefan is of Korean heritage. Lindsay first heard about the North Korean refugees in China when she was a student at Manhattan Christian College in Kansas and read about then Senator Sam Brownback’s efforts on the refugees’ behalf. “I was really confused about what Brownback was talking about,” she said. “I had only heard about the security situation in North Korea. So I did some research on it, and I started seeing facts about what was happening. I was blown away. I was really flabbergasted by that—that I didn’t know—because I consider myself aware.”

Stefan heard about North Korea from his older brother, who collected postage stamps and showed him some stamps from North Korea. Stefan learned from his brother that North Korea was a closed country, but he had no inkling of what that meant beyond the fact that mailing a letter there was impossible from most countries. Then he saw a video that a friend posted on Facebook, and he was shocked to discover that North Koreans were so oppressed. The online conversation about the video with his Facebook friends led him to LiNK. As a German, Stefan also was touched by the fact that Korea is a divided country. Many Korean-American students ask him about his German background and how it relates to his work on behalf of North Koreans. “I was born in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell,” he said. “My parents always told me about how it was when Germany was divided, but I never saw it. I never got to experience it. For me, Germany was always a united country. But in school we saw documentaries that showed how people were overwhelmed with happiness that Germany was united again. I thought it was something beautiful. If Korea could unite, there would be a lot of joy.”

Twenty-five students attended the LiNK meeting at the University of Connecticut. As is typical at many LiNK functions, most were Korean-American or foreign students from South Korea. Several students said that they attended because they knew little about North Korea and wanted to learn more. Even though they were South Korean or Korean-American, they explained, their families had never discussed the issue with them. A student from South Korea said he had learned more about North Korea from the Nomads’ hour-long presentation than from all his years growing up in Seoul.

One young man, born in the United States, said LiNK’s movie Hiding opened his eyes. Another man, born in South Korea, said he was shocked at what the film showed of China’s mistreatment of the refugees. A Korean-American woman also expressed her astonishment. “You [would] think someone would do something about it,” she said. Such reactions are typical, the Nomads told me. It’s hard for people to grasp that such atrocities are taking place, Lindsay said. “They feel like everyone should know that something like this is happening. They ask, ‘How could the world not know?’ ”

After the screening of Hiding, Angel went back onstage and talked about the ways students could get involved. Become a member of LiNK, she urged. Give us your email address. Start a LiNK chapter at UConn. Ninety percent of LiNK members are our age or younger, she informed the audience. Tell your friends about us. Angel urged students to buy LiNK T-shirts, which she would be selling at a table outside the theater after the conclusion of this event. “It’s hard to go up to someone and just start talking about LiNK,” she said. “But wearing one of our T-shirts will help provoke a conversation and give you an opportunity to talk about LiNK.”

While Angel was speaking, two donation boxes circulated through the audience. Angel, Lindsay, and Stefan had set a fund-raising goal of $10,000 for their tour, the sum needed to rescue four North Korean refugees in China. When we had met earlier in Washington, D.C., near the start of their campus tour, they had raised only $300. A month later, when we met in Connecticut, they had collected more than $4,000.

The three Nomads were now past the halfway mark of their tour. After the University of Connecticut, they would move on to Rhode Island, where they would be making their presentation the next night at Roger Williams University. Then on to Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, upstate New York, and Pennsylvania. They would work through Thanksgiving week, which they would spend in Canada, which does not celebrate the American holiday. Their last scheduled stop was Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in early December. Then they would head back to California to meet up with the Nomads from other sectors of the country and exchange notes.

Meanwhile, friends could follow their progress on Facebook. The three Nomads posted photos and videos from their tour along with a link to their blog. Their Facebook home page displayed a statement that served as a kind of one-line credo for their work of raising awareness of the plight of North Koreans: