Through the windows, I watched as the Chinese countryside passed before my eyes. On the seat of the taxi, Mom was worrying herself sick. We didn’t have even one penny to our names, but we told the driver that we would pay him when we arrived at our destination. When we began passing through more familiar landscape, my mom started to tense up. Had we turned completely crazy? In a few minutes, we would be back with the man whom we hated so much. Although we really didn’t have any better options, we feared that we might have been jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Keumsun was against returning to the Chinese farmer. In fact, I was the one who had convinced my mother to do so. To be honest, it was mostly because I wanted to see my little brother again, no matter what the price was. I missed him so much that he had started appearing in my dreams. And I was so worried for his future, at the hands of that unscrupulous Chinese peasant. Out of the three of us, I was the closest to him. While my mother and Keumsun worked in the fields around the farm, I, deemed still too frail for the hard work of agriculture, had taken care of him. I loved him, and the knowledge that I was going to see him again consoled me despite the somber reality of the future that was waiting for us on the farm.
* * *
Admittedly, we no longer knew where else we could go. Ever since our fortuitous escape in Chongjin a few weeks ago, we had been on the run, and owing to our status as fugitives, we were exhausted. Immediately after our liberation, we went straight north, toward the border, while laying low. Always we moved with only one goal in mind: to leave our homeland forever. The situation in North Korea had gotten so bad that our modest clothes made in China were worth a fortune there. We sold them, and with the bit of cash this brought us we were able to feed ourselves for three days. Then, with nothing left to lose, we headed toward the border.
Groping around in the dark, we found the path at the Tumen River, by now very familiar to us. But this time, luck was not on our side.
While we were preparing to cross the river, a border patrolman appeared. He brought us to the border patrol station for questioning, and then the next day we were transferred to a nearby military base for an even more intensive questioning.
“Did you go to China?” the soldier asked.
“No, I just went to do some business near the river, that’s all.”
I was lying and he didn’t believe me for a second.
“Do you have any money? Where did you come from?” the soldier wanted to know.
I didn’t answer. I was by then used to these interrogations and could handle myself well. He was insistent, but at least he was polite, which I appreciated.
And then we heard the verdict: we were going to be sent back to the labor camp where we had been taken a few weeks ago, when we had first been arrested.
After hearing the news, I felt hopeless. As soon as we left the base, Mom and Keumsun fell to the floor crying and refused to move an inch. I felt a little embarrassed, because I could tell they were trying to gain the pity of the officer, and I didn’t think it stood a chance of working.
But somehow it did. The man sympathized with our plight, but he didn’t seem to know what to do with us. Finally, after a long moment of hesitation, he told us that we could leave. With our feeble bodies and tattered rags for clothing, he must have thought that we would never be able to make it to China … but he was wrong.
* * *
That same night, we tried once more to cross the Tumen. Again, a border patrolman found us. In a panic, I ran to go hide in a nearby barn. To no avail: the policeman found me shortly after. Again, we repeated the same scenario. We spent the night at the station and then, the next day, we were transferred to the military base, where we were found ourselves face-to-face with the same officer yet again. Remembering us, he didn’t even bother interrogating us anymore, and he even gave us two pieces of candy. Then he let us escape again, warning us that we should be more discreet this time around.
That policeman showed himself to be compassionate. Since our first escape four years earlier, the number of people trying to flee from North Korea had increased significantly. In response, the regime had also increased the number of patrolmen along the border, but they didn’t know what to do with all of their miserable prisoners.
At eleven that night, we trudged through the freezing waters of the Tumen. Luckily, this time, no one came to bother us. In a few minutes, we reached the other side and were in China once again. Immediately, we bolted deep into the countryside, to get as far away as possible from the border. But, in the time since our first contact with the local population and our first stay in China, I understood that the atmosphere had changed quite a bit. At that time, the local residents offered us food and advice. However, as the number of North Korean escapees had been increasing, they stole from the farms, and the towns along the borders began to deteriorate. Now, no one trusted one another anymore, and we were without many options.
* * *
After three days of aimless wandering, we were still penniless and living on empty stomachs. And so it appeared that going back to the farm of my mom’s “husband,” at least temporarily, was the lesser of two evils. The idea of seeing that awful man again repulsed us but it was, for the moment, the only way we could survive. After one final moment of hesitation, we jumped into a taxi.
A few hours later, we pulled up on the main street of the village that we had left less than two months ago. Through the glass, I recognized the houses, and then the taxi approached the side that led toward the farm.
I held conflicting emotions within me. On one hand, I was afraid of seeing the farmer and his family again, the family that had treated us so poorly. But on the other hand, my heart skipped a beat whenever I thought about seeing my brother again. How was he faring? I feared the worst.
When we finally reached the esplanade in front of the farm, my Chinese “cousins,” the farmer’s nephew and niece, were the first ones to spot the car. They screamed in joy when they saw us through the windows. They looked so happy to see their two playmates again: Keumsun and me! This warmed my heart to see.
The farmer, alerted by the commotion, showed up at the entrance of the farm. He was flabbergasted at the sight of us. He could hardly believe his eyes and a big grin appeared on his face. For once, he seemed happy to see us. I got the impression that he never thought he’d see us again. He happily paid the taxi driver and even left a generous tip. Originally, we had offered the taxi driver eighty yuan for the ride, but the farmer gave him a hundred instead. It seemed as if he had really missed us, and that he was genuinely happy to have us back. But I knew it was just a mirage. For him, our return meant that he now had three sets of arms to exploit. And for a lonely man, it was always better to have a woman by his side.
I hardly spent any time dwelling on those thoughts. The only thing that mattered for me was to give my little brother a great big hug. I found him inside the farm. To my relief, he looked well. I felt tears run down my cheeks when I caught sight of him. His cheeks and his stomach were plump and he looked healthy and well fed. His skin was very tan, which we weren’t terribly happy to see, because Koreans think that light skin is a sign of beauty. But it hardly mattered, because he was smiling.
* * *
Even though we were back, it was impossible to live again on the farm as if nothing had happened. We had to change our survival tactics in China. A denunciation was almost certainly the reason behind our arrest. The police now recognized us and knew who we were, and if they found out we were back they wouldn’t hesitate to arrest us again. The farm was no longer a safe place for us. But where could we go instead?
As was her nature, Keumsun was the first to take the initiative. She wanted to go live in the city. I was a bit more cautious, as well as younger, and thus not as willing to take the same risks. Her decision stemmed largely from the attraction of living in the city: she had just turned eighteen and discovered the guilty pleasures of adult life. In this village, eighteen was the age that a woman typically got married. Our neighbors soon started to try finding husbands for each of us. They wanted to introduce Keumsun to suitors. They organized blind dates for her. At first, Keumsun refused. But, at the insistence of her friends and cousins, she finally agreed to go on one of these dates. She didn’t like the man she was matched with at all. Moreover, she had no intention of getting married at this age. Eighteen years old was far too young. She wanted to build a life for herself first.
To distance herself from the pressure she faced in the village, she landed a babysitting job in Sukhyun-Jin, a town that was at least an hour away from the farm. For her, it was the beginning of a new life, one of independence. She started to earn her own money. Some weekends when she returned to the farm, she would bring little gifts and cigarettes for the family. Later she would go work in another small city, Yongil, as a waitress in a restaurant, where the boss would exploit her illegal status. Nevertheless, living in the city was less risky than living in the countryside, because it was easier to stay anonymous among the crowded population. Moreover, it was a good idea for Keumsun and me to be separated now that we were adults. At least now, if the police came to take us, we could not be taken together.
For about six months, I keep myself busy at the farm by taking care of my brother and managing the household. I also started to make a bit of money. I often left to go to the forest and collect mushrooms and medicinal herbs that I would sell in the village whenever wholesalers came from the city. These herbs were critical in traditional Chinese medicine, and they are often very expensive. Sometimes I went fishing with my friends at the river, so that we could sell the fish for a profit. I couldn’t always go to school, but I still learned many things. There, you had to be proactive if you wanted to survive. And in China, if you had the determination and entrepreneurial spirit, you could go out and make money.
* * *
During the winter of 2002, six months after she left for the city, Keumsun asked me whether I wanted to come join her. She had found a job for me in a bakery in Won Chin, a city next to where she lived. I was sixteen, and I was nervous about leaving my mom for the first time, but I had to learn how to take care of myself. And so I accepted her offer.
There, I learned about the harsh reality of working in a business. I slept no more than five hours a night, in a little dorm situated on the fourth floor above the bakery. I helped bake the cakes very early in the morning. The bakery opened at eight a.m. each morning, but my workday began at five every morning with the others. My primary task was to break open the eggs and separate the yolks from the whites, and to supervise the baking. After the bakery closed, we had to clean the shop until late into the night. I didn’t get to see sunlight in that workshop, and I was exhausted from the sleep deprivation. Several times, I fell asleep on the job, forgetting the cakes in the oven and causing them to burn. I began setting an alarm to ensure that I would wake up before the cakes were done baking, thereby avoiding catastrophe.
This lifestyle was even harder on me because I was so far from my mom, but I held on. And at least I got to eat a lot of cakes. I quickly gained a lot of weight and actually became quite chubby. I weighed in at around 115 pounds—a record for me. Especially when you consider that more than once, I had nearly died of hunger. But I wasn’t happy. Koreans think that you have to be thin if you want to be pretty. I didn’t feel pretty anymore; I didn’t feel comfortable in my own skin.
At the bakery, no one knew that I was a North Korean living in China illegally, and owing to my ability to speak Chinese, I was able to hide my true identity. My boss might have suspected something, but he never said anything and had no problem paying me each month in cash. He never asked me for a residency permit. The first month, I made about three hundred yuan (about thirty-five dollars). My salary may have been modest, but at least I finally had a real job. I was so proud of myself. What’s more, for each of the following months, I received a raise of fifty yuan each month. At the end of six months, I had a monthly salary of six hundred yuan (about seventy dollars). But my employer took fifty yuan each month from my salary as a deposit that he said he’d give back to me in a year, if I were still working there. He didn’t want his employees to quit and work for one of his competitors after just a few months, after having been trained by him, which happens quite often in China.
During that time, my mom didn’t leave the farm for fear of being arrested. She often slept on the roof or in the mountains from fear of a denunciation. Worse, her relationship with our “in-laws” deteriorated, and the disputes flared up again. Her “husband” always suspected that my mom would try to flee with my little brother, and so he watched her constantly. Whenever I came to visit the farm, he forbade us from sleeping in the same room as my little brother. But my mom hung on. She wanted to stay near her son, despite the fighting and her constant fear of getting arrested.
* * *
Throughout the course of several months, I began to feel more and more comfortable at the bakery. But at the start of summer 2003, a new turn of events derailed the life I was building. One day, I was told to go to the counter in the bakery. There was a phone call for me. My heart started pounding in worry.
“I couldn’t take it anymore. I left the farm. I couldn’t stand that life anymore,” my mother informed me, with a hint of guilt in her voice.
She had had to leave her son behind her. She couldn’t handle the increasing number of police raids anymore. Each time, she had to crawl on all four limbs to the hills. She had to spend many nights alone on the roof, fighting off insects. She told me that her back was completely red, after having been bitten by so many bugs. And so one day she fled the farm without revealing her plan to anyone. She left on foot and then took a bus. She had since started working on another farm as a housemaid. She cooked and worked in the fields. She wasn’t paid, but in exchange she was given housing by this new family, who treated her much better than her “husband” ever had.
I was very surprised by her call and could not help but let my thoughts drift to my little brother, still alone at the farm, under the cruel hands of his father. But at the same time, I felt sympathy for my mother, and I completely understood her decision.
* * *
A few days after this call, my boss came to find me in the shop.
“You have a visitor. Your stepfather is looking for you at the counter.”
I was petrified. Trying to remain calmer than I felt, I asked my boss to tell him that I wasn’t here today. He agreed, without asking me any questions.
But three or four days later, the farmer came back again. He was undoubtedly trying to find my mother through any means he could. I managed to avoid him again, but I knew that he would not leave me alone and that he was ready to do whatever was necessary to get his hands on me. I knew that I was in danger. And so I left. I couldn’t stay there. I had to change my location. Without giving him any details, I told my boss that I had to quit. I had worked less than a year at the bakery, so I wasn’t able to get back the fifty monthly yuan that had been taken as a deposit during my training. But in any case, I didn’t have a choice. Luckily, my boss still let me stay on the fourth floor while I looked for other options.
My decision was well-timed, too, because the farmer never stopped trying to get ahold of me. Near the end of September, I received a panicked call from Keumsun. She told me that she had been taken hostage by our “stepfather.” The day was September 21, my mom’s birthday. Keumsun still worked as a waitress in Yongil, but without a phone number where we could reach her, we had not yet been able to update her on Mom’s recent escape. And so Keumsun had wanted to surprise our mother by returning to the farm to celebrate her birthday. When she got there, the man immediately saw an opportunity for blackmail, or at least a way to find my mother, and so he held her there. She had to wait for night to fall before she could escape.
My sister was at a loss and didn’t want to go back to her job at Yongil. Her objective was to get as far away as possible from this accursed farmer as quickly as possible, and to leave the countryside and this border region where the police swarmed in search of North Koreans.
“Let’s go to Dalian. It’s a large city, and we’ll have more opportunities to find work and less risk of getting arrested,” Keumsun said.
I got into contact with my mom again, and we persuaded her to leave with us to head south, to Dalian. It’s the largest metropolis in the region, and an entirely different environment waited for us there. I was hoping that this new environment would be a change for the better.
* * *
At the end of September, the three of us were finally reunited in Yongil, and we took the bus toward Dalian and its six million residents. We didn’t know anyone there. When we arrived, we spent two nights in a shabby hotel near the bus station. And then we discovered a help center for the unemployed where we stayed, and we started looking for work right away.
For four months, I would take up little jobs: handing out flyers, cleaning, cooking. Keumsun found a job as a waitress in a Korean restaurant. Mom was hired by an old, bedridden couple. The old man was essentially unable to leave his bed, so she had to take care of him all the time, washing him and caring for his needs. But it was a stable, full-time job. All of this let us save up money. At the beginning of 2004, I had made three thousand yuan (about three hundred and fifty dollars). While we were working hard, we felt safer and more secure. We could, once again, start planning for our future.
Keumsun, as usual, had grand ideas in mind, including some very specific plans. She proposed that we go farther south, to Shanghai, the economic capital of the country. She was bored at the restaurant and thought that there were few opportunities for her in Dalian. She was ambitious and wanted to try her luck in that immense, rapidly developing metropolis. And when Keumsun has an idea, it’s impossible to change her mind.
My mother was not quite ready to leave Dalian. But Keumsun had no qualms, and she decided to go alone. I wanted to stay near my mom. Moreover, I didn’t feel ready to take that step yet. I gave eighty yuan to my sister to help finance her journey, and we let her go to Shanghai. Maybe we would join her later.
The real reason my mom didn’t want to travel too much farther was because she wanted to see her son again. The Chinese New Year was coming up soon, and she dreamed of returning to the farm to make a surprise visit. We had accumulated a decent amount of money working in Dalian: more than three thousand yuan. It was a lot for us. It boosted our morale and gave us the idea that celebrating New Year’s “as a family” might be possible. A crazy idea, perhaps, but I really wanted to see my little brother. Mom thought that with this money, we would be able to buy groceries and even patch together a little party at the farm. As for me, I just wanted to spend a few days spoiling my little brother.
This idea would soon show itself to be one of the worst mistakes we made during our journey. We acted from the heart rather than from the head.
* * *
Two days before the Chinese New Year, we traveled unannounced to the farm, surprising the farmer and his family. We explained that we had made some money and come back to celebrate New Year’s with them. We were sincere: despite all the abuse and the drama we had suffered at their hands, the people on this farm were the closest thing to family we had in this country. And at any rate, there was now a baby that tied us all together forever.
But in the main room where everyone was reunited, my little brother was nowhere to be found.
The farmer was surprised to see us; he didn’t know what to say. He seemed to waffle between relief and anger. He didn’t turn us down, but right next to him, there was a man who was going to ruin everything. It was one of the farmer’s younger brothers, a delinquent whom we had rarely seen at the farm. Because he was a thief, he often had run-ins with the police. And now he immediately saw an opportunity to exploit this situation. He told us that we would not see our baby unless we first handed over some of our money to him. It was blatant blackmail.
We were crushed. We had come here with good intentions, to spend some happy times together, to reconcile. But there was no way we would give in to this blackmail. The first night, we tried to stay calm, hoping that the atmosphere at the farm would improve after a few hours. We slept in the big room. The next morning, my mom tried to take the lead and asked her “husband” directly about the reasons behind the blackmail. His defense was weak at best. And just when it seemed like he was about to lower his guard, his younger brother appeared and showed himself to be unrelenting.
Hours went by, and my little brother was still nowhere to be seen. We became angrier and angrier. We felt betrayed.
And that’s when the storm broke. There was yelling everywhere. Mom decided that enough was enough. We would be better off leaving immediately. We would have to miss our chance to see the child; they had left us no choice. Unhesitatingly, she stood up and pulled me toward the front door. It was already dark outside. We walked through the night along the esplanade, with no intention of returning. But suddenly, our “uncle” caught up to us and tried to block us from leaving. The farmer seized our backpacks and carried them back to his house. He wanted our money; it was all they cared about. We fought and fought and argued until we finally managed to escape again. The farmer didn’t follow us. He was convinced that by snatching our backpacks, he had taken possession of our money. What he didn’t know was that my mom had hidden the money behind her belt. There was no going back for us now.
We ran as fast as we could along the road that led toward the village. The ground was slippery because of all the snow and ice. It was the middle of January, bitterly cold out, and the ground was covered in a thick blanket of snow. But no matter, we did not have a minute to lose. As soon as the farmer and his brother realized our bags held no money, they would come chasing after us. We had to get off the road so that we could obscure our path. And so we ran across the fields, through the pitch-blackness of the night. Even though the snow was up to my knees, I continued at a dead run until I could no longer breathe. We had left in such a rush that I didn’t even have the time to put on my shoes. I was still wearing my slippers. But there was not a moment to lose. We had to get as far away as possible from that godforsaken farm. We forced ourselves to move forward, right up until dawn.
This is how we celebrated Chinese New Year 2004. What a nightmare. At that time, I didn’t yet know that I had set foot on the farm for the last time in my life.
In the early morning, after our mad dash through the white countryside, we finally found a bus stop next to the road. We headed toward the village where the bakery I used to work at was located. There, I bought some warm clothes and shoes. We found a run-down hotel, which cost five yuan (less than a dollar) per night, where we could rest a little.
It was the worst New Year’s of my life.