Quotes of the Day
The first glimpse of hell appears around a forested bend in China's northeastern Jilin province. Up ahead, the Yalu River narrows to a weed-choked span just 20 meters across. On one side is gaudy Changbai, a Chinese city with neon-tinted karaoke lounges and rowdy bars. The other side looks like a sprawling concentration camp, with barrackslike buildings and barbed wire strewn about. This is the North Korean town of Hyesan. A giant sign on a hill above the riverbank proclaims: "Long live General Kim Jong Il, Sun of the 21st Century!" But the 21st century doesn't appear to have graced Hyesan yet. At night, the city is pitch black, save one seven-story building that is inexplicably ablaze with light. The Chinese who peer across the river at the glowing building, which is empty of inhabitants and has no glass in its windows, suspect it is a showpiece to prove that North Korea has at least one of the trappings of modern civilization: electricity.
For many North Koreans, it's perhaps just as well that not much light shines from the Hermit Kingdom onto the river. For this narrow, watery stretch is where thousands of North Korean refugees have crossed secretly into China every year to flee famine and oppression. The vast majority are women. Although many men and children come for short stints of begging or manual labor before returning home with full bellies and a bit of cash, most North Korean women come to China for new lives. The younger, prettier ones often end up at the euphemistically named "beauty salons." But thousands more are sold by human traffickers as wives to Chinese men who are either too poor to afford a dowry or are considered undesirable to Chinese women because they are old, divorced or disabled. An ethnic-Korean aid worker who lives in the Changbai area estimates that about half of all North Korean women in China—some 95,000 women—arrived as bought brides. Here are the stories of how two such women—we've concealed their full identities for their protection—braved danger and hardship for a fresh start in China.
In February 1999 Ryu headed to Hyesan, where with the help of a middleman who assured her he'd bribed the border guards, Ryu waded across the river. She walked straight into a group of Chinese police staking out the area. After a night in jail, Ryu was forcibly repatriated back to North Korea and sent to a refugee-detention center. The camp consisted of five or six underground cells, each packed with about 80 people. Meals comprised a handful of boiled corn kernels and salty water. The good days, Ryu recalls, were when a guard with big hands dispensed the food, because that would mean a few more kernels of corn.
Because Ryu had a college education, she was allowed to work as a secretary at the camp, transcribing interrogation notes and doing basic bookkeeping. Beatings were common, especially if a detainee was suspected of dealings with South Koreans or Chinese. Ryu remembers a woman six months pregnant arriving at the camp. The baby's father was Chinese. Four guards grabbed the woman's limbs and threw her toward the ceiling over and over until the woman aborted the fetus. Ryu helped clean up the blood afterwards. "The guards said they hated Chinese babies," says Ryu. "The North Koreans hate the Chinese now, because they are rich and betrayed socialism."
After just two months, Ryu was released, she believes, because of her obedient service as a secretary. On the night of May 16, she and another North Korean woman crossed over to China, with the help of a different middleman. An hour later, the pair were ensconced in a safe house and gulped down an entire washbasin filled with rice and chives. It was the most satisfying meal Ryu remembers ever eating. Soon after, she was sold by the North Korean middleman to a Chinese smuggler for $36. In turn, the Changbai dealer sold her to a Chinese farmer in a village near the Jilin town of Baishan for $600. They now have a four-year-old daughter, and the farmer treats Ryu well. His family trusts her so much that she's even in charge of the family finances. Ryu has another child from her marriage to a North Korean back home. But she doesn't like to think about that child too much, because she has no idea if the girl is even alive.
Just down the street from Ryu lives another North Korean bride, whose tale has less of a storybook ending. Kim was a nurse back in North Korea and first tried to come to China seven years ago. Instead of crossing into a city, where she could melt into the crowds, Kim hiked up into the rugged mountains surrounding Changbai. Up in the alpine tundra, there were no border markings, and Kim wandered for days, unsure at first if she had reached China or was still in North Korea. To protect her chapped feet from the snow, she wrapped grass around her legs and hid in piles of leaves to avoid wolves. After days of walking on frostbitten feet, Kim reached a town and found work sorting eggs at a poultry factory. But a truck driver who was irked when she refused to sleep with him reported her to the police. On the truck back to North Korea, Kim swallowed a 50-yuan note wrapped in plastic. When she reached the detention center in Hyesan, she was searched, hosed down and beaten with an iron stick. But the next day, Kim's 50-yuan note reappeared, and she bribed her way out of the camp. A second journey to China a few months later also ended in failure. As a repeat refugee, Kim was dispatched to a gulag. This time, she had no 50-yuan notes to offer up. Every day for six months, she loaded bags of donated rice onto trucks, imagining what the rice would taste like. Her daily diet consisted of two corn cakes and salty water. "I saw people so weak that when they were kicked by the police they just fell down and died right there," recalls Kim. "We would bury them in a hole right where they died."
After her release from the labor camp, Kim tried yet again to reach China and finally succeeded. She was sold as a wife to a miner. But unlike Ryu, Kim has no love for her husband. He beats her, she says, and wastes their money gambling. Kim says she cannot complain, because her mother-in-law has threatened to report her to the police if Kim bad-mouths her son. The only option is to run away. Many North Korean wives do just that, which is why some Chinese men lock up their refugee brides at night.
For now, despite her abusive husband, 36-year-old Kim says she will stay put in Baishan. She has had enough of running away. Others may find it tough even to cross the border now. In August, China began replacing the armed police who used to guard the border with People's Liberation Army soldiers, presumably to stem the influx of North Koreans. Locals say the armed police, some of whom are ethnic-Korean Jilin natives, were easy for refugees to bribe; the PLA will probably be far less easily bought. Their garrisons were put in place before winter, when most North Koreans take advantage of the iced-over river to reach China. Standing in Ryu's kitchen, filled with pickled cabbage and smoked meat, Kim smiles. "I am very lucky to have gotten here before the border became more difficult," she says, before heading back home to the man who beats her.
- Hannah Beech | Baishan
- To flee oppression, many North Korean women escape to marry Chinese men. Here are two tales of desperation