Nothing to Envy (36 page)

“You traitor! You’re no daughter of mine,” she screamed into the phone before slamming down the receiver.

Over the next three days, Oak-hee called repeatedly. Mrs. Song refused to take the calls. Finally she relented.

Oak-hee sobbed into the telephone.

“Mother, I love you. I want you to come live with me here.” Oak-hee told her a little bit about her life. She had a job. The South Korean government had given her money when she arrived to get settled.

“If it’s so wonderful in Seoul why are you crying?” demanded Mrs. Song.

Mrs. Song figured that the South Koreans, puppets of the Yankee imperialist bastards, had corrupted her daughter with money. Once they’d extracted enough information from Oak-hee, they’d torture and kill her. That’s what Mrs. Song had heard about South Korea’s treatment of North Korean defectors. She had no reason not to believe it.

“It’s not like that, Mom,” Oak-hee protested. “I’m crying because I miss you. I want you here.”

Mrs. Song didn’t want to listen. She told Oak-hee she wanted to return to North Korea as soon as she recovered from the journey. She would rest up for a few more days and build her strength.

She lounged around the house, napping, eating, and watching television. The house had a huge white satellite dish that received South Korean television. South Korea’s soap operas were very popular and Mrs. Song quickly got hooked on one called
Glass Slipper
, about two orphaned sisters separated as children. When that wasn’t playing, she’d flip through the channels to look for the soccer tournament.

The 2002 World Cup was being co-hosted by South Korea and Japan. Not since 1988, when South Korea hosted the Olympics, was there so much footage from Seoul. Mrs. Song wasn’t that interested in soccer, but she was intrigued by the glimpses of South Korea she saw in the background. She couldn’t help but notice the cars, the high-rises, the shops. During the commercial breaks, there were advertisements for mobile telephones and other things that Mrs. Song had never heard of.

When the South Korean team beat Poland, tied the United States, and beat Portugal, Italy, and Spain to reach the semifinals—the first Asian team to do so—millions poured out into the streets to celebrate. They wore red T-shirts and horns with little red lights for the team’s fan club, the Red Devils. There they were, Koreans just like her, speaking the same language, but looking so beautiful, so happy, and so free.

It was hard for Mrs. Song to trust anything she saw on television. She knew well enough from a lifetime in North Korea (not to mention twenty-five of those years married to a journalist) that images could be manipulated. The Workers’ Party lectures had warned her that foreign television broadcasts were designed to undermine the teachings of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. (“The South Korean puppets under the control of the U.S. CIA wickedly connive to use these specially made materials to beautify the world of imperialism,” read one such lecture.) She suspected (correctly) that her generous hosts were being paid by Oak-hee to brainwash her into going to South Korea.

But it couldn’t all be made up. And she couldn’t dispute what she saw for herself in China—the abundant foods, the cars, the appliances.

Her hosts had an automatic rice cooker with a sensor that turned it off when the rice was done. Most of their appliances confused her, but the rice cooker was an endless source of fascination. Long ago, she’d owned a crude rice cooker, nothing like this one. It had been confiscated by the police because you weren’t supposed to use electricity for cooking.

Every morning when she heard the beeping of the rice cooker, signaling that breakfast was ready, Mrs. Song marveled at the technology.
It was true, she thought, North Korea was years, maybe decades, behind China. And who knew how far behind South Korea? She wondered what her poor late husband would have thought of all she was seeing here in China. Although she hadn’t left the house since she’d arrived, she felt like she was having a great adventure just exploring the kitchen and turning on the television. She would have liked to share it with her husband. She thought of Chang-bo especially when she was eating. How that man loved to eat! He would have so enjoyed the sausage. Her eyes watered at the thought. Then her thoughts drifted to her son. Her memories were so tinged with guilt and shame that she couldn’t even speak about him. So strong, so handsome—such a tragedy to have lost him at twenty-five. How much life he had missed. How much they had all missed, herself too, her daughters, locked away in North Korea, working themselves to death. For what? We will do as the party tells us. We will die for the general. We have nothing to envy. We will go our own way. She had believed it all and wasted her life. Or maybe not. Was it really over? She was fifty-seven years old, still in good health.

These were the thoughts drifting through her head one morning as the thin light of dawn seeped into her room. As she stirred to consciousness, she heard the chirp of the rice cooker in the kitchen. She sat up with a start. This was her wake-up call. She was ready to go.

Mrs. Song at the market in Seoul, 2004
.

O
N A TUESDAY MORNING IN LATE AUGUST 2002, MRS. SONG WAS
buckled into the seat of an Asiana Airlines flight from Dalian to Incheon, the international airport in South Korea. She was traveling under a false name and carrying a forged passport. She knew only one other person on the plane—a young man sitting a few rows away. He’d come to her hotel room at 6:00
A.M.
to give her the passport, which had been stolen from a South Korean woman of about the same age, the original photos extracted with a razor blade and replaced by Mrs. Song’s. If questioned, she was to say she was a South Korean tourist who had spent a long weekend in Dalian, a popular seacoast resort just across the Yellow Sea from Korea. To support her cover story, Mrs. Song was outfitted in new clothes that would have looked outlandish in North Korea—capri-style jeans and
bright white sneakers. She carried a sporty backpack. Her handlers had pierced her ears—something women in North Korea didn’t do—and her hair had been cut short and permed in a style favored by South Korean women of a certain age. Mrs. Song had spent two weeks in China being fattened up and groomed so that she wouldn’t look like a refugee. The only thing that might give her away was her guttural North Korean accent. She was advised not to make small talk. To avoid striking up a conversation with a fellow passenger, she was told to remain in her seat for the duration of the eighty-minute flight.

She sat perfectly still, her hands folded on her lap. She wasn’t nearly as nervous as one might expect under the circumstances. Her serenity came from the certainty that she was doing the right thing. She was at peace with her decision to defect. The morning at the farmhouse when she awoke to the sound of the rice cooker, her confusion had lifted. She had decided to accept Oak-hee’s invitation to South Korea. She wanted to see with her own eyes the world she had glimpsed on television. Her daughters, her grandchildren would have their chance—the situation in North Korea couldn’t last forever—but she had only so many years left. She would seize this opportunity, but first she wanted to go back to Chongjin to say a proper good-bye to her younger daughters. She wanted to explain her decision and give them the money that Oak-hee had left for her in China—almost a thousand dollars. “I can’t let your sisters think I’m dead,” she told Oak-hee. Oak-hee argued against it, worrying that her mother would lose her nerve or that her younger sisters would dissuade her, but Mrs. Song was insistent.

Her stay in Chongjin lasted one month because the Tumen River flooded during the rainy season; still Mrs. Song did not for a moment waver. She maintained a sense of purpose that carried her through the riskiest moments in her defection. The smugglers that Oak-hee had hired to bring her to South Korea were astounded that this sweet little grandmother carrying a doctored passport could board an international airliner without breaking into a sweat.

Getting out of China and onto the plane was the most dangerous part of the journey. Had the Chinese immigration authorities detected her forged passport, she would have been arrested and sent
back to North Korea to face prison camp. Only one hurdle remained after the plane landed in South Korea. Her passport wouldn’t be convincing enough to fool the South Koreans, who would quickly discover it was stolen during a routine check. In fact, the young man on her plane would reclaim it before they landed and disappear into the crowd.

“Pretend you don’t know me,” he told her. She would have to wait in the ladies’ room until he was safely out of the airport. Then she would go to the immigration counter and tell them the truth.

She was Song Hee-suk, fifty-seven years old, from Chongjin. She had lost half her family during the famine and was now seeking a new life for herself with her daughter in South Korea. There was nothing more to hide.

IN ARTICLE III OF
its constitution, South Korea holds itself out as the rightful government of the entire Korean peninsula, which means that all of its people—including North Koreans—are automatically citizens. The right of North Koreans to citizenship was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1996. The reality, however, is more complicated. In order to exercise the right of citizenship, North Koreans must get to South Korea by their own volition. A North Korean cannot demand the right at the South Korean embassy in Beijing or at one of the various consular offices. Out of residual loyalty to its Communist ally and also to prevent millions of North Koreans from streaming across the border, China will not permit asylum seekers to present themselves at these diplomatic offices. The Chinese are aware that an exodus of East German defectors through Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1989 forced the opening of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the East German government.

The South Korean government, too, is content to keep the number of refugees down to manageable levels. A flood of defectors coming south would be a great financial and social burden.

Those who make it into the country use various subterfuges. If they have money or connections, they can get fake passports and fly to South Korea. Alternatively, they can slip out of China into neighboring countries such as Mongolia or Vietnam, where the embassies
are not as restrictive about accepting defectors. A small number have made it into European embassies or U.N. offices in China and requested asylum.

Only a small fraction of the 100,000 or more North Koreans in China are able to make it to South Korea. In 1998, there were just 71 North Koreans who requested South Korean citizenship; in 1999, the number rose to 148; in 2000, there were 312 defectors; and in 2001, there were 583. In 2002, 1,139 North Koreans were admitted. Since then, anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 have been arriving steadily each year.

By the time Mrs. Song arrived, South Korean officials were accustomed to North Koreans showing up unannounced without documents at the airport. Her arrival at Incheon would set off a flurry of activity, but no panic.

MRS. SONG WAS
disoriented the minute she stepped off the plane. She had been in an airport only once before—boarding the plane that morning in China—and it was nothing like this. The
$5.5
billion Incheon airport had opened the year before, not far from the beach where General Douglas MacArthur’s troops landed in 1950. It is one of the largest airports in the world, a colossus of glass and steel. Sunlight streamed through the glass panels of the long arrivals corridor. People glided effortlessly along a moving walkway from the gates. Mrs. Song didn’t know where to go, so she fell in step with the other passengers while keeping a safe distance from the man who had been her escort. When the other passengers queued up at the immigration counter, she ducked into the ladies’ room, which she found as confusing as the rest of the airport. She couldn’t figure out how to flush the toilet. The faucets over the sinks turned on and off automatically, without a touch. She poked her head out of the ladies’ room to see if the man had gone, but she spotted him from behind, waiting to go through immigration, so she stayed put. She arranged her newly permed hair and freshened her makeup, gazing into the mirror at the unfamiliar face staring back at her.

The next time she checked, he was gone. She ventured out in search of a security official to approach. She practically collided
with a very tall man whose badge and photo ID were at Mrs. Song’s eye level. She bowed low, as one does when beseeching an official, and spoke her rehearsed line.

“I have come from North Korea. I am requesting asylum here,” she said.

The man was a janitor. He looked startled, but he knew what to do.

“How many of you are there?” he asked, knowing that most defectors arrived in groups. She told him she was alone. He steered her to an office next to the immigration counter. Telephone calls were made and within minutes agents arrived from the National Intelligence Service (NIS), South Korea’s equivalent of the CIA.