Nothing to Envy (37 page)

Mrs. Song’s interrogation lasted for nearly a month. She was transferred from the airport to a dormitory set up for newly arrived defectors by the intelligence service. She wasn’t allowed to leave the premises, but Oak-hee was permitted to visit her. The NIS’s first task was to ascertain that Mrs. Song was neither a spy nor a fraud, as undercover North Korean agents whose mission was to monitor the population of defectors had been caught over the years. The NIS was also screening for Korean-speaking Chinese posing as North Koreans to obtain South Korean citizenship and resettlement benefits that were worth more than $20,000. Mrs. Song was debriefed for two hours every morning, after which she had to write out notes of what had been discussed. She was asked to detail the location of major landmarks in Chongjin—the offices of the Workers’ Party, the security offices, the boundaries of the
gu
and
dong
, the districts and neighborhoods into which all Korean cities are organized. She found that she actually enjoyed the debriefing sessions: they gave her a chance to reflect on her life. In the afternoon, she would nap and watch television. The smallest creature comforts delighted her—the refrigerator stocked with complimentary juice boxes, each individually wrapped with its own straw.

She would later recall her stay with the NIS as the first real vacation of her life. After that, the hard work would begin.

IT IS NOT EASY
for people earning less than a dollar per month to be integrated into the world’s thirteenth-largest economy. South
Korea’s per capita income of roughly $20,000 per year is fourteen to fifty times greater than North Korea’s.

A good deal of propaganda on both sides of the DMZ is devoted to how North and South Koreans are the same
—han nar
, one people, one nation—but after sixty years of separation the differences between the people are significant. South Korea is one of the world’s most technologically advanced countries. While most North Koreans are unaware of the existence of the Internet, South Korea has a higher percentage of homes on broadband than do the United States, Japan, and most of Europe. North Korea has been frozen culturally and economically for the last half century. Their languages are no longer the same; the South Korean version is now peppered with words borrowed from English. Physically, too, the people have grown apart. The average South Korean seventeen-year-old male, fed on milk shakes and hamburgers, is five inches taller than his North Korean counterpart. North Koreans talk and eat like South Koreans did in the 1960s.

As the number of defectors increased in the 1990s, the South Korean government grew increasingly concerned about successfully integrating them into society. The nation’s think tanks assigned teams of psychologists and sociologists, historians and educators to come up with a plan. Although the number of defectors was small (as of late 2008, there were 15,057 in a country of 44 million), someday there might be millions if Korea were to be reunified. “If this relatively small group of North Korean defectors fails to adjust, our prospects for reunification are gloomy,” said Yoon In-jin, a South Korean sociologist involved in the studies. “If they succeed in making a new life here, we have hope of integrating. For that reason, we have to make every effort to help them so we can learn from their trials and their errors.”

The South Koreans studied various historical models. They looked at schools in Israel for newly arrived Jews from the former Soviet Union and North Africa, people who had exercised their right of return to the Jewish state but knew little of its language and culture. They also studied the problems of East Germans adjusting to life in the reunified Germany.

In 1999, they opened Hanawon on a secluded campus fifty miles south of Seoul. Something of a cross between a trade school and a halfway house, the center teaches North Koreans how to live on their own in South Korea. They are taught how to use an automatic teller machine and how to pay an electric bill. They are taught the Roman alphabet in order to read advertisements that use bits of English. North Koreans also must
unlearn
much of what they were taught before—about the Korean War and the role of the Americans in World War II. The defectors take classes on human rights and learn the mechanics of democracy.

In the classroom it all made sense, but once outside the confines of Hanawon, Mrs. Song would become terribly confused. Her class was taken on a field trip to buy clothes. They got haircuts. They went to a food court, where everybody was given money to buy their own lunch. They all got noodles; nobody could figure out what the other foods were.

Sometimes when Mrs. Song left the campus, she felt almost dizzy from the excitement. There was so much noise, so many lights that she couldn’t focus. Her eyes flitted between the huge animated screens fixed to the buildings—some twenty feet high—and the billboards. She couldn’t understand most of the billboards. HDTV, MTV, MP3, MP4, XP, TGIF, BBQ—it seemed like a code impossible to decipher. But the people themselves were what mystified her most. She knew they were fellow Koreans, but they looked like another race entirely. The girls wore such short skirts and tall boots made of real leather. So many had dyed hair—boys and girls with red and yellow hair, just like foreigners. They wore little plastic plugs in their ears, with wires draped into their pockets. Most shocking was seeing boys and girls walking arm in arm and even kissing each other on the street. Mrs. Song looked around, but nobody else seemed to notice. One day she went to a subway station in Seoul, where she watched crowds of people riding the escalators, marching down the corridors, switching between lines. She wondered how they knew which way to go.

Mrs. Song spent three months at Hanawon. At the end of her stay, there was a graduation ceremony. She was given a stipend of $20,000 to get started. And then she was on her own.

WHEN I MET MRS. SONG
in 2004 she’d been out of North Korea for two years. I was interviewing people from Chongjin for the
Los Angeles Times
. We arranged to meet at the paper’s office in Seoul. I opened the door to an immaculately dressed, tiny woman, who exuded confidence. She wore a large jade ring, and a pink polo shirt tucked into neatly pressed beige trousers. Everything from her cheery pastels to her perfectly coiffed hair suggested a woman in control of her life.

After she left Hanawon, Mrs. Song took a job as a housekeeper. She was used to working full-time in North Korea and felt she would be depressed if she stayed idle in her new life. She decided not to live with Oak-hee, but to get her own apartment, and rented a studio in a high-rise in Suwon, a city twenty miles to the south of Seoul where the rents were cheaper. By living frugally and continuing to work, she was soon able to afford to travel—something once beyond the reach of her dreams. She joined tour groups that catered to older women and explored every corner of South Korea. She even went back to China—this time as a tourist. She traveled to Poland with a group of fellow North Korean defectors who were speaking at a human rights conference. She made friends. She even dated a little. She loved going to the market to try new foods—mango, kiwi, papaya. She enjoyed eating out. She didn’t develop a taste for pizza or hamburgers, but she came to love the South Korean style of cooking beef and pork and barbecuing it at the table.

Every six months or so Mrs. Song and I would get together for a meal. When I worked on articles about North Korea I found her to be a particularly reliable commentator. She was by no means an apologist for the North Korean regime—“That rotten bastard!” she once said of Kim Jong-il, the only time I ever heard her use profanity—but she was not as embittered as most defectors I’d met. There were things she missed about North Korea—the camaraderie among neighbors; the free health care before the system broke down. She was nostalgic for her life as a young married woman. Her eyes would mist and her round face would soften when she spoke of her late husband.

“When I see a good meal like this, it makes me cry,” Mrs. Song apologized one night as we sat around a steaming pot of shabu-shabu, thinly sliced beef cooked in broth and dipped in a sesame sauce. “I can’t helping thinking of his last words, ‘Let’s go to a good restaurant and order a nice bottle of wine.’”

When it came to her son, she was entirely unable to speak. If I broached the subject, she would avert her eyes. Oak-hee told me later that her mother had never forgiven herself for rejecting him when he fell in love with the older woman and for being unable to provide for him.

But that was the past, a place where Mrs. Song mostly chose not to dwell. She relished her freedom and was determined to get the most out of her remaining years. She was bursting with curiosity. “I feel much younger now and much bolder,” she told me. As many questions as I asked about North Korea, she asked about the United States and other places I’d traveled. She would show up for our appointments full of energy and enthusiasm, always wearing a new, crisp, and cheerful outfit. After so many years sacrificing for others, she now took care of herself. When she developed a paunch—much to her astonishment after so many years of deprivation—she went on a diet. She always wore makeup. One day when I’d taken the train to Suwon to meet her, we spotted each other from across the crowded waiting room. As soon as we pushed in close enough to be within earshot, she called out, unable to restrain her excitement a moment longer, “Look at me. I did my eyes!”

She’d had plastic surgery to add the extra little crease in her eyelids to make herself look more Caucasian. It was the ultimate South Korean experience. Mrs. Song had arrived.

FOR ALL HER
eagerness to defect, Oak-hee wasn’t as happy in South Korea as her mother. Oak-hee was a more troubled person, quick to find fault with herself and others. It was always startling to see mother and daughter together: their heart-shaped faces and compact bodies so alike, their personalities so fundamentally different. Oak-hee dressed in black—black jeans, shiny black blouses, high-heeled black boots. With her angular wire-rimmed glasses and
plucked eyebrows, the effect was severe. Mrs. Song and her daughter were affectionate, stroking each other’s hair and hugging as though they’d only just been reunited, but they still fought about politics. Over lunch, a friend of mine who worked for an aid agency asked if they thought humanitarian aid was reaching the intended recipients in North Korea. Oak-hee thought that aid was being siphoned off by the military and party cadres and served only to strengthen Kim Jong-il’s hold over North Korea.

“But if it saves even a few lives—” Mrs. Song said.

Oak-hee cut her off. “You’re propping up an evil regime.”

Mrs. Song pressed her lips together into a straight line and didn’t speak much for the rest of the meal.

Oak-hee often seemed wrapped in a cloak of bitterness. She’d had money problems from the time she’d come to South Korea, in fact even before she left China. She had fallen in with a low-life crowd of Chinese and Koreans who made their living in the shadowy world of forgery, smuggling, and loan sharking. Mostly, though, they trafficked in people. They smuggled women across the river into China and they supplied stolen passports to get others into South Korea. When Oak-hee left North Korea the last time, she had no money to get herself from China to South Korea. One of the smugglers agreed to provide a passport and a plane ticket, in return for a fee of $14,000 to be paid from the defector’s stipend she would receive from the South Korean government. They signed the deal with thumbprints since neither knew the other’s real name.

The week after she was released from Hanawon, the smuggler called Oak-hee on her mobile phone. She’d just bought it—mobile telephones were invariably a defector’s first purchase—and couldn’t figure how he’d found her or gotten the number. He was insistent that she pay up immediately.

“I’m in Seoul. I’ll meet you in front of your apartment,” he told her.

Oak-hee panicked. The resettlement money was less than she had expected. Defectors in their twenties and thirties got smaller packages than older people because they were presumed to be able to work. She’d already paid $3,000 for the deposit on an apartment.
She agreed to meet the smuggler in front of a police station. After considerable negotiation, she convinced him to accept a lower fee, $8,000, just about all the money she had left.

After that, Oak-hee took a job in a funeral home, hoping to get her finances in order. She just might have, if she hadn’t been struck by a terrible longing.

She missed her mother. All along Oak-hee had been mulling the idea of bringing over her mother, and after she arrived in South Korea it became a fixation. She’d been surprised to see how well older people were treated.

“In North Korea, they don’t want you when you’re too old to work,” she said. “They’d just as soon get rid of you. In South Korea, I saw old people singing and dancing. I thought of my mother and how hard she had worked her whole life. I thought she deserved to live a little.”

Knowing that Mrs. Song would not be easily convinced to leave North Korea, Oak-hee turned to the same gang. Together, they came up with the plan to lure Mrs. Song into crossing the border to China. Oak-hee was worried that her mother could end up in a prison camp if something went wrong, and wanted her mother to be taken along the safest and least-frightening route. Defections were arranged like package tours and Mrs. Song went first class. Her package included the private car that drove her from Chongjin to the border, the bribes to the North Korean border guards who carried her on their backs across the river, and the stolen South Korean passport. “I could have done it cheaper,” Oak-hee explained, “but I wanted her to travel like a VIP.”