Nothing to Envy (38 page)

Oak-hee plunged deeper into debt. She signed up for extra shifts at the funeral home, but the overtime wasn’t enough to cover her payments. She tried to think of other ways of making money. She was a thirty-eight-year-old woman whose only professional experience had been exhorting people to work harder for Kim Il-sung—hardly a marketable skill in South Korea.

She turned to the karaoke business.
Noribang
, as they are called, literally song rooms, are designed for guests, usually male, to relax by singing. The clubs provide private rooms with sound systems, microphones,
video monitors, soft drinks, and snacks. The real attraction, however, are the hostesses who sing along, dance, pour drinks, and engage in a little flirtation—or more. Oak-hee’s role in this enterprise was to recruit young women, drive them to and from the clubs, and make sure they didn’t get into trouble with customers. Her territory was the vicinity around Suwon. Most of the karaoke bars’ clients were construction workers living in temporary housing who had nothing else to do at night. Oak-hee had some twenty girls under her wing, all of them North Korean. They were mostly in their early twenties and had been recruited straight out of Hanawon.

“They come to South Korea and they have no skills,” Oak-hee explained. “They learn quickly that they work in an office or a factory and make nine hunded dollars for a month’s work. Here they can make a hundred dollars in one night,” Oak-hee explained one evening when I accompanied her on her rounds. She was driving a Hyundai van, the floor strewn with crumpled cigarette packs and cassette tapes of psalms. It was 5:00
P.M.
and Oak-hee was just starting work. She followed the rush-hour traffic out of Suwon, then exited the highway onto a two-lane road lined with fields and greenhouses. At little towns along the way, she stopped to pick up women, some of whom looked like schoolgirls playing dress-up in their spiky-heeled sandals. Although her business is considered illegal by the police, Oak-hee insisted her girls were not prostitutes. “I don’t force them to do anything. I tell them, All you have to do is sing and dance and snatch money from the customers.’” The business was easier here than in the big city. “They have to do more in Seoul than they do out here. In Seoul, the men in business suits pay for drinks and then they expect something from the girls. These construction workers are rough, but naïve.”

The job paid Oak-hee well enough to have allowed her to bring out both of her sisters, at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars. Her youngest sister came with her five-year-old daughter. Her middle sister brought her husband and two young sons. The sisters now both work in the karaoke business, too.

The only family members Oak-hee has not been able to get out are those she loves the most—her own children. She is racked with
guilt over this. “I sacrificed my babies to save myself,” she berates herself. The last time I saw her was in the summer of 2007; her son was eighteen years old, and her daughter sixteen. She hadn’t seen them since the night in 1998 when she fled Chongjin in her nightgown. However, she regularly sent them money through brokers in China who would take a commission and then get a smuggler to carry it across the border. Shortly after she left North Korea, an illegal phone service started up in towns close enough to the border to pick up Chinese mobile telephone signals. As a result, Oak-hee was able to speak with her estranged husband every few months. He would travel to Musan to use a smuggled Chinese phone, but he would not let her speak to the children. He also refused her offer to bring them to South Korea because he suspected, correctly, that she would no longer send money if she had the children.

“I had a dream the other night about my children,” she told me. “I’m holding my son’s hand. I’m carrying my daughter on my back. We are all running, trying to escape from North Korea. There is a tall man wearing a railroad conductor’s uniform, walking toward us. I’m not sure, but I think it is my husband and he’s trying to stop us.” She wakes up to the fact that she’s a world away without them.

Kim Hyuck, 2004
.

T
HE QUALITIES MOST PRIZED IN SOUTH KOREA—HEIGHT, FAIR
skin, affluence, prestigious degrees, designer clothes, English-language fluency—are precisely those that the newly arrived defector lacks, which accounts for the low self-esteem typically found among North Koreans in the South, such as Oak-hee. South Koreans weren’t much better off fifty years ago, but North Koreans remind them of a past they would rather forget. The defectors also augur a frightening future, with good reason—South Koreans fear that the collapse of Kim Jong-il’s regime will see their country overrun by 23 million people in need of food and shelter. Although political correctness
dictates that all Koreans yearn for their missing kin (“reunification is our desire, even in our dreams,” South Korean schoolchildren dutifully sing), some view the prospect with dread. Think tanks in Seoul regularly churn out reports estimating how much it would cost to reunify, with figures ranging from $300 billion to $1.8 trillion. Young people, born long after the end of the Korean War, have less sentimentality about the missing other half of Korea. They would rather ignore the impoverished, nuclear-armed dictatorship looming above them. In the blur of their busy lives, working the longest hours of any developed nation, playing hard, driving their Hyundais fast, and listening to their iPods loud, it is easy to forget.

For all the support provided by the government, defectors can sense the pity and fear and guilt and embarrassment with which the South Koreans view them. The mixed welcome is part of what makes them feel like strangers in their homeland.

DR. KIM HAD
no intention of defecting to South Korea. When she crossed the Tumen River in 1999, her sole destination was China. Her plan was to find the relatives whose names and last-known addresses her father had scribbled down before his death. She figured they would help her to find some kind of work. She could eat enough to recover her strength, then save up money to bring over her son. Eventually, she wanted to return to Chongjin and her job at the hospital. Despite the gnawing hunger and her quarrels with the Workers’ Party, she still felt she owed a debt to the country that had provided her schooling.

As it happened, Dr. Kim’s resolve weakened during her first hours in China when she saw the big bowl of white rice and meat set out for the dog. With each passing day, there was a fresh observation that would heighten her outrage over the lies she’d been fed. Everything that transpired propelled her further and further away from the fatherland and from the beliefs she once held dear, until it became impossible for her to return.

As she nudged open the gate to the farmhouse, the dog started barking furiously, waking its owners. They were ethnic Koreans, an older woman and her adult son. They knew from Dr. Kim’s frozen
clothing and emaciated features that she was a newly arrived refugee. They invited her inside, gave her dry clothes and a hot meal. These strangers could have received several hundred dollars had they sold her as a bride—she was thirty-four years old and reasonably attractive—but instead they put her up for two weeks and helped her find her father’s relatives. There, too, she was met with astonishing generosity. The relatives she’d never met accepted her immediately as their kin.

At first, Dr. Kim had no trouble blending in with the other ethnic Koreans. She learned a little Chinese. She got a job in a restaurant making packaged lunches for workers. But by 2000, the Chinese police had redoubled their efforts to arrest North Korean defectors. Dr. Kim was caught three times. Each time her relatives bribed officials to gain her release. After the last arrest, Dr. Kim decided it was too dangerous to remain in northeastern China. She took a train to Beijing to look for a job. Passing herself off as an ethnic Korean from Yanbian, she answered an advertisement for a Korean-speaking nanny.

Dr. Kim’s employer was a working mother, a South Korean professor who had come to China with her five-year-old for a one-year sabbatical. Dr. Kim liked the professor and embraced the opportunity to live in a comfortable apartment and help raise a child. She proved to be an extremely competent nanny and housekeeper. As the end of the academic year approached, the professor proposed that she stay on with the family when they returned to South Korea. Many affluent South Korean families employed ethnic Koreans from China as their nannies.

Dr. Kim felt she had no choice but to confess. She blurted out her life story—the divorce and the loss of custody of her son, her father’s suicide after Kim Il-sung’s death, the years of semistarvation, the dying children at the hospital.

“Oh my God. You’re a doctor!” the professor said. The women hugged and cried together. “If I had known, I would have treated you differently”

“If you’d known, it would have been impossible for me to work for you. And I needed the job.”

The confession brought a rapid end to Dr. Kim’s career as a
nanny, but the professor proved true to her word. She promised to bring Dr. Kim to South Korea anyway. A few months after her departure, she put Dr. Kim in touch with a broker.

In March 2002, Dr. Kim arrived at Incheon Airport, euphoric at the prospect of starting a new life. But these feelings did not last long. Dr. Kim was convinced by a man she met at church to invest most of the $20,000 resettlement money in a direct sales operation in which she was supposed to peddle soap and cosmetics to acquaintances. Dr. Kim hadn’t learned enough in her month of orientation to recognize a scam; the sales proposition turned out to be a pyramid scheme, and she lost nearly all of the government stipend. Then she experienced another setback: she learned that South Korea wouldn’t recognize her medical training. If she wanted to practice medicine, she would have to start all over again, applying to medical school and paying for it herself because she was too old to qualify for a government scholarship. Dr. Kim grew bitter. Seven years of medical school and eight years of practicing medicine were all for nothing. She veered between self-pity and self-hatred. She felt residual guilt over deserting North Korea. She fantasized about suicide.

When I met Dr. Kim in 2004, I asked her if she regretted coming to South Korea.

“I wouldn’t have come here if I knew what I know now,” she answered, the only defector I’d ever met who would admit as much, although I suspect others felt similarly. I couldn’t help noticing that Dr. Kim still looked like a North Korean. She wore her hair pulled back and tied with a black velvet ribbon and painted her bow lips a shade of red that was straight out of a 1960s Technicolor movie. She reminded me of the Workers’ Party members I had seen in downtown Pyongyang.

When I met up with her a few years later, she had thoroughly reinvented herself. I scarcely recognized the woman who walked into the chic new Japanese restaurant in Seoul in the summer of 2007. She wore her hair in a shoulder-length shag, she wore blue jeans, and from her ears dangled long beaded earrings.

“I got tired of that tacky North Korean look,” she told me.

She looked much younger, like a student, and in fact, she was. After years of fighting the South Korean medical board, she bit the
bullet and at age forty began a four-year medical program. She was living in a dormitory with classmates nearly two decades younger. Her studies, she told me, were difficult, not because her training in North Korea had left her ill-prepared but because the South Korean medical school used English terminology that was completely unfamiliar to her. The only foreign language she had studied was Russian. She looked rejuvenated by the experience, though. After graduation, she planned to resume her medical career, this time specializing in geriatrics. Her mother had died a miserable death from Alzheimer’s. Dr. Kim dreamed of opening a nursing home, perhaps even a chain of nursing homes. She hoped that one day, when the North Korean regime had fallen, she might be able to take South Korean ideas of elder care back to Chongjin. Perhaps it was a pipe dream, but it helped her bridge the divide between her past and present selves and ease the guilt about what she’d left behind.

THE SAD TRUTH
is that North Korean defectors are often difficult people. Many were pushed into leaving not only because they were starving, but because they couldn’t fit in at home. And often their problems trailed after them, even after they crossed the border.

This was especially true of Kim Hyuck. When he arrived in South Korea at the age of nineteen, he was the same as he had always been—poor, short, homeless, and without family or connections to help him make his way.

Hyuck was released from the labor camp Kyohwaso No. 12 on July 6, 2000. He was so weak from malnutrition that he could barely walk a hundred meters before needing to rest. He stayed at a friend’s home while contemplating his next move. Initially, Hyuck had planned to resume working as a smuggler, though taking better care not to get caught, but the labor camp had shattered his confidence. At eighteen, Hyuck had already lost the illusion of invulnerability that allows teenage boys to be so fearless in the face of danger. He didn’t want to be caught again; he didn’t want to get beaten. He was tired of running. There was nothing for him in North Korea; and if he escaped to China he would be hunted down. He decided his only chance was to make a break for South Korea. He had no idea how
he would get there, but he had heard rumors about South Korean missionaries who helped homeless youth like himself. So when he crossed the Tumen for the last time, on Christmas Eve, 2000, he set out to find a church.