Nothing to Envy (39 page)

The most Christian country in Asia after the Philippines, South Korea sends missionaries spreading the gospel and dispensing humanitarian aid throughout Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. In contrast to the general ambivalence most South Koreans show defectors, the missionaries are passionate about the plight of North Koreans. Thousands of South Korean missionaries—sometimes joined by their Korean-American counterparts—have flocked to northeastern China, where they work quietly so as not to provoke the Chinese authorities, operating small, unregistered churches out of private homes.

At night, their red neon crosses glow eerily in otherwise dark patches of countryside. Other safe houses for North Koreans are known only by word of mouth. Since the UN. High Commissioner for Refugees and the mainstream nongovernmental organizations cannot overtly violate Chinese laws against sheltering North Koreans, the missionaries fill an important void by providing food and shelter to refugees.

Hyuck found his way to a church in Shenyang, the largest city in northeastern China. The church was run by a South Korean businessman who owned a furniture factory and was rumored to have the connections and money to arrange safe passage to South Korea.

“I want to learn about Christianity,” Hyuck lied.

Hyuck submitted himself to the routine. He and a handful of other defectors rose at 5:00
A.M.
and prayed. Then there was breakfast, exercise, Bible study, dinner, and then more prayer before they went to sleep at 9:00
P.M.
It went on like that every day, except on weekends, when they would occasionally play soccer. Like other North Koreans his age, Hyuck had never heard of Jesus Christ. The churches in Chongjin had been closed down decades before he was born; older people who still practiced did so in private. What little he’d been told about Christianity came from his elementary school’s reading primers in which missionaries appeared as stock villains, duplicitous and cruel. Hyuck was still cynical about Christianity. He felt that the South Korean church was forcing him to swallow its
propaganda in return for food and shelter. Then again, he felt somewhat guilty about deceiving them by pretending to be a believer. Gradually, his attitude softened. After a while, as he murmured the words of the prayers, he felt the comfort he had not enjoyed since his early childhood when he recited a poem about Kim Il-sung and had something greater than himself to believe in.

Only this time when he said “Uri Abogi,” our father, he meant God, not Kim Il-sung, and when he spoke of the son, he meant Jesus, not Kim Jong-il.

After five months at the church, the leader suggested to Hyuck that it was time for him to move on. The church was under constant surveillance by Chinese police and feared for the safety of the refugees. The man gave Hyuck 1,000 yuan (about $125) and asked him to lead a group of refugees to the Mongolian border. From there, they could try to reach South Korea.

If Mrs. Song’s passage by airplane with doctored South Korean passports was a first-class defection, the Mongolian route was akin to going steerage class. But for someone without money, it was the best way to go. Unlike the Chinese, the Mongolians allowed the South Korean embassy in Ulaanbaatar, the Mongolian capital, to accept North Korean defectors. In fact, if North Koreans managed to sneak across the Chinese border into Mongolia, they would be arrested by Mongolian border police and turned over to be deported—to South Korea. Getting arrested in Mongolia was in essence a free plane ticket to Seoul. As a result, Mongolia had become a major depot on what had become a veritable underground railroad ushering North Koreans into South Korea.

Hyuck and the other refugees took a train to Erenhot, the last town in China before the Mongolian border, a desert outpost with more camels and sheep than people. There were six North Koreans in all, including a three-year-old and a ten-year-old boy whose father was already in South Korea. Their plan was to hook up at a safe house with another group of North Koreans who were coming up from Dalian on a separate train. One of the people in the other group knew the terrain and would lead them across the border.

But everything went wrong. While still on the train, Hyuck got a panicked phone call informing him that the other group had been
arrested. His group had no choice—it was too late to turn back. They couldn’t go to the safe house because it was probably under surveillance. They had to throw away their mobile phones because they could give away their location to police. Hyuck and the other adults conferred. They had been briefed on the route and had a hand-drawn map. They decided they would head for the Mongolian border anyway.

The refugees hid out near the train station in Erenhot until 9:00
P.M.
, waiting for the light to seep out of a long summer day so they could make their way in the dark. Their instructions were to follow the main railroad line that headed north to Ulaanbaatar, using the tracks as their guide, but keeping their distance so as not to be seen. Once they reached a deserted stretch of border, they were to slip under the seven-foot-high wire fence into the no-man’s-land that separated the countries.

It was only five miles from the Erenhot train station to the first border fence and from there just a mile to the first Mongolian watchtower, where they were to surrender themselves to the authorities. They should have been able to make it on foot before daybreak, but the desert was disorienting by night—with only stars to guide them and an endlessly repeating pattern of thistle, rock, and sand the color of muddy coffee. The adults quarreled about which way to go.

Were they supposed to be walking east or west of the railroad tracks? They chose east, which turned out to be a critical mistake. The border ran in a northeasterly direction then curved sharply to the north; they were walking parallel to the border without getting closer to a place to cross. Only at daybreak did they realize their mistake. The Gobi Desert temperatures were soaring into the 90s. By the time they changed direction, found the wire fences delineating the border, and slipped through, it was late afternoon. Their shoes were in tatters from the rough terrain and their feet were bleeding. They were sunburned. The six liters of water they’d brought were finished. Hyuck and the others took turns carrying the three-year-old, but when the ten-year-old started flagging, they couldn’t do anything but drag him along. They finally found an abandoned hut near a small pond. One of the women stayed with the boy while
Hyuck ran off to get water. As he approached, he heard the woman screaming. The boy was dead.

The Mongolian border police found the North Koreans in the evening. The presence of the dead boy badly complicated the handling of their case. The coroner needed to confirm that he had indeed died of dehydration and that there had been no foul play. For the ten weeks that the investigation dragged on, Hyuck and the other adults were held in a Mongolian prison. It was an inauspicious beginning to Hyuck’s life in the free world.

Hyuck arrived in South Korea on September 14, 2001, on a flight from Ulaanbaatar with a dozen other defectors. He almost broke down when an immigration official at Incheon Airport stamped the temporary passport he’d been given in Mongolia and told Hyuck, “Welcome to the Republic of Korea.”

As with many defectors, though, Hyuck’s elation quickly vanished. His interrogation was especially grueling because of the time he spent in prison camp. The South Korean government was increasingly wary of criminals in the defector population. Then, just as he thought he would be freed, he was sent to the Hanawon camp for a month. He couldn’t tolerate being held in confinement.

Hyuck’s personality was as much of an impediment in South Korea as it was in North Korea. He was quick to anger. He bristled at authority. He couldn’t sit still. His stature, too, put him at a disadvantage in a height-obsessed society. His legs were underdeveloped and his head too large for his body—a physique typical of people who have been deprived of food during their formative years. When denied nutrition, the body directs its resources toward the head and torso at the expense of the limbs. In famine literature, the syndrome is called “stunting.” A 2003 study by the World Food Programme and UNICEF found that 42 percent of North Korean children were permanently damaged in this way.

At the time of our first meeting in 2004, Hyuck was living in Buyeo, a provincial town about two hours south of Seoul. There were no other defectors around, no one to help him settle in. He said his nerves couldn’t cope with the noise and congestion of a big city. He was broke, having lost the $20,000 in resettlement money almost
immediately. He’d given the money to a broker who claimed he could find Hyuck’s older brother. After more than a year of being strung along, Hyuck concluded that his brother was probably dead. “My brother was nearly six feet tall. There’s no way he could have survived,” he told me. One advantage of being short was that you needed less food.

Hyuck flitted between jobs. He delivered ice cream for a while before he discovered that a South Korean employee of the same company was being paid more, and he quit in a huff. He took a course to be an auto mechanic and worked as a trainee for a few months, but that didn’t stick either. He then decided that his true destiny in life was to be a professional boxer, but when he went to a boxing gym in Seoul, he was rejected for being too short. That damaged his ego and made him worry he’d never be able to find a girlfriend.

He was desperately lonely. He had a hard time connecting with new people. If South Koreans were sympathetic toward him, he found them condescending. Even though he hated the North Korean regime, he found he’d get defensive when South Koreans criticized it. This was a common predicament for defectors.

The basics of etiquette in South Korea eluded him. North Koreans don’t have the custom of making small talk with strangers and are taken aback by those who do. Whenever Hyuck left the safety of his own apartment, he was startled by neighbors who would greet him casually. He would avert his eyes or scowl in return.

“I didn’t know that when somebody exchanges a few words with you, you’re supposed to respond. I didn’t understand that that’s how you eventually build a friendship with your neighbors or that maybe those people could help me.” Hyuck would later laugh as he recalled his social blunders during those first years in South Korea.

When I saw him again in 2008, he had moved to Seoul and enrolled in college, hoping to get a degree in history and business. He was twenty-six years old. Although he lamented not having a girlfriend, he had many friends, including a cousin from Musan who’d recently defected. The process of showing the ropes to somebody greener than himself boosted Hyuck’s confidence. He told me that he’d recently met a man who owned a private school near the university
that taught English. They’d just struck up a conversation on the street. Instead of running away, Hyuck told the man he was a North Korean defector, and the man invited Hyuck to study at the school for free.

He had arrived.

Jun-sang in Myongdong pedestrian market, carrying a copy of
1984
,
Seoul, 2007
.

T
HE TAINTED BLOOD THAT HAD DOOMED MI-RAN TO A MARGINAL
life in North Korea proved her greatest asset once she crossed the border. The family ties to South Korea would prove invaluable. Unlike other defectors, reborn alone in a strange new world, Mi-ran had kin waiting to receive her.

Beneath the crisp efficiency of modern life in South Korea, Confucian traditions still hold sway. Mi-ran’s father, as an only son, was
the custodian of the family line, and after his passing, his offspring assumed that role.

When Mi-ran’s family crossed the Tumen River into China in 1998, the first thing they did was telephone the municipal office in Seosan, South Chungchong province, where her father was born. Everybody had moved out of the village decades before as part of the mass migration to the cities. The village itself had mostly disappeared when the land was flooded to build a reservoir. But in Korea, home is the place where your father was born, regardless of whether or not anybody still lives there. The municipal office had the addresses of Tae-woo’s two younger sisters, still both alive and living near Seoul, and offered to forward a letter to them. Mi-ran’s twenty-three-year-old brother, although the youngest in the family, as the only male was designated to compose the letter. He wrote in formal language:
I am writing as the only son of your brother. I wish to inform you that he passed from this world last year in Kyongsong county, North Hamgyong province
. He included the address and phone number of a house in Yanji, a small city near the border, where they were staying.

Within a few weeks, they got a telephone call from one of the sisters. She was skeptical. Nearly half a century had elapsed without so much as a telephone call, a letter, even a rumor that their brother had survived the Korean War. In 1961, eight years after the end of the war, the South Korean Ministry of Defense recorded him as having been killed in action in 1953. As far as the family was concerned, he had died childless at the age of twenty-one. His name was on the tablet for the war dead at the National Cemetery. How were the sisters to know that this wasn’t a hoax, a crude attempt to extort money from them? Mi-ran’s sister, who had picked up the telephone, told the aunt some of what she knew. Little tidbits of family lore, birthdays and nicknames. The South Korean relatives suggested a DNA test. Mi-ran and her siblings agreed.