hankyoreh

The Tumen River along the North Korean-Chinese border. (Lee Jong-keun, staff photographer)

“Do you have insurance, though?”

Lee Su-rin (pseudonym) is an insurance queen. As soon as the word “hospital” came up in her interview, she seized the chance to recommend that the researcher sign up. Even when she was tenderly looking after younger defectors who were facing the “loneliest of nights” after leaving the Hanawon center, she never forgot to encourage them to enroll. How did someone who grew up knowing only the rations distributed in North Korea come to demonstrate such astounding skill in the capitalist realm of sales, an area where you have to create demand where none exists?

The answer lies in a keen will to survive. Lee faced a few brushes with death after crossing the border. During one attempt to travel to the South in 2004, she was repatriated and forced to spend 14 months in a detention center. While crossing the Tumen River, she was nearly swept away by waters swollen from the rainy season.

“The detention center is known as the ‘shit box,’” she explained. “You can’t stretch your legs out like this. You have to keep your legs crossed, and it ruined my knees.”

“I saw someone dying there,” she added. “If you just let go, you die. When you find yourself thinking, ‘I could die and I’d be okay with that,’ then it’s over.”

It could have been death if she had let go, but she just held on tighter. “You can’t let go when you think, ‘My children are waiting for me,’” she said. Digging deep within herself, she let her imagination go to work more often and more vividly. She thought of her family anxiously waiting for her outside the jail. There was a power in her imagination, and in 2006 she settled in South Korea with her husband and two daughters.

The book “Desperate Lives” delves deep into the minds of five North Korean women who crossed the border. It is a bit different from past books that looked at defectors’ lives, though, in that the author is more concerned with the how than the why. The authors, who research psychological counseling, are less interested in asking about motivations and the reasons why people decide to defect. Instead, they tenaciously explore the inner reserves of strength that enabled the interviewees to risk their lives defecting and establish themselves in a very different world.

“If the human heart is a treasure chest, what is your treasure [greatest strength]?”

“What resources did you have within that helped you withstand everything?”

The questions all focused on “strength,” pushing the interviewees to look within at their own capabilities.

“It feels good telling you the things I feel inside. I’ve never had the opportunity to look back on myself,” one says.

The reader, in contrast, is encouraged not to simply observe the defectors’ unusual experiences, but to step inside their shoes, looking at them as human beings and equals.

The stories did not always come down to a choice between staying and dying or leaving and surviving. It would be more correct to say that the interviewees were drawn to cross the border by their curiosity about a better life. In the case of Baek Jang-won (pseudonym), it was television that shattered her illusions. The glimpses of South Korea that she got from broadcasts of “Hometown Report” were “just so cool,” she recalls.

Baek, who is in her early 40s, crossed the border with her son and daughter, both around 20. They ended up repatriated twice and sent to separate prisons; she has not heard from her daughter since. Under the circumstances, you would expect her to be more fixated on her family, but Baek said she discovered “my own value” in the process.

“Confucian ideas are strong in North Korea, and I prioritize my family over myself,” she explained.

“I had been put in prison, and I didn’t have my children or my husband there with me. I was also in bad shape physically from crossing over, and there wasn’t anything I could do for the people near me. So since coming to South Korea, I’ve been focusing on myself first,” she said.

“What I’m saying is that I matter, and that there’s no need to push myself too hard.”

Baek would buy healthy, nutritious ingredients to cook for herself. She would stretch periodically and go hiking in the hills. Her health improved enough that when she was asked what her biggest strengths were, her reply was “my positive mind first, and my constitution second.” Positivity is what sustains a strong body, so ultimately the two are one and the same.

“What keeps me going is the feeling of ‘I’ve gotten to someplace good, and now I need to live a long and healthy life,’” she said.

Won Min-hyeong (pseudonym) was a soldier who commanded 180 troops in North Korea. She had a stern character, her personal credo being, “I may break, but I don’t bend.” She crossed the border at the age of 25 after leaving the military. Neighborhood friends who had been caught after traveling to China told her that she could “make a lot of money working in Chinese restaurants.”

In the end, she was swindled and fell victim to human trafficking. Overnight, the former soldier had become an illegal sojourner who was “sold off” to a Korean-Chinese man. Won’s husband loved her, but she could not live with the idea of having been bought and paid for. With her daughter in tow, she traveled to South Korea. When asked by the authors to draw a picture of herself, Won recalled, “The counselors had us do this [drawing] at the Hanawon too, and I didn’t like it at the time because I thought they were treating us like kids.” But she proceeded to sketch images of the sun and bamboo.

“For me, my little girl is my sun. [The bamboo] can’t live without the sun, so I guess it’s the hope that we can stay strong and rely on each other? That’s right.” Behind the clipped words, there was a misty sense of hope. As a single mother from North Korea, she faces two layers of prejudice, but she has pushed through them with her characteristic assertiveness.

“I can’t stand tall unless I’m being honest. I think that’s what makes me so up front and assertive — the feeling that I know the difference between what’s right and what’s wrong,” she explained.

“When I was in China, I’d hear the sound of a police car and immediately get scared and run away. I’d go hide. Now I don’t care what passes by me. I can be proud as long as I haven’t done anything wrong.”

In contrast with North Korea, where you “have to assume the walls have ears,” Won said that she “likes the freedom to just say ‘fuck” in South Korea.

The experience of defecting from North Korea can be like walking away from your home and job to “reboot” your life in a foreign land. Over time, the interviewees have all become “strong sisters,” but they also bear their own scars. All five of them talked about the sadness of a “rootless life.” Their words came across as a plea for South Korean society to show more warmth in embracing defectors – transplants buffeted by the winds of an unfamiliar land.

By Choi Yoon-ah, staff reporter

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