By Soo Youn
We are eating typical Korean-buffet fare — galbi, sushi rolls and the standard panchan side dishes — at a restaurant in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C., on Friday, Dec. 1, 2006. Though my meal is somewhat typical, my dining companions are not. I am having lunch — all-you-can-eat, no less — with four former citizens of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, a.k.a. North Korea. Our fellow diners — their hosts at the nearby Korean church — can’t help but ask their guests, two women and two men, if they have tried the dishes before. “Is this your first time eating sushi?” One of the women lived close to the East Sea, so she has had raw fish. The other woman tries an avocado for the first time and makes a face. It’s too fatty for her palate.
As the conversation continues, it ranges from the mundane — like comparisons between South Korea and the United States (“Do American women get as much plastic surgery as South Korean women?”) — to differences in language (a lot of South Korean vocabulary differs from North Korean).
When one of our hosts reaches for a toothpick on the table, the North Koreans don’t know what it is. When they learn the Korean word for “the thing to pick meat out of your teeth,” they consider it distinctly South Korean. At first I think it’s just regional slang, but then I realize why they didn’t know the word for toothpick. They don’t need it — the word or the toothpick — because in North Korea you don’t eat meat, much less worry about having food in your teeth.
I want to ask them what they used to eat in North Korea, but I don’t want to be presumptuous or make them feel provincial. So instead I ask them how North Korean seasoning differs from South Korean. They laugh at me. There goes my cover, so I might as well be direct: “What did you eat in North Korea?” All four of them give me the same answer: grass.
The four defectors are touring the United States with Phillip Buck, a missionary and aid worker on the Underground Railroad bringing North Koreans to South Korea. Over lunch, and later in the basement of Hana Presbyterian Church, the former North Koreans talk about their experiences in North Korea and China. Because they fear for their relatives still in North Korea, they use assumed names. They wear sunglasses in the rain and cover their faces so that identifying details will not be published.
They are, after a lifetime of training, paranoid, even though they are thousands of miles away from Kim Jong-il’s regime.
These are their stories:
OK SOON KIM
AGE: 59
LEFT NORTH KOREA IN: 1997
WITH: Her husband and one of her daughters
ARRIVED IN SOUTH KOREA IN: 2002
In 1997, Kim’s youngest son was in the North Korean Army and one daughter had married, but there still wasn’t enough food to feed the family. For years they had eaten a diet of grass and leaves mixed with the occasional corn powder or noodles. They sold everything they owned to the Chinese that passed through their town for food: their TV, blankets and clothes. Some of her relatives started selling opium. But in the winter, there was nothing to harvest.
One day, her other son didn’t come home. Her husband found him lying near a stream, weak from malnutrition. They scrambled and sold whatever was left for goat milk to make juk (porridge) for him. She remembers she went out to look for roots to feed him and got caught in a thunderstorm. But when she returned it was too late — he was already dead.
“How do you imagine that your son is going to die?” she asks. She manages to hold off her tears until she says, “The only thing I ever heard anymore in our town was that someone died. What had happened to our country?”
Then her 25-year-old daughter, who hadn’t menstruated in over a year, fell ill, throwing up blood for days, accompanied by a spiking fever and nosebleeds. When she eventually improved, she had lost her hearing. Her mother fretted that she would never get married.
After losing one child and then almost another, Kim and her husband decided to flee to China with their single daughter. When they started to eat better in China, her daughter’s hearing came back, as did her periods.
Kim never expected to go to South Korea. With another daughter and son still in North Korea, she wanted to stay close in China. But her daughter eventually married another North Korean in China. And her family was caught at a Bible study twice, and repatriated twice. After that, Kim decided that the family should try to get to South Korea.
RAN HEE KIM
AGE: 57
LEFT NORTH KOREA IN: 1999
WITH: Came by herself
ARRIVED IN SOUTH KOREA IN: 2004
Hers is a story of the lengths she went through to eat, and how she was punished for it. In 1994, Kim started selling copper when the food rations stopped. Through a contact, she hoarded and bought the scrap metal and sold it to the Chinese who often passed through her border town. After two years, she was caught and sent to jail for making extra money to buy food, which is illegal in North Korea. Two years into a three-year sentence on a work farm, she was released early for good behavior. Longing to see her son, she went home, only to find he wasn’t there.
Kim, 57, breaks down and cries throughout her interview, as she remembers that her son starved to death while she was in jail, and that there was nothing she could have done about it.
While Kim was in jail, her husband sent her divorce papers through her sister. “He married some other woman while I was in jail. Because of my son I worked so hard and did everything I could to survive,” she says, and then pauses to cry again. Her former husband had left their son behind.
On the work farm, they were hungry. Their rations were cakes made of pressed corn and beans. “But it wasn’t enough. We were so hungry we went out in the fields. We captured frogs and ate them raw with a little bit of salt. At first I didn’t want to eat it, but I had to to survive. And we ate grasshoppers.”
At this point, the others ask how she could have eaten the bugs.
“You close your eyes and swallow. I was so weak, so I ate the frog, and in the fall we ate grasshoppers. You catch them and hide them in your sock to eat,” she says. “After a few days of eating it, it starts to taste good. At first I couldn’t stand it because the grasshopper’s belly would pop in my mouth.”
She finally escaped to China by herself in 1999, but was caught and repatriated back to North Korea — not before being beaten by her Chinese jailers. When a woman who shared her cell escaped, the guards beat Kim. Then they ordered the other women, many of whom were North Koreans from Kim’s hometown, to beat her as well. She remembers that they cried as they attacked her. She could barely move, and her back was so injured she was almost paralyzed.
“I thought I was going to keep these secrets until I died.”
But Yung Chul Kim urges her, “No, you have to tell the world what it’s like.”
YUNG CHUL KIM
AGE: 43
LEFT NORTH KOREA IN: 1999
WITH: His wife, their son and his younger sister
ARRIVED IN SOUTH KOREA IN: 2002
Kim arrived in South Korea in 2002 after both of his parents starved to death in the late ’90s. His mother-in-law also starved to death. After his father-in-law died, he realized, “I can’t stay. I have to go to China,” he says.
Kim looks much younger than he is. In his 40s, he has smooth skin and a boyish face and a way of looking off as if he’s bored, even when he talks of such serious things. Dressed, like the other North Koreans, in black, he manages to make a joke once in a while. He hates thinking about the past.
Kim escaped to China with his wife, their son and his younger sister by wading across the Tumen River, each holding the other’s hand, into China. When he got to China, he was amazed by the food. “The first time I saw fruit was in China. Maybe it was a grape or a persimmon,” Kim says. “The food was so surprising. We didn’t really know the value of money or how to use it, but food we know. Every house had bags of rice and corn. Even if you receive a salary in North Korea, you can’t buy 10 pounds of rice. The Chinese were so rich.”
After a few months hiding in China, Kim and his family were captured by the Chinese military and sent back to North Korea, where he was tortured in a political prison. “I almost died.” In jail, Kim was deprived of sleep and interrogated constantly: Did you meet South Korean people? Did you meet any Christians?
“If I acknowledged that I did that, at that point I would’ve been killed, executed with a gun,” he says. “At that time they kill you for meeting a South Korean or a Christian. I would’ve been gagged and blindfolded and three people would’ve shot me three times.” Kim was tortured nearly every day for the first month he was there, after which he was sent to work.
“They burn you with a lighter and cut your flesh. They tie you to a chair and burn wood on your knees. The most difficult one is the water one. You are tired, and they try to force-feed you mop water. But even that kind of water you drink because you are so thirsty.
“Another prisoner slept next to me. He had stolen a cow and started talking badly about the government. Because of that he was tortured. He got up at 6 a.m., and he was already almost dead. The guard said, ‘Let’s just do it,’ and they buried him alive.”
After three months in the gulag, Kim was released when he said he was “close to death.” He was sent to a local jail in his hometown. When his wife came to pick him up, she walked right past him without recognizing him. A few months later, Kim and his family risked everything again and crossed the Tumen back into China, where he quickly met up with Phillip Buck. After two years in Yengji, China, they were eventually brought to South Korea. They have since had another boy.
MYUNG SOO KANG
AGE: 51
LEFT NORTH KOREA IN: 1989
WITH: His mother, one brother and two sisters
ARRIVED IN SOUTH KOREA IN: 2003
Kang is believed to be one of the earliest defectors from North Korea. A remarkably handsome man, also dressed in all black, he doesn’t want to talk about his hardships in North Korea; rather, he reads from a letter he prepared. “I came here to tell everyone North Korean refugees do not commit crimes. We are regular people who have a heart for family, country and our hometowns. We will do anything to protect our family and country like you. But just because we came to China, we look like we betrayed our country,” he reads.
I interrupt after 30 minutes of hearing him rehash what I feel is a given: There are no human rights in North Korea, there is not enough to eat, and it is the fault of Kim Jong-il.
He gets agitated, and tries to convince me the defectors have done nothing wrong, and that they were forced to leave to save their families and themselves. The whole group then gets excited, and one of the women pulls out a copy of a major South Korean newspaper whose front-page, above-the-fold headline reads, “No human right abuses in North Korea.” The story quotes an official with the South Korean Foreign Ministry denying, basically, everything these North Koreans had just spent hours telling me.
And then I realize what is going on. Since the current political climate in South Korea is pushing for engagement with Pyongyang, Seoul discourages negative talk about North Korea as it pursues rapprochement through joint economic ventures. The official party line in many South Korean universities and government halls denies the existence of political concentration camps, starvation and repression.
These four have not grasped what I feel the average American, for all his or her ignorance about the Korean Peninsula, basically knows about North Korea. They came to convince me, and the others they would speak to, that the wrong was not in leaving North Korea, but not having enough food to eat, or the freedom to sell their belongings to feed themselves without being thrown into jail.
And Kang explains to me that it was groundbreaking that he blamed it on Kim Jong-il. “No defector has ever said this before. It’s Kim Jong-il’s fault. They are too scared.”
I realizes that, despite the fact that he left North Korea in 1989, he still is by no means free.
***
The appearances of these four belie their ages and their hardships. Their clothes hide their scars from torture, bodies punished by malnutrition and illness.
These four, who have spent so much time in hiding, shielding their identities, that they are at this point almost anonymous. Yet they have these histories, and they are willing to share and relive the past so that those they left behind are not forgotten.
