In Order to Live Read online

  “We’ll find your mother soon,” Hongwei told me one morning. “But there’s more to this deal. You will need to help me with my business.”

  • • •

  I had been in China for just two months when I began working for Hongwei. He brought two North Korean girls to stay in the apartment, and I talked to them and was able to translate a little. I cleaned them up, just as Young Sun had done for me, picked out clothes and makeup for them, and gave them lessons in hygiene. Unlike my mother and me, these girls had known they would be sold in China when they escaped. They didn’t care, they said. It was better than dying in North Korea.

  Hongwei brought me with him to help sell these women in the countryside. After that business was finished, we returned to the village where he had sold my mother, and I met with her Chinese “husband.” I spoke enough Chinese by now that I was able to tell him I wanted to buy my mother back. We negotiated a price—it was my first real business transaction. Hongwei paid a little more than $2,000 to buy her back for me, and I was secretly pleased he lost money on the deal.

  A few days later, we met the family in a secret location in the countryside to make the exchange. It was June, and the grass was high. My mother saw me from far away and came running down a dirt lane to hug me. She had no idea what had happened to me, or that I was coming to get her. One time she had managed to sneak a call to the fat broker Zhifang in Changchun, but all he would tell her was that I was gone. We were so happy to see each other we couldn’t stop crying from joy. It was the first time I had smiled or even felt alive in many weeks.

  Out of habit, my mother pulled me up on her back for a piggyback ride, just like when I was a baby.

  “Let me see how much my little puppy grew while I was gone,” she said. But I was not a little puppy anymore. She later told me she had hardly recognized me in my makeup and new clothes. I didn’t recognize me either. I no longer looked like a child, and everything that was childlike inside me was gone. It was as if the blood had dried in my veins and I’d become another person. I didn’t have pity for anyone, including the girls I helped sell, including myself. My only purpose now was to bring my family together again.

  There was no word of my sister. Hongwei told us that he had asked the other brokers if they knew what happened to her, but he learned nothing. It was a disappointment, but I still had hope that he could use his network to find her. And soon we would be seeing my father again.

  My mother left that terrible farm without looking back. The three of us returned to Jinzhou together.

  I still hated Hongwei, but I learned to live with him. He was sometimes very harsh with me in the beginning, but he softened with time, and I think he grew to respect me, trust me, and, in his own way, love me.

  His life had never been easy. Hongwei was born on a farm west of Chaoyang, an ancient city of Buddhist temples, parks, skyscrapers, and street gangs. When he was twelve or thirteen, he ran away to the city and joined a gang that controlled a string of karaoke clubs. These weren’t the kind of friendly sing-along bars you might find in Seoul or other cities. They were places where women provided more entertainment than just serving drinks. Hongwei never had a higher education, but he could read and write and was very smart. By fifteen, he was the head of his gang with his own karaoke empire. He used his connections to get into a lot of different businesses, such as restaurants and real estate development. About two years before I escaped from North Korea, he branched out into human trafficking. For a while, that’s where the big money was.

  In Chaoyang, Hongwei had a Chinese wife and two children, a son and a daughter. The daughter, I later learned, was only a year younger than I was.

  After Hongwei bought back my mother, she told him my true age was thirteen, not sixteen. I had never bothered telling him my age because I couldn’t believe it would matter. But he seemed shocked.

  “I would never have slept with her if I’d known she was so young,” he said.

  I don’t know if that was true, but after that he began treating me a little more gently, and I almost started seeing him as a human being. But I still expected him to live up to all of his promises, including rescuing my father from North Korea. Hongwei had contacts in Chaingbai, including some women whose business was to run errands back and forth across the border. They were hired to transfer money to North Koreans whose relatives on the outside wanted to help them. They also smuggled in Chinese cell phones so families that were separated could stay in contact. This was very dangerous, but it could be arranged for the right price.

  In August, Hongwei hired one of these brokers to find my father.

  Fourteen

  A Birthday Gift

  August 15 is a big holiday in North Korea because it celebrates the day in 1945 that Japan surrendered. On that day in 2007, our agent finally located my father in our old apartment outside Hyesan. He had no phone of his own, and it would have put him in danger to try to contact him any other way. So the woman we’d hired handed him a Chinese cell phone. He was crouching on the balcony, looking out at the Yalu River, when I called at the appointed time.

  “Abuji? It’s Yeonmi! Umma and I are okay. How are you?”

  There was quiet on the other end. He couldn’t believe he was hearing my voice after nearly five long months.

  “I’m doing fine, little daughter,” he said finally. “I’m so happy to hear your voice. Where are you?” We didn’t have much time to talk, because the police are always scanning for illegal calls. I was able to tell him only that we were in China and my mother and I were safe. We hadn’t found Eunmi yet, but we were still looking for her.

  “I miss you so much, Father,” I said. “I’ll bring you to China. We’ll pay a broker to bring you to us.”

  “Please don’t worry about me,” he said.

  “Just come, Father,” I said. “I’ll take care of everything.” I told him we could look for Eunmi together when he arrived.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll come.”

  He cried all night after the agent left him.

  My father had searched for us for a long time after we escaped. He went back to the address Eunmi had left for me and learned that the woman who trafficked us was named Jo Yong Ae. When he demanded that she tell him what happened to his wife and daughters, she admitted that she had sent me and my mother to China. But Yong Ae claimed she knew nothing about Eunmi. My father had no idea what had happened to us after we crossed the border. All Yong Ae would tell him was that we had gone to a place where there was food for us. He could only hope that we would contact him.

  After we left, his brother and our former neighbor arranged for a woman to live with him and do his cooking and cleaning. They all thought my mother would never come back. He told us he couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, couldn’t stop crying.

  Meanwhile, many people who knew us thought that my father was the one who had sent us to China. After all, he was a clever man with many connections. How could he not know where we had gone?

  The teenage girls who shared the apartment with us were convinced that my father could help them get to China, too. They were very poor and desperate. He told them he was unable to help them, but they continued to beg, telling him they couldn’t live in North Korea anymore.

  Finally, he agreed to help them escape on the condition that they tell their mother before they left. He gave them Yong Ae’s address and the girls left through her, without telling their mother. They knew she would have never let them go. When she discovered that her daughters had left, she blamed my father. He later told my mother that Yong Ae had given him 100 yuan, about $13 worth of Chinese money, for sending her the girls. He said he felt bad about it because it had caused the girls’ mother so much pain. But he never knew they were being sold as brides—or that that was what had happened to me and my mother. He just thought some rich Chinese people were paying to adopt North Koreans.

  It took six mor
e weeks to arrange a successful escape for my father. I knew he was still very sick, although I assumed he was just working too hard and not eating enough. When I spoke to my father again, I told him that I would feed him and make him healthy again in China.

  “Yes, of course,” he said. He was always so optimistic, and he never complained about his pain. But I could hear the weakness in his voice. There was no time to waste.

  • • •

  I had come to like our nice apartment and the Jinzhou neighborhood, where I could enjoy the nearby park and market. But we were soon on the move again.

  There was a flower shop on the main street in front of our building, and it fascinated me because I had never seen one before. In North Korea, if you want flowers, you go out and pick some. But here there were whole stores filled with beautiful blooms. I would sometimes slip into the shop just to breathe in the sweet, spicy fragrance, even though I never bought anything. The lady who owned the shop started to recognize me. Soon she smiled and waved every time she saw me. It made me nervous because I knew if anyone discovered I was an illegal North Korean, the police would be after us. When I told Hongwei about my concerns, he packed up the apartment and we moved the next day. We would probably have left soon anyway, because it was too risky to stay in one place very long.

  The next apartment was a large studio with a kitchen and bathroom in a different part of the city. Sometimes we’d have as many as nine women sleeping on the floor of that place, waiting to be sold.

  While my mother stayed behind and took care of the apartment, Hongwei sent me out to do his business, just as Zhifang had used Young Sun. I would be the one taking all the risks, traveling all over the countryside with illegal refugees. I had to pretend I was much older, because the women wouldn’t listen to a thirteen-year-old girl. My job was to translate for them, buy tickets or hire taxis to bring them back to Hongwei, and persuade them to cooperate if they wanted to stay in China. Once they met their potential husbands, I told the men that these women would learn Chinese as I had, and be faithful wives to them. I told the women that these men were gentle and rich, so they could send some money to their relatives.

  I tried to make it go easier for the women I sold, but sometimes I could not. The brokers were rapists and gangsters, and many of the women suffered terribly. One young woman, about twenty-five years old, had jumped off a bridge onto a frozen river during her escape. By the time she arrived in Chanchung, she could no longer move the lower part of her body. She told me that Zhifang had raped her anyway. Hongwei still managed to sell her to a farmer. It was horrible. Sadly, there were many cases like hers, some even worse.

  It makes me sick to think about what I and so many girls and women had to do to survive in China. I wish it had all never happened, and that I never had to talk about it again. But I want everyone to know the shocking truth about human trafficking. If the Chinese government would end its heartless policy of sending refugees back to North Korea, then the brokers would lose all their power to exploit and enslave these women. But of course if North Korea wasn’t such a hell on earth, there wouldn’t be a need for the women to flee in the first place.

  • • •

  Most of the time Hongwei sold women as brides for Chinese men, but sometimes the women asked him to sell them into prostitution, where they could make money to send back to their families. When I arrived in China, I had no idea what a prostitute was. Then one day, Hongwei took me on a trip with him to a steamy seaport called Huludao, where a lot of South Korean men and other tourists came for cut-rate sex. He was dropping off a woman at a brothel and he needed me to translate.

  The brothel in Huludao was run by a middle-aged Chinese woman, who went out of her way to be friendly to me. She showed me the nice desk in her office and gave me a tour of the hallways lined with tiny, curtained rooms just large enough for a small platform bed. There was a shower room, too, although I couldn’t understand why people were using it in the middle of the day.

  I met several North Korean women there, including a beautiful girl from Pyongyang who had been working in the brothel for seven years. All the women told me what a great place it was if I wanted to earn money, plus I could eat kimchi and other Korean food every day and meet all kinds of South Koreans. I was thrilled by this, because I wanted to meet a South Korean with a lovely accent, like the ones I had seen on videos. The girls made it all sound really great, and the madam offered me a place with her.

  When I told Hongwei that I wanted to stay with the nice lady, he said, “Are you crazy? Don’t ever think about working in a place like this!”

  “No, I want you to sell me to her!” I said.

  That’s when he slapped me across the face.

  “You don’t understand anything I tell you!” he said.

  He finished his business and got me out of there as fast as he could.

  I made several trips back to Huludao in the coming months, and I learned what I would have gotten myself into if I had stayed. Customers paid about $5 to sleep with the women, and the women got to keep $1. That was actually an excellent percentage for a brothel, which was why the women wanted to work there. But you had to have sex with up to a dozen men a day, some of them farmers so filthy you couldn’t wash the smell off of them. Yet there were places far worse than this.

  Hongwei told me about hotels in Beijing and Shanghai where girls who wanted to leave were injected with drugs to turn them into addicts. Then they could never run away.

  • • •

  There is no doubt that trafficking is an ugly and brutal business. But whenever human beings are thrown together, no matter what the circumstances, we find ways to connect with one another. We can cry and laugh together, even in the worst times. My mother and I got to know the women who passed through our lives, and some became our friends.

  Myung Ok was in her early forties, from Hyesan, and had escaped from North Korea twice. The first time, she made it across the river with a daughter who was around my age, and they were sold together. But while they were living with her Chinese husband, the police captured and repatriated them. The daughter was too young for a prison camp, so she was sent for “reeducation”—which meant she was starved and beaten for weeks. Myung Ok was sent to a labor camp, where she was tortured and worked almost to death.

  After her release, Myung Ok decided to risk another escape, although her daughter was too afraid and stayed behind. Myung Ok made it across a second time and ended up being trafficked by Zhifang, who sold her to Hongwei. My mother and Myung Ok got along well because they both came from Hyesan and Myung Ok had a great sense of humor.

  Unfortunately, Hongwei sold Myung Ok to a handicapped farmer who treated her badly. The man was so nervous about her running away that he followed her everywhere, even into the bathroom. She couldn’t take it anymore and managed to escape to the bustling northeastern city of Shenyang, where there was a large population of North Korean defectors in hiding. But Hongwei had underworld connections in Shenyang, and his men found her and beat her up. She was sent back to the farmer again. If she had succeeded in running away, Hongwei would have had to refund the farmer’s money; his women came with a limited one-year warranty, just like a car.

  Until my mother and I heard the stories told by Myung Ok and other women we met, we never really understood the dangers of being caught by the police and sent back to North Korea. There were even worse stories about women carrying half-Chinese babies who were forced to abort them, or being executed if the North Koreans found them trying to defect to South Korea. After this, my mother and I made an oath that we would never be taken alive.

  • • •

  The first time my father tried to escape to China was in September 2007. I had told him someone would come to get him once he waded across the river. But when he reached the other side, nobody was waiting for him. Hongwei had paid the fat broker to arrange the escape, but he had failed. My poor father had
to evade the soldiers again to make his way back to North Korea.

  He tried again on October 1. By then, the river was running high and cold. This time Hongwei traveled to Chaingbai to make sure nothing went wrong. He paid the broker Zhifang the equivalent of $1,300 for my father—a very high price for a man escaping from North Korea. Hongwei was shocked when he met my father and saw how skinny and weak he was. He had hoped to put him to work so that he could pay off his debt. But now he realized my father was too sick even to travel by bus, so Hongwei hired a taxi to take him and two women he had bought all the way to Jinzhou.

  They arrived on October 4, 2007, my fourteenth birthday, six months after I’d arrived in China. When my mother and I saw my father walk in the door, we ran into his arms. I could hardly believe I had both my parents with me again. And it was the first time in many years that my father had been around to celebrate my birthday. Usually he was traveling for his business, or later, he was in prison. So Hongwei decided to throw a very special celebration. While my parents and I were crying and hugging and talking, Hongwei went out and brought back all kinds of food and drinks for us. I had told him my father loved meat, so he bought duck, chicken, beef, and pork. There were a few North Korean women living with us in the apartment at the time, and Hongwei had brought some others along with my father, so we had a big party. The meal was like a dream come true for my father, but it was heartbreaking because he was too weak to eat any of it.

  That night, he showed me and my mother a plastic bag of opium that he had brought to kill himself with if he was captured on the way across the border. He said he would also use it if he was arrested in China, because he would not be sent back, or risk revealing our location to the police. But he was very happy to have made it out alive to see his family again. All that was missing was Eunmi. We still had no news, but my father was full of hope. He had plans to search for her after he got treatment for his stomach. And then maybe he would find a way to start a business so that he could take care of us again. My uncle Min Sik was right when he told my mother that her future husband was like a plant that could grow out of solid rock.