In Order to Live Read online

It wasn’t a great job by any means, but at least you didn’t have to have sex with anyone. Nobody owned you, and there was the potential to make good money. My plan was to work for long enough to pay for a good ID card; once I had an ID, I could get a better job and take care of my mother.

  Shortly after we started working, Myung Ok, who was incredibly clever and resourceful, left the Chinese boss to buy her own chat-room franchise. She offered us a better deal, so we followed her.

  The technology was very primitive by today’s standards, but it was still baffling to us. My mother and I had never seen a computer before, so we had to learn how to type characters and watch them come up on the screen.

  My mother struggled. When a customer would start a conversation, it took her so long to find the keys to type “Hello” that, by the time she looked up again, the screen would be blank and the customer gone.

  “Let me do it, Umma,” I told her. Even though it also took me a long time to type, my customers didn’t seem to mind the wait. They also accepted it when I refused to take off my clothes. All I let them see was my face, and if they got too crude or insistent, I would just switch them off. It worked for me, and the men were curious to find out more about me. I would usually just type what they wanted to hear, but I also got to know some of the guys and had real conversations with them. My chat room got very popular, and sometimes I had men from six or seven Web sites calling in to my screen at the same time. I had to try not to mix them up and answer the wrong man’s questions.

  The more I worked, the more money I could make. If I stayed online all the time, I could earn about 4,000 yuan—more than $500—a month after the bosses took their 70 percent.

  Finally, my mother and I had enough rice to eat, and we weren’t afraid of being raped every night. But we were not free. The chat room was just another kind of prison. If we left the apartment, we had to look over our shoulders constantly to make sure we weren’t recognized. I don’t know which possibility terrified me more: falling into the hands of the Chinese police, or running into Huang or one of his people. I knew he was still looking for me, and Huang was not the kind of man you double-crossed without paying for it.

  Near our apartment building there was a local middle school. From our window, I could look out and see girls my own age carrying school bags and playing with their friends. I asked my mother, “Umma, when can I be like that?” She had no way of responding.

  I thought life would continue like this forever until my mother met a North Korean woman named Hae Soon, who was living with a South Korean man in Shenyang. Before we met Hae Soon, my mother and I had never considered escape to South Korea a possibility. But Hae Soon knew all about it and told us that the South Koreans would welcome us as citizens and help us find jobs and a place to live. She also knew how dangerous it was to try to escape from China. If you were captured and returned to North Korea, then your life would be over. Looking for work in China was a crime, but escaping to South Korea was high treason, and you would either be sent to a political prison camp, from which there is no escape, or maybe just executed.

  Hae Soon told us that she knew a way out of China that had worked for others. There were Christian missionaries in the city of Qingdao who could get you through China to Mongolia, which was supposed to welcome North Korean refugees. Once you got to Mongolia, the South Korean embassy would take care of you. Hae Soon wanted to go to Qingdao and start the journey, but she didn’t have the courage to do it alone. So she asked my mother and me to go with her.

  As soon as I heard this woman’s story, I knew we had to get to Mongolia. My mother was very afraid. We had a good thing in Shenyang, she said. It was too risky to leave, she said, and she tried to talk me out of it. But I felt an old hunger burning in me, one that told me there was more to life than just surviving. I didn’t know what would happen to us, but I knew I would rather die than live like this anymore—I knew in my heart that I deserved to be treated like a person, not a hunted animal. Once again, I grabbed my mother’s hands and wouldn’t let go until she agreed to come with me to Mongolia.

  • • •

  Hae Soon gave us the cell phone number of a missionary contact. When my mother called him, he told her that he was also a North Korean defector, and because of God’s mercy his life was blessed and he had found freedom. She told him about our hopes to escape to South Korea, and how we were trying to find my sister, who might already be there waiting for us. He told her that God is almighty, and he could do everything. If we prayed to God, then everything would be fine. He gave her a number to call in Qingdao. The people there would teach us more about God, and they could help us to find a way to go to South Korea.

  When my mother told me about the conversation, neither of us had a clue as to what the missionary was talking about. North Korea is an atheistic country, so this was the first time we had heard anything about this Christian God. But we were willing to believe something new if it meant surviving. And the idea of mercy sounded good to us. Once again, without having much information, my mother and I decided to take a big leap.

  Money was the only obstacle. We had collected some savings, but we would need more for this escape.

  I can’t explain why, but when I was hungry, I always believed that if I wished hard enough, bread would somehow fall from the sky. My father had the same kind of optimism despite the odds against him. But you need more than optimism and hard work to succeed. You also need luck. And maybe that old fortune-teller was right, because despite everything that has happened to me, I have been very lucky in my life.

  As we prepared our escape, a friend I had met online suddenly made it all possible. He was a professional in his late thirties who lived in South Korea, and he had become one of my regulars in the chat room. Most of the men I met online thought I was somewhere in Seoul because I lied to them. But this man was different. He treated me like a real person, so I told him some of my real story. He was so moved that he wanted to help me escape. He flew up to Shenyang to meet me and gave me enough money to cover our expenses. All he wanted, he said, was for me to give him a call once we made it to the South, although I doubt he expected even that. He was a lonely man with a good heart.

  Soon we were set to go. My mother asked Myung Ok if she wanted to come with us, but she had her own business, and she was too afraid to leave.

  By early February, it was time to leave Shenyang. The dangerous escape weighed heavily on our minds. I bought myself a brown tweed coat to wear on our journey, and we decided to splurge on one last, big meal at a Korean restaurant—something we would never do under ordinary circumstances. We even went out to a karaoke bar—the ordinary kind that’s just for fun with friends.

  I’m not much of a singer, but I’ve always loved my mother’s voice. When I was young, she sang to me while she was cleaning the house or putting me to sleep. Her voice was the most beautiful, warmest sound I’d ever known. Hearing her sing again broke down a wall I had built around my heart. For nearly two years, I’d felt like all five of my senses were numbed. I could not feel, smell, see, hear, or taste the world around me. If I had allowed myself to experience these things in all their intensity, I might have lost my mind. If I had allowed myself to cry, I might never have been able to stop. So I survived, but I never felt joy, never felt safe. Now, as I listened to my mother sing the old songs, that numbness melted away. I was overwhelmed by the boundless love I felt for her, and also the intense fear of losing her. That sense of dread hollowed out my chest like a physical pain. She was everything to me. She was all I had.

  Now I had to be true to the promise I’d made my father, to keep her safe and find Eunmi. That meant getting us to South Korea.

  Eighteen

  Following the Stars

  The next morning, my mother and I and Hae Soon began a long, tense bus ride from Shenyang to Qingdao. It was about 750 miles by road, and at any point the bus could have been boarded by Chinese police checking I
Ds. But our luck was good, and we made it to the city in two days without being searched.

  Qingdao is a huge, modern port located just across the Yellow Sea from South Korea. From there a traveler with a passport could fly to Seoul’s Incheon airport in just over an hour. But North Korean defectors have to take a much more tortuous route to freedom.

  We were met at the Qingdao bus station by a middle-aged ethnic Korean woman who took us to an apartment building in a nondescript neighborhood. There we were dropped off in one of at least two shelters maintained in the city by a clandestine Protestant mission. It was the first stop in an underground railroad, where North Korean defectors were trained in the Bible while they waited for their chance to escape through Mongolia. The mission was run by a South Korean pastor with help from the ethnic Korean woman and a Han Chinese Christian man who organized and guided the dangerous trips to the Mongolian border.

  The People’s Republic of China has had a complicated, often violent relationship with organized religion. Churches were purged during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, although in the more recent era of economic reforms, the atheistic government has allowed some churches to operate openly. But Christian missions that proselytize to nonbelievers are illegal, and so is helping North Koreans escape to other countries. We were told that if the authorities found out about the Qingdao mission, the pastor and his helpers could be sent to prison and we would be deported. For this reason we were never told the real names of our rescuers.

  Our party of three from Shenyang shared a small apartment with eight or nine other female North Korean defectors. We were warned not to make too much noise and never to leave the apartment by ourselves—although some people did anyway. We were each expected to buy our own food on a stipend of 5 yuan—about 65 cents—a day. Once a week, the ethnic Korean lady would take us someplace safe to shop. Luckily, my mother and I had money to buy more food, which we shared with our group.

  When we arrived, my mother and I had never heard of Jesus Christ. We got some help from one of the other defectors who explained it this way: “Just think of God as Kim Il Sung and Jesus as Kim Jong Il. Then it makes more sense.”

  I have to confess that I was just going along with it at first. If I had to accept Christ as my savior to get to South Korea, then I was going to be the best Christian these people had ever seen. We had to worship every morning and then study the Bible all day. The pastor had us write out page after page from the book of Proverbs in Korean. We did a lot of singing and praying and repenting for our sins. I had no trouble grasping the concept of an all-powerful, all-knowing God. It was a lot like what we had been taught in North Korea about our Dear Leader, who knew everything and would take care of everything for us if we were loyal to him. But I had trouble understanding how He was a merciful God. I wondered why this God existed in South Korea but not in North Korea.

  But before long, I was swept up in the songs and the spirit of the gospel and lent myself completely to the message of hope. I also found that I was very good at prayer.

  • • •

  Soon after we arrived, my mother called our friend Sun Hi, who was living in a nearby province with her Chinese “husband” and her nine-year-old daughter, Hyong Sim. We had lived together briefly in one of Hongwei’s apartments, and Sun Hi and my mother had bonded instantly. They were the same age, both from Hyesan (although they didn’t know each other there), and both were searching for their older daughters who had disappeared in China’s network of traffickers. Sun Hi’s life had been complicated and tragic, but she was a resilient, even buoyant, woman, and we had come to think of her and Hyong Sim as family.

  My mother told Sun Hi about our plans and how she could also escape to South Korea if she contacted the mission. Sun Hi and her young daughter were having a hard time surviving on her husband’s poor farm, so she was eager for the chance to leave. She and Hyong Sim arrived in Qingdao in mid-February and joined our group.

  Unfortunately, we were already making preparations to switch to another apartment. My mother was having trouble getting along with Hae Soon, who had a controlling personality. My mother’s intolerance might have simply been caused by stress, but she found it unbearable to live in the same apartment with Hae Soon, and she didn’t want to continue our journey with her. We made some thank-you offerings to the ethnic Korean woman to help support the mission and within a short time were moved to another, similar apartment with a different group who were also preparing for their departure. This happened to be the next team scheduled to leave for Mongolia, so we also would be getting out of China sooner than the others.

  Our new group included my mother, myself, and three other women—one who had lived in China for almost a decade, one who was in her early twenties, and one who was my mother’s age. There was also a young family: a father, mother, and a boy of about three. The family had relatives in South Korea who paid a lot of money to send a broker to get them in North Korea. They went directly from the border to the mission in Qingdao, so they had never lived in China and didn’t understand a word of Chinese.

  My mother and I liked these people, and we fit in well with the group. They had finished their Bible training, and the pastor thought we were all ready to go.

  Then one day in late February, as we were making our final preparations to leave, the pastor called a prayer meeting with our new group. This is where we praised the Lord and repented our sins, which seemed like a familiar ritual to anyone from North Korea. We sat in a circle and criticized ourselves and begged God for forgiveness for all we had done wrong.

  We had done it many times with this pastor, but this time felt different. After I repented, the pastor said, “Don’t you have more to tell?”

  I looked at him curiously. He turned to my mother. “Surely there are more sins you can tell us about?”

  We were shocked. My mother and I communicated silently with our eyes. We could only imagine that someone in the other group had told the pastor about our work in the chat room.

  “We repented our sins privately with God,” my mother said. “Do we have to say it in front of everyone?”

  He told us yes, we had to make a full confession in front of everyone and beg for forgiveness.

  We started crying, and at that point he asked everybody else to leave the room.

  My mother and I told him that we had worked in the chat rooms in Shenyang, but we were so sorry, we only did it to survive. We thought God had forgiven us.

  The pastor shook his head gravely.

  “No, you are sinners. And I cannot allow you to go to Mongolia in a sinful state. You will put all the innocent ones at risk.”

  We begged and begged the pastor, promising him that we would never do such a sinful thing ever again. We were so, so sorry. Couldn’t he forgive us?

  “It’s not up to me,” he said. “You have to pray to God to forgive you.”

  Then my mother said, “You’re so right. We were too sinful, and if our deep repentance was not enough for God to forgive us, then we don’t dare go with the others and bring them harm. We can only say how sorry we are and ask for mercy.”

  The pastor didn’t say anything for a while. Then he read us a passage from Isaiah, translated into Korean:

  “‘Come now, let us settle the matter,’ says the Lord. ‘Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.’”

  The words soothed me, and I thanked the pastor again and again for his prayers. But I left the meeting feeling dirty and ashamed for what I had done to survive.

  • • •

  The next day, the ethnic Korean woman told my mother and me that we could go with the team.

  The pastor came to the apartment one more time to pray with us before we left for Mongolia and to wish us a safe journey. He pulled me aside for some final words. “Please live a proper life in South Korea,” he said. I
could tell his expectations for me were not good—he thought my past would shape my future. How could I tell him that all I wanted was to live and be free?

  • • •

  Our group was planning to cross the border into Mongolia at night, on foot, during one of the coldest times of the year, when temperatures in that part of the Gobi Desert can drop to minus-27 degrees Fahrenheit. Winter crossings were supposed to be safer because the Chinese border patrols were lighter and they wouldn’t be expecting anyone to risk freezing to death during such a dangerous trek. But there was still a real possibility that we would be arrested before we got to the border. And in that case, my mother and I had decided we were not going to be taken. My mother had stashed away a large cache of sleeping pills—the same kind my grandmother had used to kill herself. I hid a razor blade in the belt of my tweed jacket so that I could slit my own throat before they sent me back to North Korea.

  The night before we left, I called Hongwei. We had not seen each other in months, and I still had such complicated feelings for him. But now that I was facing my death, I was more at peace with my past. I had spent too much energy and time hating and being intolerant of the choices others had made. Now, at age fifteen, I felt that there was not enough time left to express my love and gratitude to the people in my life. I told Hongwei that I had prayed for my father to stop haunting him and to forgive him. I prayed that I could forgive him, too. I also wanted him to know I was escaping through Mongolia, because if I died in the desert, he would be the only one who remembered me.

  By the end of our conversation I was crying, and Hongwei’s voice was choked with emotion.

  “Good-bye, Yeonmi-ya,” he said. “I wish only the best for you. Please stay alive.”

  For once, he got what he wished for.

  • • •

  It took four long days to reach the border. Our band of defectors traveled by train and bus, accompanied by the Han Chinese man who worked for the mission. He was of normal height, and he looked to be in his late forties, just an average-looking Chinese guy, which helped him avoid attention while he was escorting undocumented defectors out of the country. He didn’t speak any Korean, and I spoke the best Mandarin Chinese in our group, so I had to translate as he told us what to do if we were stopped by police. “If any of you gets captured, please don’t give up the rest of the team,” he said. “Tell the police you were traveling alone, and save the rest of us.”