In Order to Live Read online

  • • •

  We landed in the capital, San José, and then went on by bus to the coastal fishing town of Golfito. Ours was a mercy mission to share the gospel and give physical help to those in need. We ministered to prostitutes and drug addicts, we picked up trash and cleaned shelters and generally did good works. It was the late summer rainy season, and nights were almost as hot as the days. Some of us slept on the balcony of the pastor’s house, which was also used as a church on Sundays. We slept on top of sleeping bags that were usually soaking wet, and although we had a mosquito net, I have never had so many insect bites in my life. My legs were swollen and infected, and I was so miserable, I thought about giving up and going home.

  But then a remarkable thing happened: Despite my distress, I stopped praying for myself. For the first time in my life, I found myself praying for others. And then I realized why I was there.

  The feeling had been growing in me for some time now. I had read a powerful book called Don’t Beat Someone, Even with Flowers, written by a famous Korean actress and humanitarian named Kim Hye Ja, who became an ambassador for the World Vision International charity after she was taken on a tour of Ethiopia’s famine camps in the 1990s. Her moving account of the misery in Africa, India, and other places opened my eyes. It taught me the meaning of compassion.

  Until I read her book, I thought North Koreans were the only ones suffering in the world. And even though many defectors talked openly about starvation and brutality, only a handful of a women publicly admitted to being raped or trafficked. And certainly not as children. It was too shameful to discuss. So I thought I was the only one who had gone through these horrible things. But now I read that this had happened to other girls and women around the world. I was not alone. It made me realize that I was too absorbed in my own pain. But I still did not know how to cry for a stranger’s suffering. As far as I knew, it was impossible, because no stranger had ever cried for me.

  I had chosen Youth With A Mission because I knew they served some of the poorest and most forgotten communities, but I came to understand that I wasn’t there for other people—I was there for myself. These homeless men and women in Costa Rica might have thought I was ladling rice and picking up trash for them—but I was actually doing it for me.

  Through helping others, I learned that I had always had compassion in me, although I hadn’t known it and couldn’t express it. I learned that if I could feel for others, I might also begin to feel compassion for myself. I was beginning to heal.

  • • •

  When our time was up in Costa Rica, we flew back to the United States to continue our mission among the homeless in Atlanta, Georgia.

  The homeless shelter where we served seemed like a palace to me. The homeless people had beds and laptops to use, and a refrigerator to keep their sodas chilled. They were free to come and go. But they were not happy, and they had no hope. They thought they had nothing to offer. I found it astonishing.

  Our group served them hot dogs and cleaned their rooms. When we were done, I was asked to talk to a homeless man who was assigned as my partner. My English was still very rudimentary, so I told my story through gestures and simple words. He understood that I was from a place called North Korea, and that I had made some kind of crazy escape. I acted out being hungry and scared, and being chased by police. When I shivered and crawled and said, “Sand, sand, sand!” he understood that I had made it through the desert. I was surprised that he cried when I was finished with my story. I told him that all I wanted was a chance for freedom, just as he had here in America.

  The man’s emotional response opened my mind to the power of my own story. It gave me hope for my own life. By simply telling my story, I had something to offer, too.

  I learned something else that day: we all have our own deserts. They may not be the same as my desert, but we all have to cross them to find a purpose in life and be free.

  • • •

  After our program ended in November, a friend from the mission invited me and a boy from North Korea to spend Thanksgiving with her family in Virginia. Esther Choi was a Korean American whose parents had emigrated from South Korea about thirty years before, I was so honored to be staying with her family and I felt an instant connection with them. Because they lived so far away, Korean Americans lovingly clung to their old culture; they were more like North Koreans than the South Koreans I knew. I noticed they even used an old-fashioned vocabulary that was very familiar to me.

  It was my first American Thanksgiving, and I loved the idea of making a holiday out of gratitude. Esther’s mother was planning to make a big turkey, along with lots of Korean dishes, including kimchi. I was excited because it had been a long time since I had eaten kimchi, my very favorite food. A few days before the holiday, I was riding in the car with Esther and her mother on a trip to pick some special cabbage in a garden belonging to one of their relatives when my cell phone rang.

  It was my mother in South Korea. She was almost hysterical.

  “Yeonmi! Your sister! I’ve found your sister!”

  My heart flipped over in my chest. Then I took a breath. We had been tricked before by people in China who claimed to have found her just for the reward money, and our hopes would be dashed again when it turned out to be a hoax.

  “Umma, what do you mean, you found her?” I said.

  “She’s here, in South Korea. At the National Intelligence Center. They called me.”

  I screamed so loud that Esther and her mother thought there was some kind of emergency. My mother and I cried and talked at the same time, neither of us believing this was real but hoping it was. My mother told me she was going to be allowed a special visit to see Eunmi tomorrow at the Center, the same place where we had been held when we first arrived. She would bring her phone and put Eunmi on to talk to me.

  I hadn’t seen or heard a word from my sister in almost seven years. Suddenly, I had to get back to South Korea as quickly as possible. We drove back to the house so I could change my ticket. I had planned to stay for a few more months, visiting different parts of the United States. Now nothing was more important than getting home.

  That night, I couldn’t sleep. Thoughts were roaring through my head like a runaway river after a dam break. All the walls I had put up to protect myself from the pain of losing my sister had been shattered, and now I had to feel everything, absolutely everything, good and bad. All I could do was try to hold on for dear life.

  The next day, I couldn’t eat a bite of food, and I paced through the house for hours until the phone rang and I heard my sister’s voice. I was so relieved, but I also struggled with what to say.

  “I’ll be seeing you soon,” I told her, after an awkward minute had gone by.

  “Yes, see you soon,” she said in a tiny, hushed voice.

  I recognized something in that voice, and it broke my heart. It was my father’s voice after he was released from the prison camp on medical leave. It was the sound of a captive, a tentative voice belonging to someone afraid of saying the wrong thing, afraid of being punished. It was the sound of my own voice, echoing across the years, reminding me of how far we had to go.

  • • •

  It took me almost three days in planes and in airport waiting rooms to get home. Normally defectors are kept in isolation until their interrogation period is over, but the kind NIS agents made an exception for me to visit Eunmi to “identify her.” They led me to a visiting room, and there she was—my sister I’d thought I would never see again, the same delicate heart-shaped face and tiny hands, alive. Again, there was little we could say. We just held each other’s hands and cried. I said a silent prayer to my father, who must have been smiling down on us from somewhere. It was done.

  • • •

  Eunmi’s story belongs only to her, and she deserves her privacy. What I can tell you is that she never saw any of my television appearances while she was
in China. She had no idea that we had escaped from North Korea or that we had been looking for her all this time. It was maddening to learn how physically close we had been to one another at times. As we had suspected, Eunmi and her friend had been hidden in one of the traffickers’ houses on the outskirts of Hyesan while my mother and I were searching for her and making our own escape. None of us had known that only a thin wall stood between us on that terrible day. We also compared notes and found out that Eunmi had been living in the same province when my mother and I were working in Shenyang. We were close, and yet a world might as well have separated us. There was so little chance of running into each other when everybody was hiding from the law.

  Eventually Eunmi discovered the route to escape through Southeast Asia, and that is how she made it to South Korea on her own. She didn’t need us to rescue her after all.

  When my sister graduated from Hanawon, she moved in with me in my apartment near Dongguk. She got a part-time job and started studying for her GED, just as I had. Because Eunmi was always a better student than I was, I predicted she would catch up even faster, and she did. She earned her equivalency diploma for middle school in about three months, and for high school in seven more months. But for a long time after she was back with us, my sister seemed trapped and distant, as if there were no room inside her heart for me or my mother. It was something we understood very well, and we both gave her space. In time, Eunmi made room for us all, and more.

  Twenty-four

  Homecoming

  Koreans like the New Year so much, we celebrate it twice, first with Western-style parties and fireworks at midnight to mark the beginning of the calendar year, and again, with even more fireworks and festivities, during the three-day Lunar New Year in late January or February. It’s the season when we gather with our families and think about the past and make resolutions for the future. After my mother and I escaped from North Korea in 2007, we stopped celebrating the holidays because they made us sad. But the New Year in 2014 wasn’t sad at all. Eunmi was safe. And I was full of plans.

  First, I wanted to get back to school and finish my degree. I had chosen my major specifically to join the national police agency in order to protect my mother from her violent boyfriend. But as my mind opened up in college, so did my sense of justice, and now I expected to study law. But I didn’t expect that within a year I would become an advocate for North Koreans who had no voice and no hope—the kind of person I had once been. Or that I would be stepping into the international arena to speak out for global justice. Or that the North Korean regime would denounce me as a “human rights puppet.” And I never thought that I would reveal what had happened to me in China. But I would soon discover that to be completely free, I had to confront the truth of my past.

  • • •

  My year of reckoning began quietly enough, with a New Year’s resolution to learn better English. Even after spending months among the missionaries, I still couldn’t hold up my end of a conversation. So I enrolled in an intensive tutoring program in Seoul that matched North Korean defectors with expatriate volunteers. Instead of just one teacher, I signed up with ten of them all at once. My tutors had me reading everything from Shakespeare to the American abolitionist and escaped slave Frederick Douglass. His defiant letter to his former master made me wonder what kind of letter I might write to Kim Jong Un if I had the nerve. Maybe, like Douglass, I would tell him that I was a human being and he didn’t own me anymore. Now I owned myself.

  When I wasn’t reading or studying with my tutors, I listened to English audiobooks and TED talks—even in my sleep. I downloaded all ten seasons of the American TV comedy Friends. Ask me anything about Ross and Rachel, and I can tell you. The only drawback, as far as my tutors were concerned, was that I was developing an American accent and speaking in 1980s slang.

  My English was greatly improved when I began the new term at Dongguk in March 2014, and I was on track to earn my degree in police administration. I was still occasionally taping episodes of Now on My Way to Meet You, but after Eunmi escaped from China, I had less incentive to appear on the show. Instead, I had found another, more direct way to advocate for justice for North Koreans.

  In mid-February 2014, I was invited to give a speech about North Korea—in English—to students and faculty at the Canadian Maple International School in Seoul. The head of my tutoring program said it would help me build confidence in my language skills. I wasn’t so sure, but I thought—why not?

  I pulled back my hair and wore a serious navy blue dress for my first real speech. I told the students a little bit about my life, the brainwashing, the lack of freedom, the fear and the starvation. I told them how I was part of a new generation of North Koreans, a black market or Jangmadang Generation, who grew up after the old economic system had died with Kim Il Sung. Young people my age were slowly bringing change from within the country, I said. Maybe not much change, but enough to give me hope for my friends and relatives and the millions of others I left behind when I escaped.

  Afterward, I answered questions for an hour. One of the students told me that my story had “inspired” him. I had to quickly look the word up with my cell phone. Until then, I didn’t know that a story could “inspire” someone, but apparently it did.

  • • •

  Until early 2014, most people—including South Koreans—knew North Korea only through its crazy threats of nuclear destruction and its weird, scary leaders with bad haircuts. But in February, the United Nations released a report documenting human rights abuses in North Korea, including extermination, rape, and deliberate starvation. For the first time, North Korean leaders were being threatened with prosecution in the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. But most of the three hundred or so witnesses who contributed to the report remained anonymous, while others had trouble communicating their stories. Suddenly defectors with English skills were needed to give a voice to the millions of North Koreans trapped behind a wall of silence and oppression.

  My speech at the Canadian school led to other invitations to speak, which led to more speeches and media interviews from Australia to the United States. In May I coauthored an op-ed piece in The Washington Post with Casey Lartigue Jr. Until that spring, I wasn’t sure what a human rights activist was. Now suddenly people were telling me I was becoming the face of this issue. I knew I wasn’t yet qualified to be a spokesperson for anyone, let alone the North Korean people. But from that point on, my life took off like a running train. I could not jump off if I tried. Maybe I thought if I moved fast enough, my past could not catch up with me.

  In June, I flew to Los Angeles for a conference and had to turn around and fly back to Seoul the next day for my final exams. I never even got to visit Hollywood on that trip, although I was hoping to run into Leonardo DiCaprio to tell him how much Titanic had meant to me growing up in North Korea.

  It was around this time that I received a call from a South Korean police detective who had been assigned to monitor my mother and me. All defectors are paired with a police officer for five years after their arrival in South Korea to help them resettle safely. My detective usually just wanted to know my schedule and see how I was doing. But this time was different. He said he had been instructed to check on my safety, because word had come down that I was being watched closely by the North Korean government. He didn’t tell me how he got this information, only that I should be careful what I said. It could be dangerous.

  If this was supposed to scare me, it worked. It had never occurred to me that the regime would think I was important enough to be a threat. Or to threaten me. The detective had spoken to my mother and frightened her, too. She wanted me to stop all this crazy activism right away. Why couldn’t I just live a normal life and finish my education before trying to save the world? But the more I thought about it, the angrier I got. I had risked my life to escape from North Korea, yet they were still trying to control me. I would never be free if
I let them do that.

  • • •

  My grades for the spring semester at Dongguk remained above average, and I had every intention of finishing the school year. I returned to college for a few weeks in September 2014, but again my life was overtaking my best-laid plans.

  I had accepted a number of invitations in Europe that October, including one to represent North Korea at the annual One Young World Summit in Dublin, Ireland. It was like a United Nations for youth leaders. I was to be introduced by James Chau, a British journalist and humanitarian who is famous throughout Asia as the anchor of China Central Television. In preparation, we spent an emotional morning talking about our lives, and I told him some of the details of my story. For the first time I planned to deliver a speech about the horrors of human trafficking in China—although I had no intention of revealing that I, too, had been trafficked.

  We were told to wear the traditional costume of our home country, so I was dressed in a flowing pink and white hanbok when I took the stage to give my short speech in front of all 1,300 delegates, guests, and media representatives at the conference.

  Before James began his introduction, I was nervous about what I was going to say. I was sitting on a stage with young activists from places like Ukraine and South Africa, and I was afraid I wouldn’t be a strong enough speaker to represent my people at this forum. I distracted myself by trying to concentrate on how to properly pronounce the words “international” and “execution” in my prepared speech. But when James began to tell my story, tears started running down his face. I reached out to comfort him, but that made him weep even more. By the time he had described how my mother sacrificed herself to be raped, and how I buried my father’s ashes on a lonely mountain in China, I was crying with him.