Escape from North Korea (4 page)

Throughout the United States—South
and
North—anyone caught providing food or shelter to runaway slaves was subject to six months in prison and a fine of $1,000 under the onerous provisions of the federal Fugitive Slave Act.
¹⁷
That legislation stiffened earlier penalties for helping escaped slaves. It was passed as part of the Compromise of 1850 and signed into law by President Millard Fillmore, who hoped to ward off war between the Southern slaveholding states and the Northern free states. Abolitionists nicknamed it the “bloodhound law,” for the dogs they said were used to track down runaway slaves.

In
Uncle Tom's Cabin
, Harriet Beecher Stowe's searing antislavery novel, published in 1852, one character expresses the widely held Northern view of the Fugitive Slave Act: “It's a shameful, wicked, abominable law, and I'll break it, for one, the first time I get a chance; and I hope I shall have a chance, I do!” she exclaims. “Things have got to a pretty pass, if a woman can't give a warm supper and a bed to poor, starving creatures, just because they are slaves, and have been abused and oppressed all their lives, poor things!”
¹⁸
Uncle Tom's Cabin
was the best-selling book of the nineteenth century after the Bible, and it is one of the best-selling books of all time. Its political impact is hard to overstate. When Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1862, he is reported to have said, “So this is the little lady who started this great war.”
¹⁹

The number of slaves who traveled the Underground Railroad in nineteenth-century America is small when compared with the three and a half million African-Americans still in bondage in 1860 on the eve of the Civil War. But the fugitives' impact on public opinion in the North was enormous. Their escape stories—told in personal narratives, in abolitionist newspapers, in public meetings, and from church pulpits—brought home the evils of slavery to Northerners, who no longer had the option of averting their eyes or accepting pro-slavery arguments that slaves were happy and well treated. The graphic tales of deprivation and violence, sexual abuse, and family separation did much to strengthen the abolitionist cause in the North.

The slaves' escape narratives were inspirational stories of bravery, enterprise, and self-assertion. As such, they helped erode a popular image of the black man as subservient, unable to take care of himself, and unworthy of freedom. In their own accounts and in the accounts of others, the men and women who rode the Underground Railroad to freedom emerged as fully worthy of respect. The same was true of their conductors, who were often free blacks.

In the course of research for this book, I have interviewed numerous Americans who conduct North Korean refugees along the new underground railroad. Among them were a businessman from Long Island, New York, who spent four years in a Chinese prison for the crime of feeding and sheltering North Korean refugees in safe houses in China; a student who dropped out of Yale University to form an organization that guides North Koreans to safety in third countries; a retired couple from the Midwest who oversee orphanages for abandoned Chinese-Korean children in China; a pastor from Seattle who was arrested and jailed in China after he helped more than one hundred refugees escape; a woman who left a glamorous job in the public-relations industry in Manhattan to head a California-based organization that helps North Koreans escape from China.

Like the Underground Railroad of yore, the new underground railroad is supported in part by a network of benefactors. The original Underground Railroad referred to its funders as “stockholders.” Then, as now, these people put up the money to keep the underground railroad running. Many of the donations supporting the new underground railroad are small, offered by church members moved to give by the stories they hear from missionaries working with refugees. Brokers who work on the new underground railroad often take IOUs from refugees, who promise to pay for their passage out of the resettlement money they receive from the South Korean government once they reach Seoul.

The new underground railroad also has ideological stockholders. In Washington, a core group of congressmen and senators keeps the issue alive on Capitol Hill. They work with a small number of dedicated activists who raise awareness and money through small nonprofit organizations. There are nearly two million Americans of Korean heritage. Like free blacks of the pre–Civil War North who helped runaway slaves, many of the conductors, benefactors, and activists along the new underground railroad are Korean-American.

Meanwhile, the world remains silent. While Pyongyang bears the ultimate responsibility for the plight of the North Korean fugitives, Beijing acts as a facilitator; Seoul until recently has turned a blind eye; Washington is usually quiet; and the United Nations, led by a South Korean Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, has refused to take effective action.

The number of North Koreans who have escaped so far on the new underground railroad is small. In the more than fifty years since the end of the 1950–53 Korean War, fewer than twenty-five thousand North Koreans have reached safety in South Korea. Since 2004, when Congress enacted legislation welcoming North Korean refugees, the United States has accepted 128, as of early 2012. More than one thousand are making new lives in Britain and Europe. Japan has
welcomed about two hundred. Canada has given refuge to more than one hundred. These numbers are a drop in the bucket compared with the tens of thousands of North Koreans still hiding in China, much less the twenty-four million people still enslaved in North Korea.

Yet the North Korean fugitives may hold the key to regime change in North Korea and, by extension, to halting the North's nuclear and missile programs. Help one man or woman escape, and that person will get word to his family back home about the freedom that awaits outside their prison state. Others will follow, especially if they know the world will welcome them. A sip of freedom, even the limited kind available in China to refugees on the run, is intoxicating. This is already happening.

Knowledge is power. The more that North Koreans learn about the world outside their borders, the better educated they will be about their own country. The mantra of the Kim family regime—that they live in the greatest, most prosperous nation on earth and that North Koreans are the world's happiest people—will be exposed for the lie it is.

In the 1850s—the exact date is not noted—the
Underground Railroad Record
copied into its pages the words of John Thompson, a fugitive slave who had reached the city of Syracuse in central New York state. From there, Thompson wrote the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee, asking for help in getting a letter to his mother in Virginia. The letter is set down in the
Record
exactly as Thompson wrote it, including idiosyncrasies in capitalization as well as spelling and grammatical mistakes.

“MY DEAR MOTHER,” he wrote. “I think highly of Freedom and would not exchange it for nothing that is offered me for it. . . . . Say to Miss Rosa that I am as Free as she is & more happier.”
²⁰

In October 2009, a similar letter arrived via email in the in-box of 318 Partners, a Long Island–based charitable organization dedicated to rescuing North Korean refugees from China. With the help of 318 Partners, the writer, a young woman, had arrived safely in South Korea a few months earlier.

“Hello. How are you?” the email began. “My name is Lee Sun-hua. I used to live in China. I am truly thankful to you for all your help in enabling me to live in South Korea. I was sold by human traffickers in China . . . and I lived a very difficult life there.”

She went on: “Right now living in South Korea is like living in heaven. It's still like a dream to me.”
²¹

Lee Sun-hua is not alone. Her sentiments mirror those of other North Koreans who have made it out of their homeland, to China and on to safety in third countries. Sixty years of oppression have not extinguished the spirit of these North Koreans. As they ride the new underground railroad to freedom, they are signaling the brighter future that is possible for their countrymen. There is no happy ending, as yet, to their country's story. But there is hope—and there is inspiration from their testimonies.

ESCAPE

CROSSING THE RIVER

U
nder the terms of the armistice that suspended the Korean War in 1953, a narrow strip of land, two and a half miles wide and 155 miles long, divides the country of Korea along the thirty-eighth parallel north. Since that time, that strip of land, called the Demilitarized Zone, has served as a buffer between the Republic of Korea in the south and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in the north. It also has served another purpose: It has kept the people of North Korea from running away.

For more than half a century, the DMZ has been virtually impenetrable. It is seeded with land mines, surrounded by fences, barbed wire, and watchtowers, and patrolled on both sides by heavily armed soldiers. North Korea's million-man army faces South Korea's six hundred thousand troops, who are backed by twenty-eight thousand American ground forces. For good reason, the DMZ is often called the most militarized border in the world.

In the nearly sixty years since its creation, the DMZ has seen so little human activity that it has reverted to a natural state. It is home today to the Asiatic black bear, Eurasian lynx, red-crowned crane, and other exotic species that have fled the development accompanying East Asia's newfound prosperity. More than one thousand plant and animal species coexist in this accidental nature preserve. Even the extremely rare Siberian tiger, the largest of its species, is said to prowl the DMZ.
¹

The last human beings to cross the thirty-eighth parallel in any number were Korean War refugees. At the time war broke out on June 25, 1950, an estimated one million men, women, and children living in North Korea fled south in advance of the Communist forces led by Kim Il Sung. Since the war, the only North Koreans to have crossed the line have been regime officials en route to discussions in Seoul, infiltrators bent on assassination or other mayhem in South Korea, and a few soldier-defectors familiar with the pathways that routed them safely past the million land mines buried there. As every North Korean knows, to reach South Korea, you cannot go south. You must first go north, to China. You must cross the river.

North Korea's boundary with China stretches 880 miles and is delineated by two rivers, the Yalu and the Tumen. The source of both rivers is on Mount Paektu, the volcanic mountain sacred to Koreans as the ancestral home of the Korean people and the location of Korea's first kingdom some four millennia ago. The Yalu River runs along North Korea's northwest border and empties into the Yellow Sea near the Chinese port of Dandong and the North Korean city of Sinuiju. The Tumen River separates the two countries in the Northeast. For its last eleven miles, it runs along the frontier between North Korea and Russia before finally flowing into the Sea of Japan, the body of water that the people of both Koreas prefer to call the East Sea, a rare show of cross-border unanimity in their shared detestation of the name imposed by their former colonial masters.

For North Koreans seeking to escape from their country, the Tumen River is usually the preferred crossing point. Unlike the Yalu, which is swift and wide and can defeat even expert swimmers, the Tumen is shallow and narrow. In winter, it is possible to walk across the frozen Tumen. In summer, it is easy to swim across or even wade, and there are sections where the riverbed dries up altogether.

The Christian missionaries and humanitarian organizations that assist North Koreans in China and help them navigate the new underground railroad out of that country rarely operate within North Korea itself. North Koreans who cross the river into China do so on their own initiative or with help from family members, friends, or paid professional guides. One survey of North Koreans hiding in China showed that even though a high number received assistance from Christians once they arrived in that country, barely 1 percent received any such assistance in exiting North Korea.
²

Crossing the river requires an abundance of two things that are in short supply in North Korea: luck and money. A fugitive needs luck to evade border guards who think nothing of shooting a fleeing man in the back.
³
Luck will also help him stay clear of the primitive but effective man-traps that are dug into the riverbanks for the purpose of snaring North Koreans who are about to cross the river to China.