Dec

The story of a North Korean defector

From North Korea’s border county Musan to the nearest Chinese city Yanji, the distance is merely 80 miles. It usually takes less than five hours if you drive and two days if you walk. But this short journey took Kim Song-ju more than 4 days.

With little food and no water, the 32-year-old North Korean man had only one thought in mind. “I can’t go back there (North Korea). I’d rather die if I’m caught.” He had just swum across the Tumen River, the natural boundary that separates the two neighbouring countries, China and North Korea. He was wet and exhausted.

The Tumen River is not wide. Neither is it deep. At its middle reach, the width of its narrowest point is less than 200 ft and the average depth around 4-10 ft. But conditions on the two banks differ greatly. On the Chinese side, thriving, busy and lively; on the North Korean side, decaying, dull and bleak.

Life comes full circle. Three or four decades ago, the situation was the other way around – many Chinese crossed the border to feed themselves. But Kim was too young even to remember the good old days. All he remembered was starvation and poverty.

Kim’s father died of starvation in 1995, the same year when famine began to spread in the country. Kim was in his early twenties then. The horrible images of people dying in starvation and the rumours of cannibalism haunted him ever since. He was always hungry and he was always insecure.

“The dear leader was wrong. North Korea was no heaven.” He needed to get out of this dreadful land even at the cost of his life, he decided.

He has two sisters, and one had already escaped to South Korea then. He asked the one who stayed at home to take good care of their mother when he was away.

But his attempt had to be kept secret, not just for his own sake. At that time, the families of escapees could be put in prison and even prison camps as an indirect punishment.

Kim set out at night, carefully swimming across the Tumen River. He dared not paddle hard lest the noise would draw attention. Every time he heard something, he shivered. “The soldiers would shoot at anyone who tries to escape,” when he recalled his first escape several years later, it was still not difficult to sense the fear in his voice.

It was midnight. He had just crossed the border, wet and worn-out. But he could not rest. Darkness was his best cover. If the residents living near the border spotted him, he would be reported and repatriated.

He walked and walked and walked, till daybreak. Daylight was his worst enemy. It could easily expose him. He had to hide himself in the roadside bushes or fields nearby during daytime.

Hungry, thirsty and exhausted, he dared not ask for help. Residents along the China-North Korea border were told to report any suspicious people, and they got rewards for doing so.

Kim walked for four days before he got to Yanji, a city along the China-North Korea border where many Chaoxianzu (Chinese people of Korean descent) live.

The year was 2004, the first time Kim escaped from the world’s most mysterious regime.

Even though Kim spoke the same language as the local Chaoxianzu and learnt Chinese while he was working in Yanji, his appearance would instantly give him away. He was shorter and thinner, a result of long time malnutrition.

Like most North Korean defectors, he is wary of strangers. But unlike most of them, he is optimistic and outspoken at the same time. So when he was telling his story, sitting in his 300 sq ft south London office that he shares with two other North Korean defectors, he had not cried once, not even when he retold the terrible experience of being repatriated by Chinese police and imprisoned by North Korean police.

In 2005, a year after his successful escape, Kim was reported. The Chinese police arrested him and sent him to Tumen, another city along the China-North Korea border. They kept him there for three days, and then a bus came and picked up him along with 24 fellow North Koreans.

As the bus drove across the Tumen Bridge, a bridge over the Tumen River that connects China and North Korea, he had only one thought – he wanted to die – but he couldn’t, two Chinese police were watching them and he was handcuffed.

The bus journey was no more than 30 minutes, but it felt like an eternity. When they got to the other end of the Tumen Bridge, North Korean police were already waiting there. He was taken to Onsung, a remote village.

“Why did you go to China?” “When did you go to China?” “What have you done in China?” These are always the most common questions. Then, the police asked: “Do you believe in Christianity? Have you met any South Korean people in China?” Kim knew these two questions were the most dangerous ones. If wrongly answered, he would immediately be sent to a prison camp.

After the questioning, he was transferred to a labour camp in which he stayed six days and was interrogated by the same of questions again and again. Finally, he was sentenced to jail for one month, serving in a prison near his hometown Musan.

“I only cried once, and that’s when my mother came to visit me in the prison,” he said, striving hard to hold back emotions.

Now that he had seen the world outside North Korea, nothing could have kept him in the country. He crossed the border a second time only three months after his release. This time, he had better luck.

He stayed in Yanji for three year and met a South Korean Christian who later arranged for him to come to England.

Kim said he was scared when he first landed on British soil. “I didn’t speak the language then and I hadn’t seen people of different skin colours before,” he said, half-jokingly.

That was January 2008. His life totally changed afterwards.

Now he is the editor of the FreeNK website, a hub for North Korean defectors worldwide, which promotes human rights in North Korea. Currently, he and his two fellow North Korean colleagues are planning to launch a free newspaper for people in North Korea.

“People in North Korea don’t know what the outside world looks like and they don’t know the wrongdoings of Kim Jong-il. If they have enough information, their minds will change and they will not follow Kim,” he said, determinedly.

Being brave and optimistic is one thing, and being traumatised is another. When an NHS car went by, the siren fading in and fading out, Kim suddenly stopped talking.

“I still feel scared whenever I hear the siren. I still sometimes have nightmares about my life in North Korea and China.”