We Got Out

I met these three people in a nine-story Christian church for North Korean refugees in Seoul. I don’t know the church’s name; the reverend told me just to call it Seoul Church. It looked exactly like a Christian church in Texas or anywhere in the heartland. The parishioners wore suits and dresses; the kids wore acid-washed jeans and sportswear. On the seventh floor, a family was eating in a huge cafeteria, and next door, four ladies in aprons were trying to get a classroom of hyperspazzing children to settle down.
 

Vice Hourglass

There was one woman who had given birth to a baby about a month before I arrived, and her body was still unrecovered. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t walk from her spot to the toilet, so we had to carry her. She started to cry and shout that she could not walk, so they took her out after ten days and sent her back home.

I was beaten by the guards. I bled. I was tortured in the prison. They kicked me and beat me until I became unconscious. I was unconscious for 20 hours. I was lying down in my blood, in the room with the other nine women. The other women tried to clean me up and help me, but there was no medicine or doctor in the prison. About ten days after I woke up, there was an outbreak of typhus and I got it. With high fever, the body will tremble. Three or four women had typhus during this time. When we recovered, the others got it, back and forth. It passed down the hallway to the other cells, so we could listen to the other women at night, when it was quiet, and they’d be moaning.

During this time, my ten-year-old daughter was in China with a couple who felt very sorry for me and her. I was able to defect again after I got out of prison, and I paid a Chinese broker to take me and my daughters to Seoul. It cost about $7,000 total, and this is money I was able to pay using the resettlement money I received from the South Korean government upon my arrival. On-sung is a rural city, so when it rains everybody has to wear rain boots. When I got to South Korea, the first thing I did was go to the department store to buy rain boots for my kids. The guy in the store asked my why I wanted to buy rain boots in Seoul and I said, “Isn’t it rainy in Seoul? I don’t want my children’s feet to get dirty.” He thought it was very funny.



The human rights issues in North Korea are really urgent and the situation is really bad. About 3 million people died of starvation between 1993 and 1998. It started in 1993 because that was the year Kim Il-sung died. After his death, society went into total chaos and the high officers didn’t care about the welfare of the normal people, because they were busy saving their own necks.

I starved during that time. After starving for ten or more days you lose all your energy. You lose the energy to walk. When I did manage to walk in the street, I saw a person in front of me fall down, and he had no energy to get up. He just stayed lying down in the road, because he didn’t have anything in his stomach. I couldn’t help him because I had nothing in my stomach either so I just passed by, and the person who fell down died there. I saw a lot of people lying down in the street.



During this time, young people in North Korea ran out of their homes because there was no food. They ran away and lived with other young people. These kids were called koseibi, which means “the young kids who are moving around like swallows.” They stole or begged, and that’s how they lived every day. It is very cold in North Korea and if five of them went to sleep at the station, only two or three of them would wake up. They’d die because of the cold weather. There were so many corpses at the railway stations, the government created an organization to take care of them. It was called 918 Public Service. Koseibis were dying every day in large numbers, so the 918 Public Service tried to bury their bodies in the nearby mountains. During the winter the ground is frozen, so you cannot dig it deep enough to put in the bodies. They just dug shallow holes and put the bodies inside and covered them with some dirt.

When I was in high school, my friend was at this rice field near town, and behind it there was a mountain used for burial. There was not enough stone to make tombstones, so the graves had these white nameplates instead. The mountain was entirely covered with these white wooden sticks. During the spring and during the summer, the bodies that were not buried deep enough started to come out as the ground thawed, and there was a stink. The skeletons were fine because they did not stink, but some bodies were not completely decomposed yet and there was still flesh on the bones. That makes a lot of stink.

My father was locked up in the political prison and my mother was working in the city to make some money to support me and my brother, so we were left alone in the house with one bowl of corn that had to last five days. I ate one piece of corn every hour.

About 15 million tons of rice are needed for the North Korean people to survive for a year. Since the 1960s the rice production has only been 8 million tons. The Soviet Union and East Germany used to help out, but now North Korea is not getting any help, even from its allies.

The only way to make things better is to make the world know about the awful status of people’s lives in North Korea today. What the U.S. is doing right now is affecting North Korea. They are banning economic transactions between North Korea and other countries. This is responsible for the starvation to some extent, but the major reason why the North Koreans are suffering is that the government of Kim Jong-il is refusing to open up because they killed so many people to get to their current positions. They cannot open up, because they would have to face military trial.

Most refugees in South Korea or other countries are sending money to their families in North Korea, because even if you don’t have any money in South Korea you can still live, but if you don’t have any money in North Korea you will die. It’s a strange life… That’s all I have to say today.