In Order to Live

I am most grateful for two things: that I was born in North Korea, and that I escaped from North Korea.

I actually believed that our Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, could read my mind, and I would be punished for my bad thoughts.

It is extremely difficult to move to a higher songbun, but it is very easy to be cast down into the lowest levels through no fault of your own. And as my father and his family found out, once you lose your songbun status, you lose everything else you have achieved along with it.

They need to control you through your emotions, making you a slave to the state by destroying your individuality, and your ability to react to situations based on your own experience of the world.

North Koreans have two stories running in their heads at all times, like trains on parallel tracks. One is what you are taught to believe; the other is what you see with your own eyes. It wasn’t until I escaped to South Korea and read a translation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four that I found a word for this peculiar condition: doublethink.

Still, I learned something important from my short time as a market vendor: once you start trading for yourself, you start thinking for yourself.

I could tell that his time in the prison camp had broken his spirit. He couldn’t look a policeman in the face, not even the ones who used to joke and drink with him at his table. My father used to love South Korean music; now he refused to listen to it.

But I felt an old hunger burning in me, one that told me there was more to life than just surviving.

Mongolia’s stated policy was to allow North Korean refugees from China safe passage to a third country, but events on the ground were much murkier. In fact, defectors were caught in a long-standing political and economic tug-of-war.

A second chance? I thought. A second chance is what criminals get. I knew I wasn’t a criminal; I did what I had to do to survive and save my family. But now my heart sank. I realized I had no hope in this place.

Hanawon is like a boot camp for time travelers from the Korea of the 1950s and ‘60s who grew up in a world without ATMs, shopping malls, credit cards, or the Internet. [...] There was so much more: printer, scanner, salad, hamburger, pizza, clinic. This wasn’t just a new vocabulary for me; these were code words for entry into a completely new world.

In North Korea, we are usually taught to memorize everything, and most of the time there is only one correct answer to each question. So when the teacher asked for my favorite color, I thought hard to come up with the “right” answer.

I read to fill my mind and to block out the bad memories. But I found that as I read more, my thoughts were getting deeper, my vision wider, and my emotions less shallow.

Police officers had never protected me from anything in my life. But in South Korea, protection was their job description. And so I chose to run toward the thing I feared the most and join their ranks.

I learned something else: 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.

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.

How could I ask people to face the truth about North Korea, to face the truth about what happens to the women who escape into China and fall into the hands of brokers and rapists, if I couldn’t face it myself?