Nothing to Envy (41 page)

The water came up to his chin and the current was stronger than he’d expected. The water came up over the other defector’s head; she didn’t know how to swim. Jun-sang gripped her hand tightly and fought the current. Suddenly his bare feet touched sand and he climbed out in his sopping underwear. The woman followed. He was in China. He looked back across the river at the jagged silhouette of the North Korean mountains emerging from the sky, touched with the first light of the morning. He felt a brief stab of grief, but couldn’t stop to dwell on it. He put on his clothing, which had gotten wet despite the plastic, and followed the broker into the mountains away from the river until they lost sight of North Korea.

He’d never realized it could be so cold in June. His feet chafed inside his wet shoes and swelled up with blisters. When they finally reached the village where they hoped to rest and eat, it turned out that a North Korean had been caught stealing a few days before and the locals were hostile toward defectors. They hustled out of there quickly, fearing they would be reported to the police. The woman who was traveling with Jun-sang suggested that they push on to her final destination, a village where she had been living with a Chinese
farmer. During the walk, she told Jun-sang her story. She had been with the man for several years and they had a year-old baby. She’d been arrested seven months earlier and sent to a labor camp in North Korea. Now she was eager to get back to her husband and son. She assured Jun-sang that her husband would put him up until he was ready to move on.

The farmhouse proved to be no refuge. When they arrived, the Chinese farmer kicked and slapped the woman and attacked Jun-sang with a hoe, screaming furiously. He apparently thought that Jun-sang was her lover.

Alone and lost, Jun-sang wandered through the countryside. He finally spotted a bicycle rickshaw and hopped in, repeating the one word of Chinese the broker had taught him
—shichang
, market. He got out at a small outdoor market and found a woman selling kimchi. She had to be Korean, he figured, and he asked her if she knew anybody who would hire him. Her eyes flitted between his eyeglasses and his gaudy Japanese shirt.

“You look like a young man who’s never done any hard work,” she told him dismissively. Nevertheless, after some reassurance, she introduced him to an ethnic Korean businessman who owned a brick factory and offered Jun-sang work.

Jun-sang spent his days carrying heavy trays of bricks that were so hot they would singe his eyebrows if he stood too close. At night in the workers’ dormitory, he wrote in a notebook he’d bought. It was the first time he kept a journal—in North Korea, it had been too dangerous to confide honest thoughts to paper. He wrote about his time at the university. He wrote poems. After the mind-numbing work at the factory, the journal reminded him of the reasons he had left home.

He spent two months at the brick factory, saving money to pursue his goal of reaching South Korea. He took a bus down to Qingdao, which had a large South Korean business community and a consular office.

South Korean consulates in China were well guarded precisely in order to keep out people like Jun-sang, but he thought he could talk his way in if he dressed properly. He used his remaining money to buy a suit and new eyeglasses. Full of self-confidence, he showed up
at the building, marched right past the security guard downstairs, got into the elevator, and pressed the button for the seventh floor, where the consulate was located. But the elevator buttons for the seventh and eighth floors didn’t work without a key. Stepping out at the sixth floor, he spotted another security guard so he ducked back into the elevator. Finally, he got off at the ninth floor and raced down the stairs. As he ran out of the building he could hear the guards talking in urgent tones into their walkie-talkies.

He was lucky to get out of there without being arrested.

Jun-sang had no more money and no more ideas. He thought about returning to North Korea—and just might have had he not discovered the Internet.

Though Jun-sang had been an elite student at one of North Korea’s best universities, he had never used the Internet. His university had decent computers, IBM compatibles running Pentium 4 processors, and he’d been on the North Korean “intranet,” a closed system available only to academics to browse various academic papers and a censored encyclopedia the country had purchased, but the country remained an Internet black hole, one of the few in the world that had chosen to stay offline. At a computer club in Chongjin kids could play games, nothing more.

Jun-sang had heard of the Internet, and once in China his curiosity about it intensified. He even had a vague idea that it could solve his problems. But how to get on? At the Qingdao bus station, he loitered, listening for a Korean speaker, and then approached a young man. The guy turned out to be a South Korean exchange student. “No problem. I’ll teach you how to use it. It’s very easy,” he told Jun-sang, leading him to an Internet café.

The Web was a revelation to Jun-sang. With every click, the world was opening up to him. He felt certain for the first time that he had been right after all to escape to China. Here he was, a graduate of one of the best universities in the country, indeed one of the most computer-literate North Koreans, yet he was like a child in his knowledge. He typed into a South Korean search engine the words
North Korean human rights
and
North Korean defectors
.

Over the next several weeks, Jun-sang stayed late at night at the café, eating instant noodles and reading. He learned that other
North Korean defectors had similar problems getting to South Korea and studied the strategies they’d used, what worked and what failed. He educated himself about the South Korean laws governing North Koreans and about the diplomatic complications that prevented South Korea from accepting defectors at its embassy and consulates inside China. He studied maps of China, plane and train schedules, and wondered how he would get out.

Then one day he read about a pastor in Incheon who’d written with much compassion about the underground railroad that brought defectors out through Mongolia. Jun-sang, who had set up an e-mail address with the help of the student, excitedly dashed off a message:
I am in Qingdao. Can you help me get to South Korea?

JUN-SANG’S ROUTE
was the same as Kim Hyuck’s. Hundreds of others had by this time defected along these lines and the border crossings and safe houses were well mapped out. Jun-sang would need $2,500 for the journey, which his uncle in Japan wired him. He took the train to Erenhot, then crossed the desert terrain of the border into Mongolia, where the border police turned him over to the South Korean embassy. He arrived in South Korea in October 2004, whereupon he was turned over to the National Intelligence Service for debriefing.

Then it was Jun-sang’s turn to ask questions. It was not his first question, but one of the first: Can you tell me how to get in touch with Mi-ran? He knew for sure she was in South Korea because he’d searched for her name in the Internet café in Qingdao and had read an interview she’d given. The NIS kept close tabs on North Korean defectors and would surely have information about her.

The NIS agent hesitated. Under the rules, defectors are not supposed to be given information about other defectors for fear one might be a North Korean spy.

“We can’t release that unless you’re immediate family. Sorry.”

“She was my fiancée, my first love,” Jun-sang pleaded.

The agent was sentimental, and offered to make inquiries. The next day he came in and told Jun-sang he would give him her phone number, but he felt Jun-sang ought to know that she was married.

He was astounded. In retrospect, Jun-sang conceded that it was ridiculous for him to assume she was single and the height of arrogance to think she might be waiting for him. Mi-ran was by this time thirty-one years old. They’d had no contact for more than six years.

“At the time, honestly, it hadn’t crossed my mind that she might be married,” Jun-sang recalled.

He tried to comfort himself. He remembered a poem by the nineteenth-century Hungarian poet Sandor Petofi that he’d recited as he crossed the Tumen River:

The poem had moved him long ago when he’d read it in Pyongyang, and he’d memorized the words. He had sacrificed his love for Mi-ran to remain in Pyongyang. He’d never put her first in his life. He’d come to South Korea for freedom and that alone.

OVER THE FOLLOWING MONTHS
, Jun-sang went through the same rites of passage as the other defectors. He left the orientation program, got an apartment and a mobile telephone, and wandered the streets and markets in bewilderment trying not to be overwhelmed. He had only a few friends and sometimes regretted not knowing how to find Mi-ran. After he’d learned she was married, he told the national security agent that he didn’t want her phone number.

“It’s better to leave her alone. She’s married,” he told himself.

One evening he went to the apartment of someone he’d met at Hanawon. It was an informal gathering of defectors who’d occasionally get together to drink beer. Among them was a brooding young man he recognized immediately as Mi-ran’s kid brother. Jun-sang used to slip him candies in an effort to ingratiate himself. Sok-ju was just a child at the time and now didn’t recognize Jun-sang.

They struck up a conversation that evening and spoke again in subsequent gatherings. After a while, Sok-ju grew suspicious.

“How do you know so much about me and my family?” he asked. Then, before Jun-sang could respond, he slapped his knee and answered his own question. “Yeah, you’re that guy who used to hang around my sister …”

A WEEK LATER
, Jun-sang was pacing the sidewalk in front of identical high-rise apartments. He and Mi-ran had agreed to meet at a subway station in eastern Seoul. When Sok-ju had figured out who he was, Jun-sang had little choice but to call her. As soon as she realized it was Jun-sang on the phone, he could hear the indignation in her voice. “How come you didn’t call me sooner?” Mi-ran said. “We could have helped you.”

He felt foolish. He’d been in South Korea for nearly a year, a period when he was flailing about, desperately lost and lonely. He could have used a friend, particularly an old friend who knew him and understood where he came from. Though he felt himself aggrieved, a man who’d been jilted without notice, he ended up apologizing.

Now he checked the time again and again on his mobile telephone—nobody he knew wore a watch. He wondered if he had taken the wrong subway line or was waiting at the wrong exit. He was still confused by all the subway lines that shot out from the ever-expanding nexus of downtown Seoul, each station bigger than the last, with endless tile-lined corridors and multiple exits that were indistinguishable from one another. This one was in a newly built apartment district where Mi-ran said her mother lived. Jun-sang scanned the sidewalk to see if he recognized anybody in the crowd streaming toward him. It was a clear day in that brief, perfect interlude between the soggy summer and winter. The sidewalks were crowded, mostly with women, since it was a weekday and most South Korean women don’t work after they have children. Jun-sang watched the women in their tight jeans, yakking on their mobile telephones with fuzzy toys dangling off the ends. Some pushed elaborate strollers that must have cost as much as bicycles. Strollers
were almost unknown in North Korea—kids who couldn’t walk were strapped on the back with long cloths. Jun-sang wondered if Mi-ran was like these pampered young mothers. In a fleeting moment of panic, he wondered if she could have walked right by without his recognizing her. Then he heard his name called and he spun around, startled.

“Have you been waiting long?” Mi-ran said, rolling down the window of her car.

Jun-sang was still susceptible to Hollywood imagery. For years he had anticipated their reunion and hadn’t quite let go of the scene of the couple running toward each other on a foggy train platform. He’d imagined all kinds of scenarios but they never involved a car—certainly not a car with Mi-ran behind the steering wheel.

She was stopped in the bus lane and leaned over to push open the passenger-side door, beckoning for him to climb in. She spoke rapidly, apologizing for her lateness, the traffic, how she couldn’t find a parking space. She kept her eyes on the road, while his darted over her. Her features were the same—he couldn’t believe he ever thought he might not recognize her. Maybe, though, she wasn’t as radiant as he remembered, or maybe her beauty had been magnified by the years of longing. Her complexion betrayed the strain of mothering a one-year-old; a sprinkling of acne around her chin was barely concealed by makeup. He could see the touch of the
ajumma
about her. She wore a flouncy apricot-colored skirt and a baggy short-sleeved blouse. The clothing was complicated, like her life; the simplicity of girlhood had vanished long ago.

“You’re so calm,” he broke the silence.

“No, no, I’m nervous inside,” she responded.

They drove to a quiet restaurant on the outskirts of the city. They began with polite inquiries about family, but there was no subject that didn’t lead to tragedy. Jun-sang didn’t dare ask about her sisters. He’d heard that they’d been taken away. And she couldn’t ask him about his parents, whom he might never see again. They quickly wound their way to the subject of Mi-ran’s abrupt departure. As they spoke, he felt the anger swelling up.

“You might have tried to send me a clue,” he told her.

She protested that she wasn’t sure at the time she was defecting—that
it could have just been an excursion to China to see relatives—and even though he didn’t quite believe her, he felt better hearing her say it.

She learned that he had not been in Chongjin in October 1998 when she’d left—the glimpse she thought she had of him from across the street was just a product of her imagination.