Nothing to Envy (33 page)

She wasn’t faring much better. Other doctors supplemented their earnings by selling medicine or performing operations, particularly abortions. Dr. Kim didn’t have the training or the stomach for such things. Instead she cobbled together meals from her patients’ gifts of food, but after a while they didn’t have much to give.

Dr. Kim had quit pediatrics in 1997. She couldn’t bear looking into the eyes of starving children any longer. She switched to research, hoping that it would keep her from having to deal with dying people, but there were no conditions in which to do research. After breakfast, the doctors were preoccupied with finding food for dinner, and after dinner, they worried about the next breakfast. She began leaving work early to scavenge in the mountains for edible weeds. Sometimes she’d chop wood to sell. Her weight had fallen below 80 pounds. Her breasts shriveled and she stopped menstruating. From afar, she looked more like a twelve-year-old child than a woman in her early thirties. The first few days she’d gone without eating she’d felt so hungry she would have stolen food from a baby. But after four days or so, she felt nothing but a strange sensation that her body was not her own, that she was being lifted into the air and dropped down again. She was profoundly exhausted. She had no strength to get up in the morning. She quit her volunteer position at the party secretariat and by early 1998 had stopped going to work entirely. She tried various ways to make money—she sold alcohol or coal at the market. She didn’t lament the waste of her medical school training. At the height of the famine, it was enough just to stay alive.

On one of her excursions to the market, she ran into an old
friend. They had been classmates in high school, both of them the kind of popular, smart girls who might have been voted “most likely to succeed.” Her friend had been a class officer. They made polite small talk, telling each other that they looked well even though they were both sallow and emaciated. Then Dr. Kim inquired about her classmate’s family. Her husband and her two-year-old son had died, just three days apart, she said matter-of-factly.

Dr. Kim tried to offer her condolences.

“Oh, I’m better off. Fewer mouths to feed,” she told Dr. Kim.

Dr. Kim couldn’t decide whether her friend was callous or insane, but she knew that if she stayed in North Korea any longer, she would either be the same, or she’d be dead.

Before he died, Dr. Kim’s father had given her a list of his relatives’ names and last known addresses in China. It was a suicide note of sorts—her father had scribbled it in a shaking hand during the delirium of his self-imposed starvation. At the time, Dr. Kim was offended by the list, but she hadn’t thrown it away. She dug out the little box in which she had stored it, carefully unfolded the paper, and looked at the names.

“They will help you,” her father had said.

DR. KIM LEFT FOR
China alone. She couldn’t afford to hire a guide or bribe the border guards, so she had to rely solely on her own wits and instinct. By March 1999 enough people were making the trip that you could pick up tips in border towns about the best spots to cross. The early-spring landscape was just beginning to thaw out from an exceptionally bitter winter, and the Tumen was still frozen in spots. Dr. Kim went to a spot that she’d heard you could walk across. Every few feet she would throw a heavy stone to test the thickness of the ice. At least on the Korean side, it was solid. She slid one foot forward, then the next, delicate as a ballerina. She made it about halfway before her stone disappeared into a patch of slush. She followed anyway and the freezing water came up to her waist. She cleared a path with her hands as if breaking through icebergs.

Dr. Kim staggered up the riverbank. Her legs were numb, encased in frozen trousers. She made her way through the woods until
the first light of dawn illuminated the outskirts of a small village. She didn’t want to sit down and rest—she feared succumbing to hypothermia—but she knew she didn’t have the strength to go much farther. She would have to take a chance on the kindness of the local residents.

Dr. Kim looked down a dirt road that led to farmhouses. Most of them had walls around them with metal gates. She tried one; it turned out to be unlocked. She pushed it open and peered inside. On the ground she saw a small metal bowl with food. She looked closer—it was rice, white rice, mixed with scraps of meat. Dr. Kim couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a bowl of pure white rice. What was a bowl of rice doing there, just sitting out on the ground? She figured it out just before she heard the dog’s bark.

Up until that moment, a part of her had hoped that China would be just as poor as North Korea. She still wanted to believe that her country was the best place in the world. The beliefs she had cherished for a lifetime would be vindicated. But now she couldn’t deny what was staring her plainly in the face: dogs in China ate better than doctors in North Korea.

North Korean wives of Chinese men, Tumen, 2003
.

I
T SURPRISED NO ONE THAT OAK-HEE WOULD LEAVE NORTH KOREA
at the first opportunity. From the time she was a schoolgirl, Mrs. Song’s oldest daughter stood apart from the Kim Il-sung idolatry that consumed her nation. As soon as she came home from school, Oak-hee would yank off the red scarf of the Young Pioneers. She didn’t bother to fake tears at Kim Il-sung’s death in 1994.

Over the years, as her family got hungrier, she grew angrier. She blamed the government for mismanaging the economy and for the deaths of her brother and father. North Korean television incessantly played a song called “The Comrades’ March” (“We live in a socialist country with no worries about food or clothing. / Let’s straighten our chests and look at the world with pride”) and ran patriotic footage of waving flags, which Oak-hee found ridiculous.

“No worries?” she would snort as she switched off the television.

But the truth was that Oak-hee’s initial decision to defect from North Korea had as much to do with escaping her marriage as it had to do with escaping the system.

The marriage had been tumultuous from the beginning. Oak-hee and Yong-su fought like other couples about sex and money, and when times got tough they fought about food and politics. Yong-su always won. If the argument wasn’t going his way, he would deliver a hard slap that would send her reeling across the room as the last word.

Despite his drinking, Yong-su managed to keep his job as a conductor and apartment thanks to his family’s clout. The conductor’s job was among the most desirable within the railroad. When he was working the routes to the border, Yong-su could supplement his income by carrying goods to sell to Chinese traders. He’d pay 5 won for copper wire and scrap metal to workers who stripped it from their idled factories and resell it for 25 won. At first Oak-hee was surprised because her husband had, in the past, fancied himself something of a party official, even though he’d been rejected for party membership, and liked to deliver impromptu lectures on the evils of egoism and capitalism to his wife and anyone else who’d listen. He would chastise her for flippant remarks about Kim Jong-il. Now he waved away his earlier compunctions.

“Anyone who does what the party says is stupid. Only money matters now,” he told her.

Yong-su’s scrap-metal scam made him a relatively wealthy man in bad times. From his trips to the border he would bring home big bags of rice and bottles of soy sauce; for a time, they had stockpiles of corn in their apartment. Whenever Oak-hee would suggest that they take some food to her starving parents and brother, however, he flew into a rage.

“How can you think about giving away our food at a time like this?” he yelled.

Yong-su didn’t trust Oak-hee not to help her family, so he would leave only a bare minimum of food and money in the apartment even though his work took him away for days at a stretch and the
railroad schedules were unpredictable. In 1998, he left Oak-hee and their son and daughter, then eight and six years old, for a week with nothing to eat. On June 5, a holiday called Children’s Day, their son was supposed to participate in a sports fair at his school. The children were told to bring a box lunch, but the house was completely empty. Oak-hee rushed around the city trying to beg food from her relatives, but nobody had much to give. She finally found her sister selling biscuits at the market and took a handful. She ran to the school at lunchtime to find her son standing in the playground waiting, his eyes filled with tears.

“I’m so sorry, sweetheart,” she told him, handing him a small bag of biscuits.

Yong-su, a former musician, had a nice singing voice and a charming manner around women. Now, with some money in his pockets, he and his friends would pick up women and stay up late drinking. One night, when Oak-hee and the children had been asleep for hours, she heard Yong-su drunkenly stumble into the apartment and then a woman’s peals of laughter. Oak-hee didn’t know if it was a girlfriend or a prostitute, but she wasn’t about to get out of bed to find out.

After that, Oak-hee began plotting her escape in earnest. It was possible for her to file for divorce, but it would mean losing everything. Although the Workers’ Party gave lip service to freeing women from their lowly place in traditional feudal society, the North Korean system was still stacked against them. In a divorce, the man kept the home and the children—no matter if he had been abusive or unfaithful. Oak-hee would be especially disadvantaged because of her family’s class status and without a father to negotiate on her behalf. Oak-hee figured her best hope would be if she was able to go to China to earn some money of her own. If she had enough for her own apartment, she might gain some leverage to force Yong-su to give her custody of the children.

One night Yong-su came home drunk and in a particularly ugly mood. He hit Oak-hee, knocking her down, and then delivered a kick so hard she thought she heard her rib crack. Suddenly there was a knock on the door—it was a traveler asking for directions, which
happened frequently given their proximity to the station. While her husband was answering, Oak-hee got up off the floor and retreated into the kitchen. She slipped out the back door and down the steps wearing only her nightgown.

The clock on the train station showed the time as 10:00
P.M.
It was the end of August, the night warm and pleasant. When she was far enough away that she was sure her husband hadn’t followed, she stood outside contemplating her next move. Usually after fights, she would run off to her mother, who would put warm compresses on the split lips and the black eyes. The next morning, when Yong-su sobered up, he would cry and apologize and beg her to come home, which she always did. For ten years, they had been living that way. If she was ever going to change, now was the time to do it.

Oak-hee didn’t dare enter Chongjin Station, where her husband’s co-workers might recognize her. Instead she walked along the train tracks north through the warm night out of the center of the city until she reached the first station on the outskirts, Suseong. So many people were homeless by now that nobody paid attention to a woman wearing only a nightgown.

She remained at the station for two days. Her ribs throbbed from the beating. Hunger and dehydration gave her a blinding headache. She felt too dizzy to stand up. She saw a crowd forming around the station, people getting excited. A train was departing for the border town of Musan. She summoned up the energy to claw her way into the throng surging toward the doors and windows of the train. People grabbed the seats, then filled the aisles, stood in the toilet and on the gangways between the cars. They hung out the windows and clung to the undercarriage. The train was so crowded that the conductor couldn’t pass through to collect tickets or check travel permits. Oak-hee reached Musan after a day’s journey. She had no documents, no money, no food, no clothing.

What she did have was the body of a relatively healthy thirty-two-year-old woman. Oak-hee had never been a great beauty. Her mother had always pegged her as the smart daughter—her middle
sister was the one everyone said looked like a movie star—but Oak-hee had weathered the famine better than many. Short and buxom like her mother, she had the type of physique that gave the illusion of plumpness. Her tiny nose made her look young, and her teeth were white and straight. Even if she had been so inclined, Oak-hee was too old to be a prostitute, but that was never something she’d consider. There was, however, another way for North Korean women to sell themselves that was somewhat more palatable.

Just across the Tumen River, walls of corn stretched for miles. The villages had plenty of food, but what ran in short supply were women. The traditional preference for sons and the restriction on family size had resulted in a lopsided birthrate of about thirteen males for every ten females. In their late teens, many young women migrated to the cities to fill the jobs at China’s booming factories, which paid better than farmwork. Bachelors in the countryside, particularly those over thirty-five and without money or great personal charm, had difficulty finding wives. They turned to marriage brokers who charged roughly three hundred dollars for their services, more if they delivered women who were good-looking and young. But looks and youth weren’t a prerequisite; healthy women into their sixties were also in demand to cook and keep house for older widowers.