Krys Lee - How I Became a North Korean

Yongju shuddered. That small hunched movement moved me. I wasn’t the only one. Missionary Lee rose and gave him a clumsy hug. He said, “I’m so sorry, my son.”

Mrs. Bang folded her arms tightly across her chest.

“You should know that with all the border crackdowns, it’s much harder for your people to cross than before.” She looked at us with reproach, as if a stranglehold border should have made them grateful to be locked up indefinitely. “Look, here you are, safe! God is more powerful than any government.”

Later I learned of other organizations, including some Christian groups, who moved people quickly out of China. Many anonymous good folks undertook the dangerous work while governments talked about North Korean human rights but were too trade-happy with China to act. But my friends were Missionary Kwon’s charges. For them it would be Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and so on, until they were converted. Unless I did something about it.

A week after I left the mountains I was betrayed by a Joseon- jok woman who promised to help me, then sold me to a local gang. In the crowded city that seemed large enough to hide in, the woman had given me a job with actual pay at her eatery. I was so grateful, but within a few days of working in the kitchen, men in a van seized me and forced me into a basement den.

When they stepped back, the first person I saw in the mildewed basement was a young girl with heavy bangs. She ran straight into the knot of my belly, this girl about Byeol’s height. She reminded me of Seongsik and the life we had cobbled together. I held her to me as one of the men behind me coughed.

“Go back inside, Suhyeon!” said a woman with brassy dyed-red hair coiled up into a bird’s nest.

Her voice crackled with displeasure, and she yanked the girl into a private room near the entrance. I never saw the girl again.

The ajumma the men had said would take care of me was a stern terror with a black fuzz above her upper lip. Her gauzy skirt and a billowing jacket that increased her generous size made her appear even more formidable.

“What am I supposed to do with her?” She prodded my stomach.

“Trust me, there’s a niche market for women like her,” said one of the men with a colorful serpent tattoo winding up his neck. He looked like one of the gang members that had terrified us at home.

“What about later? What will happen later ? I don’t want trouble.”

“Shut up with the questions and do what you’re told,” he said. “That’s what you’re paid for.”

“All right, all right,” she muttered, dropping her gaze.

I wanted to scream; I wanted to claw away the walls as if they were paper. I wanted to reverse three generations of decisions so that my grandparents would die fighting against American imperialists and Nam Joseon lackeys, and give our family a hero’s seongbun, so we could live differently. But looking back wasn’t going to help my baby, so I calmed myself as some of the men left and others headed down the hall. I looked for any routes for future escape, but there was only the one locked door leading out.

“We’ll want more vitamins in your diet.” The ajumma inspected me. “I don’t want any sicknesses.”

A pitiful sound escaped me. I couldn’t believe it was from me.

“Dear, it could be worse.” She patted my arm. “Plenty of your people service twenty men a day, real men. You’re only servicing them online.”

She unlocked one of the cubicle rooms. A baby-faced girl with a turned-up nose, introduced as Miyeon, emerged in a robe of scarlet and vermilion, her legs bare. She crossed her arms over her thin chest.

“ Eoh-meonah, Eonni!” This girl, who didn’t look eighteen, caressed my stomach. “What will you do? What will you ever do?”

“The same thing you do, for some very special customers,” the ajumma said. “She’s by the bathroom. You know the routine.”

After the ajumma left me in Miyeon’s care, we sat on the bed, the only place to sit.

“I’m from Yanggang province,” she offered in a rapid, high-pitched voice.

“I’m from North Hamgyong province.”

“Me, I thought I would cross, earn good money for my family working at a Joseon- jok restaurant. That’s what the broker told me. But they brought me here.”

“I was sold into marriage.” I was too ashamed to say that when I first crossed I’d agreed to being sold.

She confirmed that the dozen locked doors lining the hallway outside held more of our women, we who had grown up with our skirts hemmed below our knees and sleeves covering our shoulders. Most had been sold to Chinese men our grandfathers’ age, tricked by brokers, or kidnapped. She pressed her bony knees to her chest when I asked, and confirmed that there was no way to escape. The best way to stay out of trouble here, she said, was to be invisible.

While she babbled, I took stock of her bed, the clock and the mirror, the computer stand, the computer. That was all there was in the tiny room.

“But why am I here? What do we have to do?” I asked.

She took my hands in hers. “You’ll… you’ll have to take your clothes off for men on camera. It’s all done by computer. You been long in China?”

I shook my head. Tried to keep my breathing regular. If I opened my mouth a scream would come out.

“Do you know what a computer is?”

I nodded. “The man I was first sold to had one.”

“There are some real perverts out there, Eonni. I’m sorry.” She bit down on her lower lip, leaving a track of peony-tinted lipstick across her uneven front teeth. “It seems impossible, but you will get used to it.”

Her words became disordered fragments as the number grew in my head of the days, months, even years the women had been enslaved. I thought of the flower girls in our country, selling their bodies to men. But I was an overripe fruit; I couldn’t believe that men descended to such measures.

Miyeon showed me to my room, with an identical frame bed and computer squeezed into it. This was where I would take the South Korean men’s calls. Strip off my clothes and do what they wanted me to. I collapsed onto the bed, short shallow breaths escaping me.

“I can’t do this,” I managed.

She squeezed my hand and said again, “Oh, Eonni.” She said nothing more than that. “Older Sister.” As if recognizing me was all she could promise.

I was locked in like the rest of them. At first I pummeled the door to my room until my knuckles were raw. The door, the color of green of bleached tea leaves, was covered in long scratches. Nail marks. My voice withered, for our doors opened only when the ajumma decided to open them. There was little to distract me except for the clock ticking opposite the wall and two heart-shaped pillows tied to the lumpy bed. With my ear pressed to the thin partitions, I listened for the low murmur of other girls. In the monitor I saw myself looking at me and wondered who else was looking.

We were given a pill with every meal, every day. The ajumma said, “I want your skin to glow with health!” No matter how many pills we took, nothing changed our sallow, underground look. A tin tray came to my door loaded with rice, vegetables, a watery dwenjang guk . There was room inspection and cleaning duties. A black-suited man at the main door changed off with other men at the twelfth hour. Other black suits banged in and out through the front door, stinking of cigarette smoke, and headed to the back room stuffed with couches where they played cards and, occasionally, called for a favorite girl. They were the only people the ajumma listened to.