From
Survival to Freedom:
-The
Stormy Life of a North Korean Defector-
By Kosuke Takahashi
Copyright
Kosuke Takahashi
2003
Kim Soon Hee,
a North Korean defector in the United States
The
night was bitter cold. It was dark without moonlight. Across the 100-yard-wide
river lay ahead China. The Tumen River was frozen.
Kim
Soon Hee, 39, was carrying her two-year-old son on
her back and a backpack on her chest. She ran as hard and as fast as she could
across the river from North Korea. Three other North Koreans fled with her.
Gunshots
shattered the silence. Two people screamed as they were shot to death by North
Korean border guards. The third person went missing.
Kim
Soon Hee was in China by sunrise. She was cold and
shaking. Her son was screaming and crying. Kim's legs were bleeding from the
cuts inflicted by the cracks of ice and rocks in the river. But she and her son
had survived. Once in China, she headed further inland until she could not walk
anymore. She kept walking and never turned back.
Kim
Soon Hee stayed in China for six years. Then, in
August 2000, she left her son behind and headed for the United States. She made
it as far as the Mexican border. In April 2001, she was arrested trying to get to
San Diego illegally.
Last
November, however, the U.S. government granted Kim political asylum. She is
only the third North Korean granted that status to date. She now lives a life
in the shadows in Los Angeles, working as a waitress and hoping to get her son
back.
Her
struggle for survival and freedom has been long and hard. It is very unusual
for North Koreans to reach the United States. North Korea has, since its birth
at the conclusion of World War II, been ruled by its founder Kim Il Sung and his son, current leader Kim Jong
Il, who have established a Stalinist regime and cult of personality that has
left millions near starvation and their nation isolated. North Korea is a state
few can visit and from which few can escape. To meet a North Korean is perhaps
the rarest encounter ordinary Americans might ever have. And that, together
with the story of the bizarre world she left behind, makes Kim Soon Hee's story as unique as it is harrowing. Yet people around
her are still not quite sure who she really is. This is the story of a North
Korean woman who remains something of a mystery, as well as the story of her
turbulent life in the "Hermit Kingdom" and her perilous journey to
the United States.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
"All
the time, I am worrying about my remaining family in Musan City," Kim Soon
Hee said, wincing with a faraway look in her narrow
eyes. This March, Kim agreed to an extensive, three-day interview with me. We
met in the house of Han Cheong Il,
a South Korean resident in San Diego and voluntary guardian of Kim in the U.S.
"I
can have no contact with them,” Kim, dressed in a black and white striped, long
sleeved shirt, said. “I am afraid that they have already been punished and
killed because of my escape from North Korea."
Kim
was born on Feb. 27, 1964 and grew up in Musan City, Ham Kyung Book Do County,
which is very close to the Chinese border in the northern part of North Korea.
Her father, Jung Kyu Kim, was born on March 15, 1929
and served in the Korean People's Army (KPA) for many years and retired from
its top position in 1991. He was stationed in Chulsan
in Ham Kyung Book Do. Her mother, Sung Sook Lee, was
born on April 6, 1931 and had been a housewife.
Kim
has an older sister and two younger brothers. Her brothers joined the army when
they were eighteen years old.
She
was sort of a member of the intelligentsia in North Korea. Kim graduated from Yeo-Myong University, Chong-Jin
City, with a physical education degree when she was 22. Among the subjects she
learned were mathematics, chemistry, biology and Japanese. She was then
assigned as an elementary teacher at the Musan In Min
School in Musan by the Korean Workers Party. She taught physical education to
classes of about 45-46 students.
At
the age of 24, she married Dong Chul Chang, a middle
school teacher, now 40. They were introduced by his brother, who worked with
her at the same elementary school. Kim and her husband have a son, Young Min
Chang, age twelve.
Kim
lost contact with the rest of her family in Musan. While hiding out in China in
1994, she once wrote a letter to an uncle in Pyongyang to ask about the current
situation of her family in Musan. But his reply was shocking to her.
It
said, "Family is in danger. Do not write me a letter any more. Otherwise,
I will also be in a lot of danger." She has since stopped sending her
letters to North Korea.
"I
want to erase everything about North Korea from my memory," Kim said.
"I got bad luck in North Korea. Even if Kim Jong
Il dies, I do not want to go back there. It's terrible
country. I got sick and tired of it."
In
North Korea, many bitter experiences led her to take the cross-border action.
She
was caught six times illegally selling dried squid in the evenings to help
support her family. Internal security agents of the Korean Workers Party
kicked, hit, and pushed Kim and ordered her to stop banned capitalistic
activity.
Still,
she persisted. In 1993, the police unleashed their dogs on her. She suffered
bites on both of her legs. The police, she says, also beat her.
The
North Korean communist party sets wages and assigns all jobs. Not until July
2002 did the government begin taking steps toward
economic reforms by approving small private food markets and lifting the price
controls. Up to then engaging in capitalistic behavior—regardless of the
reason—had been viewed as a result of foreign influence. Any sort of external
influence had always been unacceptable in the Stalinist country, for it
represented the regime and personality cult built on mistrust of all outsiders.
Kim's
trouble did not end there. The marriage was also a bad one.
From
about 1990 to 1994, Kim was the victim of domestic violence. She was struck and
pushed by her husband about once a month for refusing to accept his extra-martial
relationships. Traditional, family-centered values of Korean culture based on
Confucianism control social attitudes toward women. Women are viewed somehow as
inferior in North Korea. Domestic violence is viewed as the fault of the woman
or as a man's right to exercise his authority over his family. She was forced
to suffer the physical and emotional abuse of her husband for years, and could
not voice her anger at what he was doing.
She
was unable to seek the help of law enforcement or the local government. The
police and government would do nothing to combat domestic violence. She was
also afraid of the authorities because of the beatings she suffered for
illegally selling dried squids. The domestic violence only stopped when she
escaped North Korea in 1994.
Asked
why she did not seek a divorce, Kim said, "Divorce is not accepted in
North Korea. You cannot get divorced. But there is an exception. Women who
cannot have a child can get divorced. Other than that, you cannot get
divorced."
As
remote as North Korea remains, Musan is a rare city with contact with the rest
of the world, especially China and Japan.
Musan,
a coal-mining city with an estimated population of 130,000, sits near the
border with China. Because of this geographical proximity, Kim learned much
about life in China. This came from people who traveled in and out from China
with food and money. She kept hearing about higher living standards outside of
North Korea and heard many friends complain privately of the impoverishment of
her country.
In
addition, there were about ten Japanese families in Musan, who had arrived
there before the 1950-53 Korean War. Since that time the government had never
let them leave the country. Kim said they lived in an apartment where only rich
North Koreans can live, had a fine refrigerator and wore nice clothes. She got
clothes from them while she was growing up. She even learned some old Japanese
songs from them and sang them in front of me.
Musan
is located in a mountainous region and is known as a coal-mining town. It has
no arable lands for rice crops, and produces corn but seldom enough to produce
much of a surplus. Musan's already poor food
situation was exacerbated by North Korea's "great famine" of the
1990s, in which millions of people died of starvation.
Kim
said she could only eat rice and tofu once a year. That date was April 15th,
Kim Il Sung's birthday. She
ate corn, potato and cucumber as her staple day after day. The government gave
out food rations to people only once every several months. She saw long lines
of people waiting to get food distributed every time.
"I
saw uncountable people starve to death, especially children," Kim said.
"Children were even picking up ants on the streets. They ate anything
alive on the streets they could eat because they were so hungry."
Kim
hated life in North Korea-the repression, her husband's betrayal and the
poverty.
"At
the age of 20 or so, I became mature enough to think about our society,"
Kim said. "And I became very upset about it."
Asked
about Kim Jong Il, she
shouted, "I hate him. Kill him!"
Despair
made Kim courageous enough to leave her mother country.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
On Feb. 26, 1994, Kim
Soon Hee left home with her son.
Kim had made extensive
preparations for fleeing. She filled her backpack with powdered corn that could
be easily drunk with water, matches and a valuable antique Korean ceramic pot
that her father had given to her when she had told him that she was going to
escape from North Korea. He was the only person in her family with whom she
shared her plan.
“I could not tell my
mother about my plan because we were so close,” Kim said. “I knew what her
reaction would have been. She would have surely stopped me. She would have been
very afraid that we were going to be killed at the border.”
Even though her father
knew that her escape would destroy his life, she said,
he did not oppose or attempt to subvert her plan: he understood the suffering
she had experienced.
Kim had planned her
escape for several years with three other people. One was her student’s father,
and the other ones were his brother and sister.
On the night of Feb.26,
they headed westbound on foot to the village of Sam-Jang—a
community near the Tumen River. They ate corn
meal en rout to Sam-Jang.
They traveled only at
night because daytime travel was too dangerous. There were KPA soldiers or
boarder guards everywhere near the border. If they were caught, they knew they
would be prosecuted and executed for their betrayal. They hid in bushes and
slept during the daytime.
Four days after leaving
Musan, they arrived in Sam-Jang in the early morning. They proceeded to an old
woman’s house there. Her co-conspirators knew the old lady, who lived by
herself. She fed them dinner.
The group decided to rest
for a while and then head to the Tumen River, which
was only a hundred yards away from Sam-Jang.
While Kim was taking a
rest with her son, her compatriots came into the room. They told her that they
could not cross the river with her because of her son. Kim begged them to take
both her and her son. Finally they relented.
On March 1, 1994, they
left the house at about 3:00 a.m. They walked about twenty minutes to the
river. They decided to separate, thinking this would improve their chances of
walking across.
The shooting started as
they began to cross. Kim’s compatriots fell, but Kim was
physically strong enough to cross the river, carrying her little son on her
back: Kim used to play volleyball at the age of 9 to 16.
The water was only up to her
stomach. Kim walked toward the village. By that time, her son had become sick.
She was also shaking like a leaf in a storm.
She trudged on and found
a house with a barn and hid in the barn. She held her son and he cried until
the morning sun was bright.
When a Chinese-Korean
woman came out from the house and saw them, she took pity and fed them. She
gave Kim twenty won in Chinese currency and warned her not to travel on rural
roads but to travel through the mountains.
Kim headed toward the
mountain. It was getting dark. Her son started to cry again and she was scared.
She picked up some pieces of wood and lit a fire with matches in her backpack.
Soon, two hunters came
upon Kim. They looked at Kim and her son carefully and said, “You must have
escaped from North Korea?” Kim did not answer.
They too were
Korean-Chinese. At first Kim was silent. Then, she said, she began to cry. She
begged them for help. The hunters took her to their house. Their house was located
in the midst of the mountains. She planned to stay there for one day and leave,
but her son had a very high fever and was too ill to continue the journey.
The hunters let her stay
for about ten days, until a stranger visited the house.
He was a local
Chinese-Korean leader named Lee Ju-Suk.
Lee gave Kim and her son
permission to stay at his home in the mountains for six months. She worked for
his family, cooking, cleaning and washing their clothes. Lee’s family had two
daughters whose ages were almost the same as Kim’s son.
Finally, after two years
later, she heard Lee and his wife arguing. Kim emerged from her room, only to
be confronted by Lee’s wife, who cursed her and hit her. Later, she said she
found out that the wife upset because Lee was paying her for her work. The wife
ordered her to get out.
Lee sent Kim to his
farmer uncle's home. There she lived with Lee’s uncle, wife, daughter and son.
She spent three years working for them.
By now the time had come
for her son to attend school. Because there were no nearby schools, the uncle
suggested they move to the city called Yon-Byon.
The school demanded that
Kim pay to have her son enrolled. She agreed.
But in Yon-Byon, meanwhile, Chinese border guards and public security
officers were intensifying their searches for North Koreans who had fled from
their country. China was deporting those refugees if caught.
Kim said she had many
hideous experiences seeing North Koreans being prosecuted by Chinese
authorities.
One day, she was walking
down the street with her son, and she saw a man being dragged by Chinese
authorities. They were hitting him with a long flashlight, and kicking and
stepping on him with their boots. They beat him and hooked his nose with a
steeled hook. Kim heard from the local Chinese that authorities were going to
kill him or send him back to North Korea where he would be tortured and
executed for his betrayal.
Kime was very scared and felt uneasy. Since
then, she lived with the horror that the same fate awaited her and her son.
Lee Young Hwa, the representative of Rescue The
North Korean People! (RENK), a Japan-based citizens' group supporting North
Korean asylum seekers in China since early 1990s, said he had only heard from
North Korean refugees about rumors of such Chinese authorities’ cruel
oppression. But Kim insisted she had seen that brutality, and she testified
about this to the Executive Office for Immigration Review of the U.S. government. Her testimony
cannot be independently corroborated today although.
One day, her Chinese Korean
neighbor introduced her to a Korean woman who owned a uniform store. Kim
started to work there, knitting and making alterations. She was paid about $150
per month. She worked there for three years. The woman was married to a man
whose name was also Kim. She said she called him “Boss Kim.”
One day after the work,
the woman asked to speak with Kim. First she thanked Kim for working hard and
gave her some clothes and cash. Then, she asked how Kim continued to live
illegally with her son in China. She warned Kim that if she were to be caught
by the Chinese authorities, then she would be sent back to North Korea.
Then, the woman told Kim
about America. She said in America she and her son could live in freedom. “From
that point on, I could not stop thinking about going to America,” Kim said.
“But I didn't know how to get there.”
At that time, Kim never
thought about going to South Korea because she believed that South Koreans were
sneaky, as cunning as foxes, and always trying to defraud other people of money.
Several days passed, and
Kim was introduced to a man selling fake passports. He asked her for 20,000 won
in Chinese currency, or about $2,000, for a passport that would help gain her
entry to the United States. She did not have that much money. She called her
old friend Lee and asked him for help.
Lee was silent. Then he
started to help Kim, but only at a price: If Kim agreed to let him and his wife raise her only son, he would give her the money.
Kim agreed.
It was a crucial and
cruel moment as a mother.
Later, when I asked her
how she could agree to such a demand, Kim said, “I planned to go to the U.S.
and get back my son later. There was no choice. Live or die.”
When I asked her if she
feels guilty about this, she replied in a barely audible whisper, “Yes, I do. I
never stopped thinking of my son left behind.”
But did Kim really think
about her well-being first, before that of her son, when she was confronted
with the choice of whether to leave him behind in China or not?
An American friend said
she thought of herself.
“She chose her destiny
first,” said Han Sang Hee, the daughter of her Korean
American benefactor, who served as a court interpreter for Kim. “As a mother,
it sounds cruel, but it’s human nature. She had no choice. If I were her, I
also would have brought myself first. You have to understand that.”
Her father elaborated: “I
personally think that the Chinese-Korean couple wanted her son as their own
child because they could not have had a boy. They only had two girls. They
regretted not having boys. Even if Kim returns to get her son back in the
future, by that time, her son naturally would think his parents are that
couple. I suspect this is what that couple thought.”
Lee Young Hwa, head of RENK, pointed out that most of the North
Korean adult refugees like Kim had abandoned their little children when they
escaped.
“They act on animal
instinct,” Lee said, who is also an associate
professor of economics at Kansai University in Japan. “They think they will be
able to have another baby in the very future if they escape and survive. They
think they can give birth to another baby again. Because of this, many
refugees’ minds have gone to pieces, having destroyed their family bond.”
Kim left her son and the
antique her father had given her with Lee Ju-Suk in
return for $6,000 in U.S. currency. She bought a forged South Korean passport
for $2,000. She planned to leave China with Boss Kim who had business to
conduct in Hong Kong and the Philippines.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
In August 2000, Boss Kim
and Kim Soon Hee left Yon-Byon.
They headed east towards Buk-Kyong in south China by
train. It took them a day. In Buk-Kyong, they took
separate rooms at a local hotel. They stayed there for two months while Boss
Kim attended to business.
On Oct. 28, 2000, they
traveled to Shim-Soo adjoining Hong Kong by train for
two days. After getting off the train, Boss Kim told her to cross the border
into Hong Kong on her own. He told her that he would follow her after she
crossed the border.
She was to call his
cellular phone after crossing the border, and they would meet each other in
Hong-Kong.
She headed alone towards
the underground hallway of the train station, Boss Kim watching her from
behind. The hallway connected Hong-Kong and Shim-Soo.
She walked through the hallway for about fifteen minutes.
On the upper level was an
inspection area. Kim’s heart was beating hard and she was sweating. The
inspector looked at her and then her fake passport. He did not ask her any
questions. Instead he stamped her passport.
There was a train station
near the inspection area. Kim got a train, passed three stations and got off.
She found a public telephone and called Boss Kim.
It was now about 2:00
p.m. Boss Kim answered the phone. He asked her where she was. She did not know.
She grabbed a man passing by. Kim did not speak their dialect of Chinese, so
she used body language. He seemed to speak English. Boss Kim spoke English very
well, so they were able to communicate. He seemed like he was describing the
location where she was. He then handed the phone back to her. Boss Kim told her
to stay where she was. She was in front of a hotel.
Boss Kim arrived around
4:30 p.m. They went into the hotel but it was very expensive. They had to save
money for a trip to the Philippines, so they decided to sleep on the bench in
front of the hotel. The night was very cold. Kim said that was one of the
most unforgettable moments during her journey because she had never experienced
sleeping on the cold bench.
They got up at 6:00 a.m.
next morning. They then took a bus to the Hong-Kong Airport.
At the airport, Boss Kim
purchased two airfare tickets to the Philippines. They got on the plane and
arrived in Manila about two hours later.
In Manila, they found
beds in a motel and a youth hostel. They stayed there for about twenty days
while Boss Kim conducted his business.
Kim Soon Hee flew from Manila to Mexico City on Nov. 20, 2000 with a
ticket that Boss Kim bought for her.
Upon her arrival in Mexico
City, she got in a taxi and asked the taxi driver to “Go, LA!” But the driver
took her to a hotel. She did not speak English, so she had to communicate
through body language.
“How would I have known
the difference between Mexico and America?” Kim said. “Since I arrived in
Mexico City, I thought Mexico was part of America.”
She threw her fake
passport and airfare tickets away once she arrived in the hotel because she
felt too uneasy to keep them.
The next morning, she
went downstairs to the lobby. She wanted to ask them for help. The receptionist
tried to help her. He told her to wait there, made few phone calls, and told
her to answer the phone.
The person who was on the
phone was a Korean. He asked her if she wanted to go to the Korean consulate. She
said she couldn't and wouldn't. He told her that he would help her and told her
to wait in the hotel for a while. She was scared but she waited.
A few hours later, he had
arrived. Kim said he was a very nice man. They introduced themselves but
she did not tell him that she was North Korean. Instead, she told him she was
Korean-Chinese.
First, she asked him to
take her to a cheaper hotel. They left the hotel and found a cheaper hotel. The
rate was $20 per day. She did not know what to do next. The man said he would
help her, so she told him that she wanted to go to America.
After staying at that
motel for almost a month, the man introduced her to a truck driver. He told her
to take his truck and go to Tijuana with the truck driver. He said that Tijuana
was close to the U.S. and when she arrived there, she could find the way to
America. She paid the truck driver $600. That was all the money she had
left in her pocket.
On Dec.16, 2000, she left
Mexico City with the truck driver. She got in the back of the truck. It was a
big truck and had no windows. It was dark inside. It took them almost eight
days to get to Tijuana.
In Tijuana the truck
driver took her to his friend's house. She spent one and a half day at his friend’s
house. The driver’s friend introduced her to a sewing company, and the owner of
the company seemed Taiwanese. She decided to work there for a while to gain
much knowledge of how to sneak into the U.S.
The owner even found her
a place to stay. She was paying 1200 pesos in Mexican currency per month for
the room.
Her salary was $900 to
$1,200 per month, depending on how many hours she worked. She worked eighty six
hours per week. She worked day and night, even on weekends.
About three months
passed. One day, a Hispanic friend came to her with a taxi driver. That friend
told her to pack her belongings and go to the United States with him. Then she
gathered her belongings and left the place with him. She paid the taxi driver
$700. He already had a new fake passport for her. She did not see the passport.
The taxi driver had it the whole time.
On April 6, 2001 at 9:00
p.m., she left Tijuana with the taxi driver. When they were stopped at the
border, the inspector asked her for the passport. The taxi driver handed the
inspector a passport. The inspector looked at her and then her passport.
That American officer was
smart enough to notice her strange English accent. They were asked to pull
aside. And she was then arrested at the border by the Immigration and Naturalization
Service (INS) for attempting to enter the U.S. using a false document—on the
verge of entering the Promised Land.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Kim was detained and
released into the custody of Han, a former vice chairman of the Korean People’s
Association in San Diego, after asking for political asylum as the first North
Korean refugee on May 2001. She underwent a host of psychological tests and
interviews both by the FBI and the INS and at immigration court hearings until
she was officially given asylum status at a hearing in San Diego last November.
For Kim, the process of
seeking refugee status in the U.S was difficult because it was hard to prove
that she is in fact a real North Korean. Until she came to the U.S., the most
important thing for her purpose had always been to disguise herself as a
non-North Korean. She had abandoned all of the evidence which suggested she was
North Korean.
“She never said she is
from North Korea,” Han said. “Officers found it. She never knew what the
situation would be. She was extremely afraid that once she confessed that she
is a North Korean, she was going to be executed.”
Surprisingly, mid-May in
2001, soon after Kim applied for asylum and it became news in South Korea, the
North Korean Mission to the United Nations in New York announced that Kim was
actually not a North Korean citizen.
In May 2001, the
Seoul-based organization called Commission to Help Korean Refugees (CHKR) sent
a North Korean defector, Chang In Sook, to San Diego
to make sure if Kim was from North Korea and, if so, to help verify Kim’s
statement that she comes from North Korea.
From South Korea, Chang
said in several email interviews and phone interviews, “There were some
disputes about Ms. Kim's identity around that time. The day before I met
her, I also met two fake NK guys and revealed they were not real NK
defectors, but Korean Chinese. I could conclude that because they didn’t
understand North Korean dialect and some terms used in North Korea. But
Kim used the same dialect, terms and intonations as North Koreans use when I
talked to her. And she also knew lots about North Korea.”
Despite that, some Korean
Americans still doubt she is not from North Korea. Among them is Douglas Shin,
a famous Korean-American pastor in Los Angeles whom the Los Angeles Times once
featured, praising his human right activities toward North Korean refugees.
“I still think she is not
from North Korea,” said Shin. “The INS does not know her well.” But he said he
has never met her and did not divulge his specific evidence to back up his
opinions.
Kim’s guardian Han
distanced himself from Shin’s views. “We still never know about her well. She
is still scared about everybody and does not open her mind 100 percent to us.
She is not like us. She is from North Korea. She is kind of like ‘Alice in
Wonderland’ here because North Koreans are very ignorant about the outside
world.”
Indeed, Kim has found the
adjustment difficult.
Kim did not know how to
use a refrigerator and toilet. And Kim was once so surprised to see that the
majority of American houses have a garage, saying “In America, even cars have
their own space.”
Kim was also surprised to
know the fact that North Korea actually started the Korean War in 1950. She
said in North Korea she had learned South Korea started the war.
During my stay in Han’s
house, Han held a party hosting about ten Koreans in San Diego. Kim never
joined their conversations or ate at the dinner table. Instead, she had dinner
alone in the kitchen and watched Korean TV dramas broadcasted by satellite.
When asked why she did
not join them, she just shouted in English, “No! No!”
For me, she always seemed
to fear to reveal her lack of general knowledge, which would surely be
disclosed once she joined them.
Indeed, even her
constitution has also found the adjustment difficult. During the party, Kim ate
a cut of pork spareribs
and then her entire skin soon became red. Apparently, it was urticaria or hives. She said she has become allergic to
meats because for years, she had always eaten vegetables in her mother country.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
According to Korean media
such as the Yanhap news agency, there are two more North
Korean defectors in the U.S. besides Kim who applied for asylum status in the
U.S. later than Kim did. They gained it last September, earlier than Kim,
marking the first time North Koreans have secured that status.
They are identified as
Lee Kil-nam, 40, and Lee Chol-soo,
39. The two men reportedly fled North Korea separately at the age of 8 and 17,
and had been hiding in the third countries like China and Russia. They happened
to meet in Mexico via France after separately leaving Moscow on fake passports.
They were also caught in last April illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.
Lee Kil-nam
has parents, a wife and a daughter in North Korea. Lee Chol-su
married in 1986, and his father and wife are still in China.
According to Yu Lae Kyung, their guardian in Phoenix, Chol-soo
now lives in Los Angeles and Lee Kil-nam in Phoenix.
Yu did not divulge specific details about their current lives to me.
Kim’s son lives with Ju Suk Lee, an ethnic Korean and
a Chinese citizen in Yon-Byon. She stays in touch with
her son and Lee’s family, by making an overseas call in once every two or three
months: Kim does not have a home phone.
During the interview, Kim
Soon Hee repeatedly said, “I wish to live freely with
my son.”
“When will the day come
at a time all the suffering North Koreans could live freely? I wish ordinary
Americans would know much better about North Korea and help save North
Koreans.”
Postscript:
It was really hard to find out a North Korean defector in the U.S. It took
me three months to locate Ms. Kim. I've called many Congressmen's offices
and dozens of Korean Churches here and elsewhere, as well as human rights
organizations in both South Korea and the U.S. and bar associations across
the U.S., including the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA)
and the American Civil Liberties Union, to look for defectors.
Michael
Shapiro, my supervisor at Columbia University’s Journalism School, once wrote
me the following email on Nov.21.
“come by to talk about your project. i have to tell you that at this point the window is
closing on finding a north korean here. if you have not found one by this point i
fear that your entire time will be spent in search of such a person. let's consider a new way to get at the same idea of the
exile, alone, in a strange land.”
In looking
for Ms. Kim, I noticed Korean people, such as pastors in churches here and
elsewhere, are unwilling to talk to me about North
Korean defectors. I suspect that this is because they do not want to get
involved in any North-South problems. This topic is much more sensitive in the
Korean community than I had expected.
By
mid-January, I managed to find both Ms. Kim and her guardian Mr. Han in San
Diego, who is protecting Ms. Kim. But Mr. Han said Ms. Kim needed time to get
accustomed to her new life in the U.S. before granting me an interview.
It was on
March 15 to17 that Mr. Han finally allowed me to speak to her and arranged my
interview.
I have noticed lots of journalists are rushing to Mr. Han in order to interview
Ms. Kim. Some Korean TV stations are even offering him several thousand
U.S. dollars as a commission fee. But, so far, Mr. Han has not allowed
any journalists to interview Ms. Kim, except me, because he is concerned
with Ms. Kim’s sensitive mental condition. I gained his and Ms. Kim’s
trust, which finally allowed me to do interview. I am very happy with this
result.