N. Korea’s Brides of Despair

YANJI, China —  It was hardly the most romantic of courtships.

Kim Hye Soon, a 36-year-old divorcee, met the man she considers her fourth husband one day and agreed to marry him the next. Only there was no gown, no music, no celebratory meal -- no proper wedding at all. Kim simply followed him to his one-room cottage down a dirt road flanked by rice paddies.

Li Dong Gil, 38, was admittedly not the greatest catch. He had been badly disabled in a work accident that left him hunchbacked and unable to perform physical labor. What little money he was able to earn he spent on drinks and gambling, according to Kim.

Still, she was grateful to have found him. As a North Korean refugee, Kim had lived on the run, spending sleepless nights in fields and farmhouses in fear of being caught by Chinese police and deported back to North Korea. She had just escaped from a brief liaison with a Chinese man so violent that he was later imprisoned for killing his own mother.

“What choice did I have?” demanded Kim, a petite woman with girlish features but hard eyes and weather-worn skin.

Together now for three years, she and Li live with her daughters in a village on the outskirts of this city 15 miles from the North Korean border. “If we had stayed in North Korea, we would have starved to death,” she said.

She spoke under a name she has assumed and asked that the village not be identified for security reasons.

Each year, thousands of North Korean women swim or sneak across the 800-mile border with China in search of food or work. It’s relatively easy to get out; in some places, the Tumen and Yalu rivers on the border are no more than a muddy trickle. But the women quickly discover they have no way of surviving on their own in China, which considers North Koreans illegal migrants.

For these women, finding a Chinese mate has become the refuge of last resort.

Almost from the moment they cross the border -- and sometimes when they are still in North Korea -- the women are tapped by brokers. The preference for male babies in rural China has led to a shortage of marriage-age Chinese women. Unable to woo a partner with the usual blandishments, men are often willing to pay $300 -- more if the woman is especially pretty.

“Women are very scarce in the countryside,” explained Li, Kim’s husband. A handsome man despite his misshapen physique, with a tawny complexion and leonine features, Li said he never had so much as a serious girlfriend before Kim.

“They say that North Korean women are more obedient than Chinese, but I wouldn’t know since I had no experience with women before,” Li admitted sheepishly. “I’ve had nobody but the one I’m with now.”

It is almost impossible to determine how many North Korean women are in similar situations, because Chinese authorities do not recognize or register the marriages.

Choi Jin I, a North Korean who eventually escaped to the South, estimates there are tens of thousands. In the northeast China villages where she lived, about 1 out of 10 women with mates were North Korean defectors, she said.

“It is easier for women to get out of North Korea than men because at least they have their own bodies to sell,” said Choi, who was a well-known poet and writer in North Korea. She believes that nearly three-quarters of the estimated 100,000 North Korean defectors in China are women and that many, if not most, live with Chinese men.

“They figure it is better to find a man, any man, than starve to death in North Korea,” she said.

Kim Sang Hun, a prominent human rights activist in the South Korean capital of Seoul, agrees that the numbers are high. Chinese authorities arrested and deported about 8,000 women in a March 2000 crackdown called the Campaign to Eradicate Human Trafficking, he said. But Kim added that those women represent just a small percentage of those in secret unions, and the numbers have been climbing ever since.

“The women keep coming out,” he said. “They are looking at any chance to survive. They don’t expect happiness out of marriage, only survival.”

The life of a peasant wife in China is not an easy one, often entailing long hours of work in the fields and at home. Li and Kim live in a single room, almost entirely unfurnished except for the rolled sleeping mats and traditional earthenware cooking pots sunk into the vinyl-covered floors. A freshly slaughtered chicken waited to be prepared for lunch. Outside, chickens and rabbits ran loose in the yard.

The North Korean women, in effect, are kept hostage by their illegal status, unable to go to the police or even seek medical treatment if they are abused. Few speak much Chinese, which isolates them further.

Horror stories abound about women trapped in relationships as nightmarish as those in a gothic novel. In the northernmost provinces of China, where single women are particularly scarce, it is not uncommon for brothers to share one, say some of the North Koreans. Some women have been sold to brothels or traded among men. Many are not permitted out of their homes to prevent them from running away; some are even locked up.

“I was more a slave than a concubine,” said Kim Jong Oak, a 24-year-old North Korean who spent two years in the northern Chinese city of Harbin with a man who she says beat her incessantly and kept her virtually imprisoned.

Kim had been recruited as a teenager along with a sister in her hometown of Hoeryong by a grandmotherly woman who promised the girls jobs as laborers in China. Kim escaped two years ago to South Korea with the help of a missionary, but she has had no word of her sister.

“Many of the North Korean women defectors have had similar experiences of being sold,” Kim said. “They don’t talk about it, but I know the scars are there.”

The stories are numbingly and depressingly similar. Most women cite chronic famine as the main reason they left home.

Shim Yang, 29, said she fled North Korea in December 1998 after watching her 17-year-old sister die a painful death from eating poisonous plants foraged from the forest. She began living with an older man, but Chinese police caught her and deported her. After 10 months in a labor camp, she returned to her hometown near the border.

“But I couldn’t stand the cold stare of villagers. They were all whispering that I was a whore who sold my body in China,” she said.

She crossed again into China and now has a 10-month-old daughter with a rickshaw driver. She complains that he spends his meager salary on drink.

“I’d run away, but where would I go?” said Shim Yang, who was visiting other North Korean women in another village near Yanji.

Women say recruiters work inside North Korea, scoping out women who have a look of desperation. The recruiters typically work with border guards and military men, who for a fee help the women enter China.

Once across, they are turned over to Chinese brokers -- who are usually of Korean origin and speak the language -- before being sent on to other brokers elsewhere in China.

“There are some decent brokers who will make you a good marriage and some bad ones who just want to make money. But once you cross to China, you have to go to the man you’re introduced to. That’s our destiny,” said Ri Gum Sun, 28, who was brokered by her brother’s friend for a bargain price of $250.

Ri, an exceptionally pretty woman and a university graduate, had had several offers of marriage in North Korea but rejected them in the hope of a better life in China. She admits disappointment with her Chinese mate, who is 15 years older and has little money or education.

“In the case of my husband, when I first saw him there was no spark. I was not attracted in the least to him,” she said. “But he is a kind man. I have a child with him now, so I could never leave him.”

The poet, Choi, was recruited by a first cousin in 1998. A divorcee at the time, she agreed to defect to China and “marry” a farmer, figuring she would at least get out of North Korea and perhaps learn Chinese. She went through three men: the farmer, another Chinese who was barely literate, and a gangster who, she said, beat her and tried to force her into prostitution. She escaped from him one night wearing blood-soaked nightclothes.

Despite her experiences, Choi grudgingly defends the brokers for helping women escape North Korea. She blames the problems on the Chinese government for failing to provide legal protection for defectors.

“The general consensus among peasant men and many of the women is why not legalize these marriages? If people were free to choose their partners, there would be fewer cases of abuse and less of this vicious trafficking,” said Choi.

China has received much criticism lately for its refusal to grant refugee status to North Koreans. Human rights advocates have been trying to raise money for refugee camps for them, and the Bush administration is reportedly considering giving thousands asylum in the United States.

But not all the unions are disastrous. Some women express if not happiness, at least some degree of contentment.

Kim Hye Soon’s mate, Li, raised money to pay someone to smuggle her two daughters, now 11 and 14, across the border. The couple plan to also bring out her 16-year-old son, who is living in North Korea with her first husband. “I’m one of the lucky ones,” said Kim, who met Li through a church.

The family lives in a constant state of anxiety, however. Kim is the last North Korean “wife” in the village. Several others have been caught and deported.

As illegal immigrants, her daughters, Eun Hang and Hyang Mi, are not able to go to school or even leave the village. They spend their days in the backyard playing with the rabbits and chickens.

“That is my biggest heartbreak -- that I can’t give my children a proper education,” said Kim. “If they live here and have to get married, they will repeat their mother’s life story and agony, and then their children will face the same destiny.”

When her mother is out of earshot, 14-year-old Eun Hang confides that she shares that fear.

“Married people don’t seem very happy,” the teen said. “I don’t want to get married.”