Hwa-Young* works in China with women who flee North Korea or are abducted by people traffickers and taken across the border.
Many of the women are tempted to leave behind a miserable life when they are told there are jobs waiting for them in China. But often they are sold on to brothels or into marriages with poor Chinese Korean men.
About half of the 250 women who have found refuge through small church groups have been helped by Hwa-Young in the last year.
Never assume you’re safe
She hopes that refugees from North Korea will one day return to rebuild a church. The capital, Pyongyang, was once known as ‘the Jerusalem of the East’ because it had a high number of churches, but now they are mainly secret and hidden. In her 40s and of Korean descent, she works in north-east China and travels long distances to meet women who have crossed the border from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. She has one rule when travelling: never assume you are safe. She hopes that the churches where she meets women from North Korea are not bugged, but she would never make that assumption about a hotel. She advises them to take the same precautions.
If the women – who are living illegally in China – are caught and repatriated as defectors, they can be dealt with harshly by Kim Jong-un’s government, often disappearing into a labour camp.
She fulfilled a long-held desire to work with women trafficked from North Korea after 20 years of working in a church and building up counselling and administrative skills that would later help in her work of organising group meetings.
The first two years were tough, she says: ‘I had no experience and didn’t speak Chinese. The culture in China is completely opposite to what I was used to back home. It’s like a jail without bars. You are always under pressure. Then there’s the security issue. How do you avoid being arrested? I felt lonely, pressured and homesick all the time.
Replacing the idol
Dealing with North Korean women is hard. ‘They had to idolize Kim Il-Sung (founder of modern North Korea and grandfather of current leader, Kim Jong-un). He’s stuck in everyone’s soul. When people start believing in God, it’s difficult to replace this idol in their hearts. Even when refugees have lived in China or South Korea for some time, they find it hard when something negative is said about Kim Il-Sung. He’s been dead since 1994, but it’s like he’s always present wherever they go.’
‘I don’t mind dying’
Despite the difficulty of Hwa-Young’s first two years, she has overcome some of the pressures. ‘Now I don’t have any fear of death. I’m a single woman and, if it’s necessary, I don’t mind dying for this cause. The hardest part was the fact that I couldn’t rely on anyone else. And when I feel lonely, there’s nobody to talk to.’
When she started she could tell no one what she did. If she spoke about how lonely she felt it would invite too many questions. ‘That’s dangerous for me and for others. I cannot share stories over the phone, become a church member or confide in a pastor. I have two friends, but even with them I share only 50% of what’s troubling me.’
She says the women she works with are not your ‘average women’, they are mentally scarred from their time living in North Korea: ‘They are still prisoners in a jail called ‘North Korean women’. They don’t know the outside world. Whenever I tell them stories about things happening outside North Korea and north-east China, they cannot grasp what I tell them. They feel like victims all the time. If I give them something, they don’t receive it as a kind gesture. To them, it feels like somehow I’m taking advantage of them.’
Women raised in fear
She feels the reason for their brokenness is that they were raised in fear. ‘They go to preschool at about five, but they are still forced to watch public executions. Sometimes friends or neighbours are murdered in front of them. Even when they are older and leave the country they still experience fear. There is much more freedom here in China, but the women are not safe and continue to live in fear.
‘Most of them have been abused in North Korea and in China. They feel numb, not even feeling the hurt anymore. They grow up in severe poverty, always going hungry. All of them know what it is like to worry about every meal, to eat from the rubbish and beg for food.’
