Their births separated by just moments and miles, the lives of two Koreans take very different paths.
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Of the thousands of interactions I’ ve had with North Korean refugees in China, I can’ t get one out of my head. I met her during a visit two years ago to her small farming village where I stayed the night in a drab, one-room house. The roof was made of mud and the interior walls and ceiling were covered in newspaper.
I was there to help her and other North Korean refugees access resources and medical care as part of my work with the nonprofit Crossing Borders .
I was taking notes for the doctor when this woman approached our table. She was just 38, but she had a sad face with wrinkles around her eyes. She had no rights or protections. China routinely arrests refugees and sends them back to North Korea, where they are guaranteed time in the world’s most brutal prison camps.
As I took down her vital information, she told me her birth date. Shocked, I stopped typing and asked her to clarify. We had been born on the same day — on opposite sides of the Korean Demilitarized Zone.
I was born in Seoul, she in Chongjin — a North Korean mining town about 200 miles north. Though our births were separated by just moments and miles, t he details of our lives couldn’ t be more different. My family was able to emigrate to the United States when I was a baby, in search of a better life. I was well educated and blessed to be able to pursue my passions. I was granted time to mess up, to find my footing as an adult.
Meanwhile, she had spent years of her childhood trapped in a devastating famine that claimed the lives of up to 3 million innocent North Koreans. Her family starved to death. Many refugees have told me they ate bark and grass to survive at the instruction of their government. Some even turned to cannibalism.
Though it is a crime to leave their country, hundreds of thousands of North Koreans have risked imprisonment to find their next meal.
