love, bliss, pleasant, misfortune, injustice, and resistance

Since early on this year, the issue of Koreans—both north and south—being caught and handed over to North Korean officials on Chinese territory has been a unsettling topic to my heart. For a long time, Chinese police force was used to capture any North Korean escapees passing Chinese territory. Although such an act is against the international treaty concerning international refugees and escapees, the act was never openly challenged in fear of diplomatic problems, until early on this year. This time, the South Korean government made a formal objection to China’s plan to transport of nearly thirty people that escaped from North Korea back to their dreaded home.

 Having slept, played, and cooked together with those around my age that had to undergo the painful procedure of escaping from North Korea only a few months before, I was touched as I never would have before. The day I came upon the news, it was strangely easy to picture my friend desperately clinging to the South Korean embassy wall as Chinese police grabbed her foot. As a member of Amnesty International, I took part in this issue by promoting Amnesty’s efforts to sign petitions and send letters of condemnation to the Chinese embassy. Thanks to my efforts several school mates became aware of the problem and participated in helping the captured escapees. But, all went amiss as China again closed its damn ears to its neighbors and had its own way. 

 Despite the failure, the fire was not yet quenched in me and when news of a South Korean man caught in the same problem reached the news, I was eager to participate again in the protest. In this case, the person caught is a South Korean social activist that in his past afflicted himself with socialist ideals and actually visited the North a few times to see how communism was actually practiced. Thankfully, as Sartre did after Praga’s Spring, ideologists get a chance to revise their theories after witnessing sites where their theory was actually implemented, the person in this case also changed his mind after the visit. Therefore, he changed his view toward North Korea to a more acceptable one and focused on helping North Korean escapees reach Korea safely. North Korea saw this as a threat and the Chinese police force was called on to capture him.

 So, with such knowledge, I visited a church located across the Chinese embassy where people were putting on a 102 protest against the problem—by the way I’m not religiously afflicted to church. There, I read several posters that recounted successful escapees’ accounts and what’s more, accounts of what happened if the attempt failed. If the escape failed, the people are either taken to this concentration center with conditions much resembling Auschwitz or shot dead in front of their family. Even for other family members that were left in North Korea, the result is catastrophic. The victim’s family are all taken to the concentration center and both tortures and put to hard labor under insane living conditions.

 Waiting by the street for mom’s ride back home, this phrase resonated in my head, “I grew up not knowing the words, love, bliss, pleasant, misfortune, injustice, and resistance at the camp; I only learnt these concepts after I came here (South Korea)”. It wasn’t strange for them to describe themselves as dog turds, it seemed to me.