The majority of North Korean women who venture into China fall into the hands of human traffickers of the sex trade. Although a victim of such depravity, Lee Mi-ja considers herself providentially protected to have survived to tell the following story.
Lee Mi-ja’s father died when she was still very young, leaving her mother to grapple alone with the hardships of a famine-racked North Korea. Unending work, privation and shrinking government distributions combined to take a fatal toll. Three years ago, her mother, a victim of utter fatigue and despair, surrendered in her daily life-and-death battle for survival in the hardscrabble economy of Hamkyoungpukto, “the Siberia of North Korea.”
In her 20’s, Mi-ja suddenly found herself unshielded from the economic facts of provincial life in the wake of eight years of man-made famine. A middle-aged woman from a nearby town … confided in whispered tones that her relatives lived in China. Furthermore, she had decided to take pity on Mi-ja’s family tragedy expressing a willingness to accompany her personally to China and arrange for Mi-ja to live with relatives described as prosperous. The grieving young woman accepted readily, never suspecting anything but goodwill from her elder.
The harrowing river crossing of the Tumen River went undetected by both North Korean and Chinese border guards. However, Mi-ja’s elation was short-lived.
In a matter of only a few hours, she watched with disbelief as a coarse Chinese farmer stuffed a wad of Chinese bills into the ajumma’s fist and glared at the young woman as if he’d struck a bargain for a fattened pig.
Mi-ja’s heart sank yet again upon discovering she would not even attain the dubious status of a ‘mail order bride.’ Instead she was relegated to a ‘concubine’ for a violent married man, who would burst into a rage and rain blows on her face and arms at the slightest sign of protest to his advances, leaving her face bleeding and swollen.
To endure such dehumanizing treatment would scar the life of even strong individuals. However, Mi-ja is quick to point out that she counts herself fortunate. She escaped her sexual servitude in less than a year. She explains ruefully that many North Korean girls, as young as 15 and 16, have been bought and sold in China up to four times.
[From a testimony by Tim Peters before The House Committee on International Relations]
Full testimony: The House Committee on International Relations, Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific
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