On the North Korean side, there were sentry boxes every fifty yards or so, and guards carrying rifles were on round-the-clock patrol. I spotted some men standing around talking and smoking cigarettes on the opposite bank-in China. More than enough time to get shot in the back, mind you, but I tried not to think about that.
If it had been winter and the surface had been frozen, I could have crossed it in a matter of seconds. The river was so narrow it couldn’t have been more than about thirty yards wide. The first thing I felt when I saw the river was surprise. By the time I got to the banks, it was nearly midday. I started munching on it and headed for the river. In the morning, I got up and walked around in front of the train station for a bit. I wanted to recover my strength, such as it was, so I went to a park in the city center. I couldn’t think too much about it because it brought to mind images of my own children. I wondered what had become of his parents. And when he found something, he picked it up and ate it.
Like me, he was looking for something edible on the ground. When I turned around, I saw a small child behind me. There were no kernels on them, but I fastened my teeth on the cobs and ate what I could. I eventually spotted some abandoned corncobs. I had no money, of course, so I tried to find something on the ground. Some people were clearly shopping for something to buy, while others looked like homeless people, unable to do anything but look on enviously. It was huge, and there were so many products, I felt dizzy. I hadn’t eaten for two days, so I headed for the market. Irritated by the Chinese officers’ judgment, the police, showing off their barbarous power to the Chinese customs officers, shot the whole family as soon as the group stepped back onto North Korean soil.Īfter hopping off the train, I walked for such a long time that my legs became as stiff as boards. The Chinese customs officers were shocked at such cruelty and explained that such things weren’t allowed in China. The North Korean police pushed a wire through their noses to link them all together. One of the worst I’d heard was the “nose-ring case.” A family of four had escaped, but the North Korean police caught them in China. Who knows if they were true, or if they were just propagated by the state to keep us in our place. I’d heard some terrible stories about what happened to people caught trying to escape everyone had. It was patrolled 24 hours a day by legions of border security guards.
How things change!īy 1996, the Holy Land of Revolution was infamous as a place people holed up when trying to escape to China. Because of that, it became known as “the Holy Land of Revolution.” The city has a huge monument to the revolution and a statue of Kim Il-sung. The Koreans were attempting to push the Japanese occupiers out of their country, and the Anti-Japanese Guerrilla Corps, allegedly commanded by Kim Il-sung, beat the daylights out of the Japanese army. About twelve miles northeast of Hyesan, there’s an area called Pochonbo, famous for a battle that took place there in 1937. The town of Hyesan is famous for its coalfields and copper mines. Now the whole migration had been thrown into reverse. Bizarrely, some thirty years earlier, many Chinese Koreans and Chinese had tried to escape to North Korea during China’s “Great Leap Forward” and Cultural Revolution, that country’s own attempt at mass starvation. A lot of people cross over it, and even more try to. The Yalu River separates China and North Korea.
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