The girl fled to North Korea to find her mother

As Songmi Park crossed the river, her toes scratched the shore.

He knew he should be afraid. The river is deep and very watery. If caught, he will be punished or even killed. But he felt much stronger than he feared.
He left North Korea to find his mother, who abandoned him when he was a child.

Matsumi felt like she was flying while walking on the ice at night.

May 31, 2019. “How can I forget the best and worst days of my life?” she said.
Escaping North Korea is a dangerous and difficult task. In recent years, Kim Jong Un has surrendered to those trying to escape. Then, at the onset of the global pandemic, the country closed its borders, making Songmi, who was 17 at the time, one of the most experienced people to successfully escape.

Songmi crosses the Yalu River for the second time, which separates North Korea from China and provides the easiest escape route for refugees.

When he first went out as a child, he was tied to his mother’s back.
These memories are still piercing like yesterday.

He remembers going to a relative’s pig farm in China to hide when state police arrived. He remembers his family begging him not to be deported. “Let me come!” shouted the relative. The police beat him until his face bled.
Back in North Korea, he remembered his father with his hands behind his back. He also remembers standing at a train station and watching his family get sent to one of North Korea’s infamous prisons. he is four years old.

Songmi was sent to live on her father and mother’s farm in Musan, North Korea, half an hour from the Chinese border. They told him that going to school was not an option.
Education in South Korea is free, but families often have to bribe teachers, something Songmi’s grandparents couldn’t afford.

Instead, he spent his childhood traveling around the country looking for alfalfa to feed the rabbits on the farm. Even in the summer it often hurts. “I don’t eat much, so I have low immunity,” she said. “But when I woke up from the illness, my grandmother would let me heal by the windowsill.

One night, five years after the train to the prison camp left the station, his father fell on the bed behind him and took his hand. He muttered excitedly. Life can begin again. However, he died three days later. His time in prison took a toll on his health.
Song-mi’s mother, Myung-hui, is devastated when she comes home a week later to find her husband dead. He made an unexpected decision. He will try to escape from North Korea again. alone.

The next day her mother left, Songmi said she could hear something different.

Now she’s 10 years old alone to take care of her old grandmother who has no money: “One of my family is gone, it’s so creepy.”

In a moment of desperation, if you know how to find it, the North Korean plateau. inadequate livelihood. Songmi takes a two-hour hike up the mountain every morning in search of food and plants to sell. Some herbs can be sold as medicine in their local market, but they must first be hand washed, cut and dried, which means they work late into the night.
“I can’t work or plan for tomorrow. Every day I try not to starve to get through the day.”
“

Only 300 miles away, the plane is flying and Myung-hee is already in Korea.

After traveling through China to Laos and Thailand for a year, he arrived at the South Korean Embassy.

The South Korean government, having agreed on the resettlement of North Korean fugitives, sent him to Seoul. He lives in Ulsan, a trading city on the south coast. He spends every day relentlessly cleaning the inside of the boat to earn money to pay for his daughter’s escape.
Fleeing North Korea is very expensive. He needs a middleman who can help him overcome problems and money to bribe everyone along the way.

At night, Mingxi sat alone in the dark, thinking about her daughter, what she was doing, and how she looked. Songmei’s birthday is the saddest. She would take the baby off the shelf and talk to him, pretending to be his daughter, trying to connect them.

Songmi’s mother started crying as she talked about the time they spent outside the safety of the dinner table. He hit the girl in his hand.
“Don’t cry, all your beautiful makeup is ruined,” she said.
After paying Representative
£17,000 ($20,400) Myung-hui finally managed to arrange for his daughter’s escape. Suddenly, Song-mi’s ten-year wait comes to an end with little hope.

Since crossing the Yalu River into China, he has been in hiding, moving from place to place at night for fear of being arrested again. He took a bus from the mountains to Laos and took refuge in a church before heading to the South Korean embassy.
He stayed at the embassy for another three months before flying to South Korea. When he arrived, he spent several months in a resettlement center for North Korean fugitives. The whole journey took a year but for Songmi it was like 10.

When they finally met again, he and his mother sat down for a bowl of Minghui’s cold and spicy noodle soup.

Classic Korean food is Songmi’s favourite. Songmi displays infectious energy in contrast to her mother’s guilt. He laughs and jokes as he comforts his mother to cover the wounds of childhood trauma.

“The day before I left the transfer center, I was terrified.
I don’t know what to say to my mother, “I want to look good in front of her, but when I wipe it, I’m too heavy and my hair is messy.

“I’m afraid a lot,” Mingxi accepted.

“He was right in front of me, so I had to accept that he had to be,” Myung-hee said. “There’s so much I want to say, but I can’t. I hug him and say, ‘You’ve been through a lot here.'”

Songmi says her heart is gone. “For 15 minutes we just cried and hugged.

Myung-hui is afraid to start explaining, their first escape is his idea, how does he come from prison to live with his wife and remind them every day that he is alive and their son is dead?

He said, “I want to take you away, but the surrogate says you’re not a child.”
“And we’ll all suffer if we get caught again. That’s why I let your grandma watch you for a year.”

“I see,” Songmi said, her eyes falling to the ground. “Just one year turned into 10 years.”

“Yes,” her mother nodded.
“My feet didn’t move when I went tomorrow, but your grandfather wanted me to go and he wanted me to go, I want you to know that I didn’t leave you, I want to give you the better of my life.” It seems like the choice was right.
“

To someone outside of North Korea, this choice may seem unimaginable. But these are the instinctive decisions and risks people have to make to escape – and that’s harder. Under Kim Jong Un, the government tightened border security and imposed tougher penalties for those trying to escape.

More than 1,000 North Koreans will go to South Korea each year by 2020. In 2020, the year Songmi arrived, that number dropped to 229.
When the epidemic broke out earlier that year, North Korea closed its borders and banned people from traveling across the country. The soldiers at the border were ordered to kill anyone they saw trying to escape. Only 67 South Koreans arrived in South Korea last year, most of whom left before the outbreak.

Songmi was the last person to escape before the border closed. Their memories are so priceless that they provide the latest and greatest insight into life in the world’s most secretive country.
He remembered how hot the summer was. By 2017 the crops had withered and died, and there was nothing left to eat in the fall and spring. But farmers still have to give the same crop to the government every year, which means they have less food and sometimes no food to eat. They started cooking on the mountain. Some eventually choose to quit farming.
He said that the wages of miners, another major employer in his hometown of Musan, are lower. International sanctions against North Korea following the 2017 nuclear weapons test mean that no one can buy the mine’s iron ore. The mines are almost idle and the workers are not getting their wages. He said they would break into mine at night and steal anything they could whip. They do not know how to find food in the forest like those who work on land.

However, in 2019, my biggest fear was to find enough food to make a living, as well as watch foreign TV series and movies. These items have long been shipped north, giving the public a glimpse of the fascinating world that exists beyond its borders. The beautiful image of Korea today is portrayed as the biggest threat to the government in Korean dramas. “Watching South Korean movies can be fined or jailed for two or three years, but wanting to watch the same movie in 2019 will get you into political prison,” Songmi said.

was caught with an Indian movie on the USB stick but managed to protect it so he wouldn’t know it was there and was fined.
His friend was not so lucky. One day in June 2022, Songmi, who had just arrived in Korea, received a call from her friend’s mother.

“He said my friend was arrested for buying a copy of The Squid Game and was killed because he was the one who gave it to me,” Songmi said.

Songmi’s account matches recent information that someone from North Korea was killed for spreading foreign programming.

“Looks more painful than when I was there.
“People young and old were killed or sent to concentration camps to get Korean news,” he said.

As a capitalist, freedom of South Korean life is often a struggle for North Korea. It was very different from anything they had experienced. But Song Mei was easy.

He missed his friends and couldn’t tell them he was gone. She forgot to dance with them, she shook the ground with the games they used.
“When you meet up with friends in Korea, you just go shopping or have coffee,” he said with some contempt.

What helps Songmi integrate into society is her belief that she is no different from her Korean friends.

“After traveling for months in China and Laos, I feel like an orphan sent abroad,” he said. But when he landed at Seoul Airport, ground staff greeted him with the familiar “an-nyeong-ha-say-yo”.

The word “hello” used in North and South Korea surprised him: “I know we are people of the same country. I did not come from abroad. I just went south.” She sat at the airport crying for 10 minutes at

Songmi says she has now found her purpose – to defend the unification of the two Koreas.
This is the future that Koreans dream of, but most people do not believe in this dream. The longer the country stays, the fewer people, especially young people, see the need to reunite it.

Songmi visited the schools and gave information about the north to the students. He asked which ones were considering getting together, and usually only a few raised their hands. But when he asked them to draw a map of North Korea, most of them described the north and south of the entire peninsula.
It gave him hope.

short gray line
Songmi only felt vaguely nervous as she got used to her relationship with her mother. The two smiled and hugged often as Song Mi dried her mother’s tears as she delved into the painful details of each other’s pasts.

Songmi said that her mother made the right choice because they are both in Korea now.

Myung-hui may not recognize her daughter at first, but the two are alike.
Now she can see her 19-year-old self in her daughter.

The relationship between them is like friendship or brotherhood. Songmi likes to tell Myung-hui all the details of her day.

Only hit when they fight.

“Then wow, I’m with my mom,” I thought, laughing.
It was also broadcast, filmed and edited by Hosu Lee.