Exclusive | Sold and separated: the trafficked North Korean women trying to bring their Chinese children ‘home’ to the South
China is the main way out of North Korea for people fleeing the country but for many of the women who make it across the border, human traffickers are waiting to kidnap and sell them to Chinese men. Those who later make it to the South must endure the torment of leaving the Chinese children they have with these men behind. In this instalment of a four-part series, Josephine Ma looks at how a lasting reunion proved elusive for one woman who had already suffered a lifetime of struggle
For North Korean defector Choi Ran*, Daegu was to be the start of her last new beginning.
The South Korean city was meant to be the final stop in a decade-long ordeal from starvation in the North and at least one forced marriage in China to cultural isolation in the South.
It was meant to be the first step in a fresh start with her “husband”, the 49-year-old Chinese cab driver she was sold to in her mid-thirties, and their young son, born in the rural backwaters of China’s Heilongjiang province.
But Daegu proved to be the end of the end for the 45-year-old. In March, just weeks after the three were reunited, Choi was murdered by her lover, a businessman who had funded the expensive reunion and killed Choi when she said she wanted to break up.
Her ashes now rest in a box at the Yongin Crematorium, in a special section for homeless people.
Choi’s life was testament to the complex web of ties that bind the thousands of North Korean women fleeing the hermit kingdom via China and the lengths to which they must go to keep their families together.