North Korea Undercover Read Online Free Page A

what they were told. Jimmy was the black sheep.
    The family lived in the forgotten far north-east corner of Korea in the town of Saebyol in North Hamgyong province, only an hours walk from China. The border isformed by the Tumen river running down from its source, the sacred Mount Baekdu – where regime legend has it that Kim Jong Il was born – to the East Sea or Sea of Japan. Up in the hills, the Tumen divides China and North Korea and then close to the sea forms the border between North Korea and Russia for its last 11 miles. The Russian name of the river is Tumannaya, which means foggy. In the dead of winter, the surface of the river freezes over, making it so easy to cross all you have to do is run. In the late autumn and early spring, the ice is weak, and great care must be taken because the current is strong and drowning a serious possibility.
    Jimmy had a friend, let’s call him Mark, a smuggler who was making a small fortune bringing in second-hand clothes from China. Around 1997, when the famine was at its height, Mark told Jimmy that North Korea was much poorer than China. The famine had shattered much of Jimmy’s belief in the system. He’d seen dead babies, dead old people, dead middle-aged people lying slumped in the street, at railway stations or just by the doorstep of their homes. Never many bodies in one place, he said, just one or two.
    At fifteen, Jimmy got the itch to travel and one moonless nightin late November, around two o’clock in the morning, when the guards were, he hoped, asleep, he found himself face-down, crawling across ice not even as thick asyour finger, the only sounds the creaking of the ice as it took his weight and the barking of dogs from China. The Tumen here, far away from the sea, was around 100 metres across, and most of the surface was hard ice. But the middle section, around 10 metres across, was perilously thin. Jimmy described a trick the smugglers used: they took two sticks, maybe 5 feet long each, and crawled forward, one in each hand, using them to spread their weight and get some traction on the ice. One stick at a time, Jimmy crawled on. To be fair, at 5 foot 2 and not an ounce of fat on him, he would stand a far better chance at crossing thin ice than you or I.
    He made it. On the other side, Jimmy gorged himself with five or six bowls of white rice at one sitting. Everything Mark had told him about China turned out to be true: the food was abundant, you could eat meat and white rice every day, luxuries you only had on feast days back home, the electricity worked, you could watch whatever you wanted on telly, you could go to karaoke bars and party all night long.
    Jimmy returned with 40 kilos of second-hand clothes on his back – the bag he used was the same size as he was. They smuggled second-hand ‘sports clothes’, T-shirts, trousers – they were not allowed to wear jeans in North Korea then – into the North. Jimmy reckoned that, if the average wage was 500 won a month, he made around 2,000 won, worth roughly £200 ($170), around four months’ pay in one run across the border. He could have been shot by the border guards or captured and then executed, but he loved the buzz.
    He did his best to keep his family in the dark about what he wasup to. But the regime s spell over him was entirely broken. Jimmy was determined to go back, and did so, again and again. Each trip, his profits grew. And then, trouble. He was on the Chinese side of the river, working his way from village to village, trying to keep away from the Chinese border guards and the police until he could get to the town where he could get hold of more second-hand clothes, when he was caught. He spent a week in a police cell in China. They fed him properly, three times a day, and then he was sent back to North Korea. He was only sixteen, and categorized as a simple ‘border-crosser’, not a political defector, and after a roughish time, they let him go.
    His family were angry with him, and they