Sold NoKor brides face hard choices in China
LIAONING (AP) — The North Korean woman drives a motorbike slowly down a narrow lane shaded by tall corn to the farmhouse where she lives with the disabled Chinese man who bought her.
It’s been 11 years since she was lured across the border by the prospect of work and instead trafficked into a life of hardship. In those years, she’s lived with the dread that Chinese police will arrest her and send her back to be jailed and tortured in North Korea. She’s struggled with the scorn of neighbors who see her as an outsider.
But most of all, she’s been haunted by grief and regret over the children she had to leave behind.
“When I first came here, I spent all day drinking because I worried a lot about my kids in North Ko- rea,” said the woman, who asked to be identified only as S.Y. due to safety concerns. “I was quite out of my mind.”
Experts estimate that thousands, and perhaps tens of thousands, of North Korean women have been trafficked across the border and sold as brides since a crippling famine in North Korea killed hundreds of thousands of people in the mid-1990s.
Brokers tell the women they can find jobs in China, but instead sell them to Chinese men, mostly poor farmers in three border provinces who struggle to find brides in part because Beijing’s one-child policy led to the abortion of many female fetuses.
Like S.Y., many of the women have children still in their homeland.
Their plight is largely ignored, partly because the women almost never agree to interviews. The
Associated Press spoke with seven trafficked North Korean women and three Chinese husbands.
Because the women have been trafficked to China, they are living in the country illegally and have never officially married their husbands.
Some of the North Koreans get along with their new families and are satisfied with their new life in China. Others are abused by their husbands or ignored or mocked by their new relatives and neighbors. Others have risked the perilous journey to South Korea — with some having to make the heart-wrenching choice to leave children behind again, this time in China.