Josh Chin (’07) writes in the San Francisco Chronicle about his experience inside a safe house for North Korean refugees in northeast China and why it took him a year to put it all down on paper:

A year later the smell of Korean pickled cabbage still works in my head like a Proustian nightmare. Kimchi for me is the food of paranoia, of paralyzing ambivalence and, ultimately, of failure.

In January 2006, I shared several meals with a dozen North Korean orphans in a safe house in China, half a day’s train ride from the North Korean border. Run by a missionary couple, the house was part of a loose network — made up almost entirely of Christian aid workers — that shelters some of the 100,000 or so North Koreans who’ve fled their criminally mismanaged country in search of food and economic opportunity. Many of these migrants, living in China illegally, are victims of abuse and exploitation. The missionaries are virtually their only protectors.

To supporters in the United States, the network is known as the “Underground Railroad,” a reference to its incredible secrecy and its agents’ occasional successes in smuggling North Koreans through China to freedom in South Korea. Journalists craved access to this network, and the access I had was about as good as it gets: deep and exclusive. For a reporter taking his first stab at the North Korean refugee story, this was an unimaginable coup.

Read the full piece here.