Covering North Korea

At the time of Lee’s birth, Cheongjin’s bustling port made it the third largest city in North Korea. Lee’s family was educated and well-to-do—her father was a Christian pastor who helped start churches in the countryside. In the late ’30s and early ’40s, Lee said in a recent interview, the Communists started to gain power and suppress all Christian activity.

In 1946, communists shot and killed her father. In 1950, when the Korean War broke out, the family decided to flee to South Korea.

Lee Hee Sook (right) and her sister visiting North Korea in 2004.

Although the 38th parallel had been established five years earlier at the end of WWII, Lee recalled, immigration wasn’t tightly controlled and many were able to cross the border with relative ease. She and four family members fled on one of the Hungnam “miracle boats” that conducted a mass 2-week evacuation of UN forces and nearly 100,000 refugees. Thinking they would return in a few days, Lee and her family buried clay jars of preserved food in the ground around their home so they would have food to eat when they got back. Besides the clothes on their backs and a few blankets, Lee also thought to pack a handful of photos from the family album.

In South Korea, the family had to start all over again, but their education afforded them good jobs – her brother worked as an English interpreter for the US army while her husband managed South Korean laborers for the US army. Later she and her husband would both work for the U.S. Embassy in Seoul.

It was difficult to communicate with relatives in North Korea, but Lee’s family managed to smuggle a few letters back and forth to each other. The letters they received from her brothers in the north, however, sounded unnatural.

“I could tell that what they were saying was very forced, as if someone was watching over them,” said Lee.

In 2004, Lee and her sister had the chance to visit North Korea for the first time in over half acentury. The Hyundai Corporation, which arranged the tour, spent two months processing visas and paperwork for 50 tourists, most from South Korea, and declaring all known South Korean relatives of each tourist for security clearance. From Seoul, the group traveled by bus for less than an hour before arriving at the Demilitarized Zone, where guards conducted an extensive search of their luggage. Lee was disturbed to see the condition of the North Korean soldiers, who were posted every 50 feet on the North Korean side.

“They were extremely malnourished. Though they were 16 or 17 years old, they were short, like 5-feet tall, and skinny,” Lee said.

On 90-minute bus ride to Mount Geumgang near the eastern side of the DMZ, the visitors were instructed not to stand up or look outside.

“But I stood up really quickly because I had to have a peek,” said Lee. “I saw shantytowns, dirt houses and people wearing just threads. It was like a town that had been swept away by a tsunami.”

The group stayed at a tourist resort on Mount Geumgang for three days and two nights. Lee talked to employees in the hotels, restaurants and stores and found that many were Chinese. They had been brought in and taught Korean so that “real” North Koreans wouldn’t have any contact with wealthy tourists, she said.

The brief visit to North Korea didn’t change Lee’s opinion of her former homeland. “The regime is evil but I feel for the people’s suffering,” she said. Seeing the emaciated North Korean soldiers and the barren land made her decide not to go again.

“It’s too horrible, too sad,” she said. “These people have no idea what’s out there. In their minds, life is suffering. They think that is the norm.”