Free A Thousand Miles to Freedom by Eunsun Kim

ensure our safety at any cost. In China, we felt like we were being watched at every second. How were we supposed to leave this country without help? The solution proposed by our “savior” seemed to me the only possible option. It was either get married, or get arrested and be repatriated to North Korea, where prison or worse awaited us. Besides, this Chinese woman who’d welcomed us in seemed so nice and so helpful—and she promised us a kind and considerate man. What did we have to lose?
    *   *   *
    As soon as our guardian angel received my mom’s consent, she set to work immediately. She made many calls on her cell phone. Sometimes, she spoke in Korean. When that was the case, I tried to guess what the conversation was about. More often, she spoke in Chinese and I couldn’t understand what she was saying. She enthusiastically inquired about every potential suitor. While listening to her talk on the phone, I asked myself, Is this really how she was going to find us a man? I thought that she would ask friends, neighbors even. But she seemed instead to have some sort of a network, and a lot of experience as a matchmaker. Were there really that many Chinese men who were looking for North Korean wives?
    That morning, she scurried around frantically and just a few hours later, her phone started ringing. Then it rang again. Everything seemed to be moving faster than we had expected. But our “generous savior” never told us any details of the phone calls.
    The morning of the third day, two sinister-looking men with dark, sunburned skin appeared in the room where I was staying. One of them had a huge burn on his left temple, and his hair had stopped growing there.
    They are both so hideous , I thought in fear, when I saw them standing in front of our hostess in a corner of the kitchen.
    I tried to listen to them discreetly, but to no avail. They were speaking in Chinese, and I couldn’t understand a word they were saying.
    A moment later, the uglier of the two took out a bundle of very dirty money, and gave twenty hundred-yuan bills to our hostess.
    The woman came to fetch us and told us to pack our belongings and follow her.
    â€œThis man wants a son,” she explained to my mother.
    I did not yet understand that we had just been sold for two thousand yuan.

 
    9
    Several Months Later
    We never should have come to China. For three hours, my mother, Keumsun, and I had been walking through the darkness of the Chinese countryside looking for a bus stop. To flee … to leave this barbaric man who held us prisoner. Mom had decided to flee one night after a particularly nasty argument with her Chinese “husband.”
    â€œI want her to give me a son,” he had told the woman who sold us to him. For several months, he harassed my mom in this pursuit.
    That night, she just couldn’t take it anymore.
    â€œI’m too old to get pregnant now, let us go,” she begged him.
    â€œI paid two thousand yuan for you, reimburse me then!” he hollered back at her.
    *   *   *
    From the very first day, I hated this man. He was more than forty years old, but I, a little girl, was already better educated than he was. He didn’t even know how to write his own name. He just used an X as his signature.
    I still remember very clearly the first day of our new life with this man. We had left our “savior” and headed toward unknown territory. Because our “savior” hadn’t even bothered telling us which one of the two boorish men had bought us in the kitchen, it took a while to get used to the idea that this would be the new man in our lives, my new “father.” Our “savior” barely even said good-bye to us.
    We left her house following the two men, who walked in front of us. We didn’t exchange even one word. It was only when the three of us were sitting on a bus headed toward an unfamiliar destination,