By John Pomfret
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, February 11, 1999; Page A30

The agent who brokered the marriage of Kim Jin Hai, 23, right, to Chinese farmer Piao Erzi, 26, says the price for a "pretty North Korean miss" ranges from $800 to $1,150. (By John Pomfret – The Washington Post)

WANGQING, China – On Dec. 30, the mother of Han Jin O and Han Eu No was arrested as she tried to sneak back into North Korea with a sack of rice on her back and her children by her side.

The police let the teenage girls go but detained the mother. The next day, North Korean police came to the family's house in the northern city of Hyesan and demanded a $125 bribe – a fortune for poor North Koreans – to release the woman from one of North Korea's notorious labor camps, the girls said. With a father so malnourished that he is unable to work and with no savings, there was no way to get the mother out of jail – until a gut-wrenching solution was found.

A North Korean businessman with contacts in China promised to raise the money. His price? The girls. There are many men who need wives in China, the girls said he told their father. And they won't go far. He assured their father that he would settle the girls within miles of the North Korean border. With relatives over the border, you will have the right to go to China, the businessman told him.

"I was willing to be a bride so my mother could be free," said Han Jin O, an extremely thin 15-year-old who looks barely 12. "I wasn't going to let them sell my sister." Han Eu No is 13 but hardly looks 10.

The Han sisters are part of a river of girls and women flowing out of North Korea as that isolated Communist country stumbles further toward famine and self-destruction. As many as 2 million people are feared to have perished in North Korea since food shortages swept the country in the mid-1990s. Interviews with 20 refugees and aid officials during a recent four-day trip to the North Korean border painted a picture of a society in desperate straits. Malnutrition and hunger are the norm, the all-consuming search for the next meal the obsession.

As such, women and girls in North Korea have been turned into chattel to be traded by their countrymen in the quest for food and money.

According to officials in private aid agencies working along the North Korean border, an increasing number of young North Korean women, many in their early teens, are being smuggled out and sold to Chinese farmers and laborers from all over China who have trouble finding wives. Some are sold to karaoke halls and brothels, which line the grimy streets of the small cities in northeastern China. But most are sold to single men from villages that many young Chinese women have abandoned for the perceived brighter vistas of bigger cities.

Aid officials said they had no estimate on the number of women streaming into China but several officials, who have operated on the North Korean border for three years or more, said they believe the number of smuggled women is increasing. The reason, they said, is that North Koreans have already cannibalized a large portion of their factories and clear-cut a large percentage of their forests to barter with China for grain.

"They need other things to trade, so they are trading their girls," a South Korean aid worker said.

Chinese smugglers, engaged in moving everything from spare parts to cars and women from North Korea to China, corroborated this view. In a smugglers' den – a circle of three houses on Chinese territory just opposite the North Korean city of Musan – two Chinese smugglers acknowledged that the four women they were keeping in one of the red brick buildings were North Korean, and bound for customers in China.

"They don't have anything else," said one of the men, referring to his North Korean partners. "We've cleaned out the mine, and the chicken farm" – a reference to Musan's two biggest industries. "Now we are taking their pretty girls."

A source in Yanji, a regional center near the border, said the price for a "pretty North Korean miss" ranges from $800 to $1,150, depending on her age, looks and health. Health is very important, he added, because so many of the girls are malnourished and extremely thin.

This source arranged for one North Korean woman, Kim Jin Hai, 23, to marry a Chinese farmer of Korean extraction in a village near Helong, a township 30 miles from the North Korean border. Kim hailed from Hyesan, a North Korean city on the border with China. She was smuggled to China by a North Korean businessman after her parents decided she would be better off in China.

Kim is the daughter of well-placed local officials but even they determined that life was deteriorating at home, her husband said.

"Everything was fine at home," Kim said. "We lived better than these peasants."

"So why did you come to China?" countered her new husband, Piao Erzi, 26, a farmer who married her in January. "She refuses to admit that things are better here."

The smuggler said he paid $500 for Kim but gave her to the Piao family free because they are distant relatives. And, he added, he has significant dealings with Kim's mother, who is a part of a network of North Korean officials who regularly travel to the Yanji region for business – such as selling antiques and ginseng and smuggling cars.

The selling of wives to Chinese men in this region has prompted a battle between the Chinese government and the smugglers of human cargo. In the last two months, Chinese authorities have increased the fine for selling women to more than $1,000, according to local sources, although that hasn't dampened business much because by simply selling one bride smugglers can recoup the fine.

The smugglers, for their part, have taken to selling the women to Chinese not living in the region, such as transient laborers from as far away as Zhejiang and Shandong, more than 1,000 miles to the south.

Operating in between the smugglers and the authorities are private aid officials, often South Koreans, who – at great risk to themselves – attempt to save the women from being sold. They also try to keep them from Chinese border police, who will forcibly repatriate them to an uncertain future in North Korea. Some aid officials attempt to help the women leave China, via Mongolia, to Kazakhstan in central Asia, which has a large population of Koreans.

The private aid groups operate illegally on Chinese soil; China does not recognize North Koreans in China as refugees and has thus outlawed any attempts to help them.

Late one recent evening a private aid official was patrolling the border when the headlights of his car raked across two women being led by a man. "Korean girls," the man shouted to his driver. The pair jumped out of their jeep onto a snowy road and gave chase into the forest, shouting after the girls in Korean, "We're here to help you, we're here to help you."

Nine North Korean refugees, mostly elderly women and men, waited in the jeep – fearing a sudden sweep by Chinese border police, which would have meant deportation.

"We reacted too slowly," said the aid official as they returned to the jeep. "Those girls got away."

Private aid officials were luckier with the Han sisters. The girls were rescued after a local Chinese contact tipped them off that a North Korean businessman was trying to sell two teenagers. They would not say if they paid for the girls.

In Wangjiang, a small town 50 miles north of the Korean border, the Hans have been placed in the house of an elderly Chinese couple of Korean extraction. Private aid officials are giving the family food to feed them. Still, the fate of their mother weighed on their minds.

"Will you save her?" Han Jin O asked a visitor in a soft voice. "Will you save my mother?"