Since then, he has helped more than 150 refugees get to Seoul.
An additional 350 wait in his safe houses north of the winding Tumen River, which forms the border. On one side is North Korea, a land where famine has killed an estimated 2 million people in the last decade. On the other is northeastern China, where markets groan with beef, apples, bananas, green vegetables, spices and the Korean staple, kimchi.
North Korea comes clearly into view from some vantage points on the Chinese side. Occasionally, a soldier can be seen sitting on the riverbank. Along one bend, a huge portrait of Kim Il Sung stares down from a bucolic railroad station. Bald mountains, stripped of trees for firewood, expose their bulging ribs.
The North Korean town of Namyang, seen through a pay-per-view telescope, seems eerily unpopulated; its low-slung buildings appear to be mostly empty.
Refugees say daily existence there is filled with horrors. They report that they subsisted on roots and leaves boiled into putrid soups; witnessed authorities shooting people who stole corn from the fields; saw loved ones starve to death and buried them in old rice sacks on mountain slopes packed with bodies.
In order to get out, North Koreans might use a watch, trinket or the equivalent of a few dollars to bribe the bedraggled guards sitting sentry every few hundred feet. Or they might evade the guards and then wade or swim to the sparsely guarded Chinese side. In winter, they can trot across the river's icy bends.
Once in China, poor and malnourished children have prowled the open-air market in Tumen to beg for food. Adults sought out work on farms or in factories. Some have been desperate enough to storm into diplomatic missions in a bid to gain sanctuary.
Their presence has become increasingly uncomfortable for authorities, and China has been cracking down. China considers the North Koreans economic, rather than political, refugees--people who, like millions around the world, simply seek a better life elsewhere. It has a treaty with North Korea, traditionally an ally, to return the refugees. North Korean soldiers also have crossed the porous border to round them up.
Although refugees can blend in physically because the area is heavily ethnic Korean, those who can't speak at least rudimentary Mandarin rarely venture outdoors.
