The woman tries to pass the younger children off as her own. She has enrolled them in school, and they have rapidly picked up Chinese. Nevertheless, she's not sure how long she can continue the ruse because Chinese couples are supposed to have only one child.
At another apartment lives an 11-year-old girl who hasn't been outside the building in three years. Chun fears that nosy neighbors would realize she's not in school and doesn't speak Chinese. She came across the river with her mother. An elder sister disappeared in the train station when they arrived.
"I'm going to get you to South Korea," Chun tells the girl as she draws in a notepad he's given her. "I know you'll be a good student." He asks the girl's mother to hold out for a little while longer.
After making his rounds, Chun hastily settles on a list of five, and makes calls on his cell phone to the safe houses where they are staying. At the last minute, he decides to add a young couple, bringing the total to seven.
The Seven Chosen
Late on a Monday afternoon, the group assembles in the apartment of a missionary-businessman in Yanji.
There is Chun's trophy, the 32-year-old woman who claims to have headed a small unit in a North Korean nuclear missile plant. Tiny, with glasses and eyebrows that look as though they were tattooed on, she was an elite cadre in the North Korean Communist party, went to college, learned how to use guns and grenades, and every year reported for reserve duty. Or so she says.
She grew disillusioned when her sister couldn't get treatment for tuberculosis and malnutrition. She crossed the river to China, where a church helped her get medicine for her sister. But North Korean authorities caught her bringing it back. Police questions about church and karaoke -- "enjoying life," as she puts it -- made her start thinking about how North Korea controls its people.
"You can't laugh when you want to laugh or cry when you want to cry," she says, dabbing at tears. "I could never think of the meaning of life, or religion, because I always had to think of the party."
She picks at a callus on her hand, developed in 2 1/2 years of farm labor in China. Her saving grace is that she's learned to speak Chinese reasonably well, which will help on this journey.
Also chosen is a small 35-year-old man with dark curly hair, who is clad in a black jacket. He left North Korea three years ago after his older brother and nephew died of hunger. He worked on a Chinese farm, was captured and spent 14 months in a North Korean labor camp, escaped to China again and has lived for a year in a safe house.
