A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea

by Masaji Ishikawa

You don’t choose to be born. You just are. And your birth is your destiny, some say. I say the hell with that. And I should know. I was born not just once but five times. And five times I learned the same lesson. Sometimes in life, you have to grab your so-called destiny by the throat and wring its neck.

After all, the little things usually tie families together with the bonds of familial love.

She was everything to me—the only kind person in my life—but I knew she had no choice.

All at once the adults on the train started crying. I wondered why. After all, they were going back to their homeland, so why were they sad? It seemed to portend bad things to come.

I had no choice but to keep walking down that gangway. Born again.

So there we were—the beneficiaries of smug humanitarianism—prisoners in paradise on earth.

But, thankfully, there are also many who don’t. And one day, they’ll be the downfall of the house of cards that is North Korea.

Though normally I didn’t believe any of that nonsense, even I was kind of taken in for a moment. I stared and stared at that card, feeling as if perhaps I actually was a person with a noble aim.

When you find yourself caught in a crazy system dreamed up by dangerous lunatics, you just do what you’re told.

After my grandmother’s death, my mother’s face quickly developed deep wrinkles. She suddenly became more weathered, worn, and frail. These weren’t the wrinkles of old age; they were wrinkles of pain.

I don’t think I ever felt as close to her as I did that night. Her desperation, her fear, her exhaustion—all of it seeped through her thin clothes and straight into my heart.

And I came to recognize that, no matter how difficult the reality, you mustn’t let yourself be beaten. You must have a strong will. You have to summon what you know is right from your innermost depths and follow it.

And all around me, I saw nothing but a kind of farcical futility. I could no longer really see the point of being alive.

Human beings are nothing if not irrational, so I did what countless people had done before me and countless others will do long after I’m dead: I prayed.

After a while, I felt that that part of me had simply withered away like a limb that atrophies from lack of use.

I looked around and wanted to weep at what I saw. The telephone on the table. A radio. Some fruit in a bowl. The dog snoozing by the window. Compared with North Korea, this was Shangri-La.