I am Joy: I Escaped North Korea and Survived Human Trafficking
I was born and raised in a small North Korean village near the border with China. My family was very poor, and it made life extremely difficult for us. As a child I could not attend school and didn’t have any dreams for my future, because we were just trying to survive.
When I was seven, my mother quietly left us to go to China in order to make money. It took me months to realize that she was never coming back. As a teenager, my stepmother kept trying to marry me off so they would have one less mouth to feed. I didn’t want to be married off, so I finally decided to go to China to find a better life.
I felt so sorry to my father for not being a good daughter. I left a letter for him to explain why I was leaving, and how much I loved him. I told him that I hoped to see him again someday. Next to the letter I also left behind my nicest clothes, hoping he could sell them to buy food. I sewed a secret pocket into my jacket and hid a photo of my family there, and under my shirt collar I hid enough opium to kill myself in case I was caught. The morning I left I didn’t want to raise any suspicion, so I casually said goodbye to my father and walked out like it was any normal day. I couldn’t stop crying as I walked away. I knew that I may never see my family again, especially my father, who had sacrificed so much to raise me.
I will never forget how cold it was at the river. I could feel the snow through my torn shoes and the wind blew through my thin jacket. I was shivering as I stood in the knee-deep snow, waiting for the chance to make my escape. I slid down the riverbank onto the ice. I could hear the ice cracking as I crawled on my stomach across the frozen river. I expected that at any minute, North Korean guards would see me escaping and shoot me. After I finally made it to the Chinese side, it took me hours to find the broker I was supposed to meet.
By the time I found her, my toes were frozen white. The broker took me to her home to rest and recover . But I soon realized I was trapped. She told me I had to repay her and the other brokers a lot of money for helping me escape. And, because I had no money, the only option was to be sold as a bride. I was scared that if I refused, the brokers would sell me to a brothel or I would be forced to work in online sex chatrooms. I also knew that if I ran away, I’d be caught by the Chinese police and sent back to North Korea to face imprisonment and torture.
I had no choice but to be sold as a bride. For three days, a broker paraded me around villages in northern China and crowds of men would gather to bid on me.
In the final village, I sat cowering in the corner of a house. My cheeks were still red from the night I had crossed the river. There were many older Chinese men walking around me, and staring at me. I stared at the floor to avoid looking into their eyes. I did not understand what they were saying, but I could tell they were talking about me. I felt so humiliated. I was treated like an animal in a zoo. The North Korean broker finally found a man who was willing to pay enough for me. I was sold for three thousand dollars. In that moment, I was overcome with hopelessness, sorrow, and loss. I felt like I was losing everything, including my own body, to someone I had just met.
I was only 18.
The man who bought me lived with his parents. They were afraid I would run away so they were always watching me. I was not even allowed to go to the bathroom without their permission. One morning, I started feeling sick so they took me to a local hospital.After some medical tests, the family brought me back to the house and everyone was smiling and talking. I was so confused. Someone called a North Korean woman who lived in my village and asked her to interpret the news for me. I was pregnant. As everyone celebrated, I felt even more hopeless.
This pregnancy would make my escape impossible. In North Korea, I had heard that if you jump off a high place or carry heavy things while you’re pregnant, you’ll have a miscarriage. So I tried to jump off the highest tree in the backyard, and carried around heavy buckets of water. But nine months later, I gave birth to a healthy baby daughter.
For the first few days after her birth, I didn’t even want to look at her. I was sorry and ashamed for feeling that way, but I couldn’t help resenting her. But as the days passed, my daughter began to recognize my face, and she would greet me with a big smile and open arms whenever I walked into the room. Her smile and joyful laughter began to melt away my troubles and hardships.
For the next two years, my daughter became my only reason to live.
Then one day, a North Korean woman who had also been sold into the same village introduced me to a South Korean man. He told me about South Korea, and the possibility of a free life, and said he offered to help me get there. But he warned me that the journey through China and Southeast Asia would be too dangerous for a young child. I was so torn. This was my chance to finally be free from this man and from the constant fear of being caught and sent back to North Korea. But how could I leave my child, the only joy in my life?
I was afraid I would never get an opportunity like this again , so I made the extremely difficult decision to go to South Korea, and I vowed to come back to China as soon as I could to get my daughter. In the early morning of my departure, I held my daughter in my arms as she slept and cried. I thought about the moment she would wake up and cry because I was not there. It reminded me of the day that my own mother had left me. I had felt so lonely and wondered for so long why she had abandoned me. I resented her for giving birth to me if she wasn’t interested in raising a child. And now I had to do the same thing to my own daughter.
I clenched my fists as hard as I could to hold back the tears, and I told the family I was making a trip to the market. I grabbed the bag of clothes I’d hid in the bush the day before, and headed to the bus station. I cried every day for the next three months thinking about my daughter. During my journey out of China, there were many nights when I woke up thinking I’d heard my daughter’s voice calling out “mommy.” One night, I didn’t want to wake everyone up so I went behind the curtain to cry, and I found another woman who was already there crying. She had also left her child behind to escape with my group. We sat behind that curtain in the safe house, weeping and hugging each other.
I finally made it to South Korea in 2013 with the help of Liberty in North Korea. I am currently in my last year of studying social work, and I want to devote my life to helping North Korean women who have endured the same trauma that I have. Although adjusting to a new society is difficult at times, I am determined to work hard so that one day I can bring my daughter to South Korea to be with me.
I should not be here today - I am one of the lucky ones.
At this very moment, women are being treated like a commodity and are being sold to older Chinese men. A recent report estimated that 60% of the North Korean female refugees in China are trafficked into the sex trade. 50% of those trafficked are forced into prostitution, 30% are in a forced marriage, and 15% are working in the cyber sex industry.
I am here as a survivor to share the darkest moments from my past so that I can help bring an end to the exploitation of other North Korean women refugees.
For North Korean women, escaping from North Korea is not the end of their journey but the beginning of their fight for freedom.
Please extend your love and give your support so that more North Korean people will find true freedom and safety. Thank you. I am grateful and hopeful. I am Joy.
See what life is like for North Korean women who are sold in China in the short film "Sleep Well, My Baby". Based on true stories from women rescued through LiNK.
Read Joy’s full journey from escaping North Korea to being sold in China, and finally reaching freedom through LiNK’s rescue routes in our 3-part series here!
The Most Dangerous Contraband in North Korea Isn’t a Weapon. It’s a Wish.
By: Jihyun Kang
Growing up in North Korea, Jihyun took inspiration from the smuggled South Korean dramas she watched to create her own unique clothing. After reaching freedom in 2010, she has continued to pursue her interests in fashion and culture as a catalyst for change. She runs several business ventures, practices fine art under the name “Da Gyeol,” and works with the Ministry of Unification as an advisor. She’s pursuing her Masters in Entrepreneurship, Dept. of Future Science & Technology Business, at Korea University.
I grew up in North Korea, and at fifteen, I encountered a Westerner for the first time at the top of Mount Paektu. He stood over 190 centimeters tall with a thick beard, wearing ripped jeans and a frayed T-shirt. In North Korea, worn-out clothing was a symbol of deprivation. Yet my father whispered, "He is wearing that for style." With that single remark, the worldview I had been taught, began, the first time, to crack. And I thought: I want to dress like that, too.
Fashion is more than clothing. It is the moment when individual desire moves faster than collective command. People follow taste before ideology, and express themselves through what they wear long before any political declaration.
A state can enforce a dress code, but it cannot manufacture desire. That is why North Korea's fear of blue jeans was not irrational—it was the regime recognizing, however dimly, that something it could not control was already growing.
Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, argued that transformation always begins at the margins—in forms so crude and insignificant that those in power dismiss them entirely. Christensen built his theory around corporations, but the logic applies to any system that holds a monopoly over its people, including a state. North Korea's regime was so focused on maintaining ideological control at the centre that it ignored what was happening at the bottom.
That bottom was the jangmadang—the spontaneous, bottom-up market ecosystem created by ordinary people to survive after the collapse of North Korea's state-led distribution system. When that system imploded during the Arduous March—a famine in the mid-1990s that killed hundreds of thousands—people built informal markets out of sheer necessity: not revolution, not ideology, but survival. Yet by 2018, a CSIS study found 436 officially recognized markets operating across the country. What began as a desperate improvisation had quietly become the infrastructure keeping North Koreans alive.
These markets did not merely sell food. They became conduits for Chinese clothing, USB drives loaded with South Korean dramas, and glimpses of a world no one had taught them existed. When a system ignores what people actually want, the market finds the gap.
The act of choosing—what to eat, what to wear, what to watch—may seem trivial. But a person who has tasted choice cannot fully return to obedience.
The jangmadang was the first place where North Koreans learned they could survive without the state. That desire did not stay underground—it surfaced. People began wearing jeans, dyeing their hair, and pulling on T-shirts printed with foreign letters. The regime could no longer ignore it. Authorities branded jeans and Western fashion as 'anti-socialist infiltrations' and deployed street patrols. Teenagers caught in these sweeps were sent to re-education camps; in severe cases, their names and home addresses were read aloud on state broadcasts as public shaming (Radio Free Asia).
In 2024, state-run Korean Central Television went so far as to blur the jeans worn by British TV presenter Alan Titchmarsh during a broadcast. The ruling party's official newspaper, the Rodong Sinmun, warned that a country could 'become vulnerable and eventually collapse like a damp wall' if it failed to preserve its own way of life (Newsweek, May 2021).
Regulations cannot extinguish human desire; they only raise the price of the forbidden. This is the inflection point Christensen identified: by the time an incumbent recognizes the threat, it is already too late.
To date, more than 34,000 North Koreans have resettled in South Korea (South Korean Ministry of Unification, 2024). At the start of each of those journeys, there was something like my pair of jeans—not ideology, but desire; not a declaration, but a taste; not revolution, but the market.
No government in history has ever successfully suppressed the human impulse to trade, to choose, to want more. Not the Soviet Union. Not Cuba. Not Mao's China. North Korea will not be the exception.
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Jihyun is a participant of the LiNK English Language Program (LELP), which serves to not only help North Korean defectors build confidence and skills in English, but develop their capacity as advocates for this issue. To that end, we partnered with select LELP “columnists” to write and polish personal essays through multiple rounds of external feedback and revision. Our goal is to have more North Koreans share their stories directly and lead efforts to change the narrative.
We believe the North Korean people can achieve their liberty in our lifetime.
Opportunities like LELP invest in the people building that future now. Help more North Koreans find their voice, reach their goals, and lead change on this issue.
