101 sending brokers to bring them over the border. However, even the latter constituted an insecure and uncertain way. Furthermore, irrespective of how difficult it was to bring their children to China, if the person that the North Korean refugee women were living with in China refused the child, they could not live together with their children. For that reason, me and my child could not stay there together any longer. … ‘Please, make my child eat here and give her some work,’ [I asked some people]. I entrusted my child to them and returned. I had brought my child over [to China] because I really wanted to live with her but [that man] kept tormenting me about me being happy with my child. … That man’s younger sister came one day and said, ‘I heard your child came but where is she?’ – ‘Your brother acted so harshly to me that we are now separated from each other.’ – ‘In that case I can take your child in. I will take her to live with me, I’ll teach her Chinese and I’ll teach her writing.’ That woman was living by herself, you know. … But from the day that this woman took my child to her house, for my daughter a life as a slave began. Everything; she wouldn’t allow her to talk to me on the phone or to meet, she made her clean that big house, made her give her massages every single day, made her get water and medicine and raise the glass to her lips, and when that woman came back from outside, she would just take her clothes off and then my child would wash them. That’s a servant, really. [I thought,]‘Alright, so be it. Up to being a servant, that’s bearable. She has promised to teach her writing.’ But one day this happens. When I phoned them that day, my daughter says, ‘Mum,… she punctured my ear with a needle, I can’t hear.’ Oh, you know. I got so angry and I said to that woman, ‘I don’t care if she doesn’t know how to write or whether she knows the language but bring my daughter back to me.’ But she didn’t. My child. She just didn’t give her to me. Didn’t give her to me. … My child had lived in that house as a servant for 5 years. … And I really wanted to see my child but she wouldn’t let me, telling my daughter, ‘Don’t follow your mum but follow our Wang family.’ And, ‘Forget your mother.’ She talked to her like this. That’s why, really, I gave birth to her but couldn’t even meet her, I brought her over but couldn’t even speak to her … (Yi Chunhui, 2009, 1-6) In the beginning, after I had lost my child in China, I walked around like a mad person mistaking every child I was passing for my child. For six months I went to every place that called itself a school to look for him. [Asking] whether they have a boy of his name. Thinking ‘If he was taken by a house without children they might send him to school’ and thinking I should first search for him at schools, so I went to all these schools. They probably have changed his name. Everyone tells me that they don’t have him. After I wandered the roads for six months I became sick. And I had to lie down. I was so upset, it killed me. Well, being in China, thinking of my daughter in &orth Korea troubled me and I seemed to hear my lost child crying somewhere, so although I was sick I couldn’t even get treated. My head was aching, it felt like exploding, my head was so painful. On top of that, I couldn’t eat and so it went, but after ten years, when it turned the eleventh year it got better slowly. Before, I had to cry whenever I saw a school on TV. Stress is something that humans cannot express. In the past I didn’t know what it meant when parents said ‘You only know when you’ve lost a child what it means to be called father or mother’. When your parents die you think something like ‘Ah, now they’re old, I think they will pass away’, but when you don’t hear word of a person who’s still alive! I couldn’t breathe. It’s beyond words. But now, also because much time has passed, the thought slowly,