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police station is going to come for a raid, you are contacted in advance from
somewhere. So you hide in someone else’s house. When they come to an empty house
and see nobody’s there, they leave again. But, apparently, once they’ve received a
report they cannot disregard it but must go to arrest people. Because otherwise they
themselves get into trouble. ... When there’s talk about a raid coming up, they hide
you in this house, and you have children and carry on with your life, but only my
oldest daughter hasn’t been caught yet. That is, recently, the people in this
neighbourhood, people from these houses that brought in &orth Korean women to
live with them, have wildly filed complaints protesting that it’s all the same &orth
Koreans, but why are they not arrested and taken away from others’ houses but only
from theirs. (Mun Gyeongsun 2009, 1-1)
In a month [you change] houses around 5 times, around once every week, you live in
this house and then again in another house. Another house. It had become a situation
in which you cannot live if you don’t move and live like this. … When you make the
mistake of leaving the house and going outside at the wrong time, many were arrested.
People in Cheongdo or other places seem not to have experienced this. But for us,
when we were living in Jangchun, to live in hiding really was too difficult. (Hwang
Sunjeong 2009, 1-1)
In just one night, at that time there were around 100 &orth Korean women who were
arrested, I believe. That is, they said they arrested everyone. In our village when I
heard the news later I was told that they were all sent back, in our village it was me
and another woman who were arrested, but all [the others] were sent back. You know,
that woman’s child and my child were both [three] months old. But let’s say, for
example, if I arrived in this house, the police came and said that &orth Korean
women have to pay a fine, and we paid the fine, because of the fine they said they let
you get away with it. Other &orth Korean women who weren’t well off and couldn’t
pay the fine were not let off, those who paid were let off, that’s how they did it. … All
the time [you hear]news about &orth Korean women being arrested, how they
arrested them in one village, and when you wake up the next day [you hear] how
things went in yet another village, because you hear such stories you are always
afraid. You can’t stay at home. That’s why from then on I followed my husband
around. (Gil Gyeonghui 2009, 1-7)
Since Hwang Sunjeong (2009, 1-1) lived together with her family, she was not sold off
to a farm village like other North Korean refugee women who had come to China alone.
In return, she had to move house with her family once every week. On the other hand,
North Korean refugee women living in farm villages repeatedly went into hiding in
other places whenever there was news of crackdowns, and returned home afterwards.
But once these means of repeated escapes were also reported to the police, they
could not remain in these places any longer.
Women who had relatives in China were forced to move from one relative’s home to
another, in times of severe crackdowns sometimes hiding for several months and
restarting work afterwards; this became their repetitive everyday life. But, when