86 way out of Hanawon are, again, brokers. Even though the existence of brokers gives rise to various social problems, governmental organizations regard them as a ‘necessary evil’, and North Korean refugee women, too, say that the existence of brokers is something of great necessity to them. It seems that, prior to 2000, brokers operating in North Korea, China, third countries, and in South Korea did not form a unitary organization nor a connected chain. Before flights from North Korea appeared en masse, the majority of North Korean refugee women crossed the border without the help of ‘brokers’, finding routes and walking through or across the Tumen River by themselves. However, many more North Korean women began to cross the state borders once they listened to women who went in and out of China to trade, as well as to people in their neighbourhoods who they were familiar with; it is these North Korean refugee women among whom cases of being sold off to Chinese brokers started to emerge. There is a lawn in front of the train station. I was on this lawn in front of the train station, and on the other side there were all these middle-aged women sitting together and talking. Back then, at that time, I wasn’t good at all at going somewhere and socializing with people who I was seeing for the first time. So I was sitting there quietly when some woman came over to me and said, ‘You’re not from here.’ ‘Ah, yes, I’m not from here’, I told her, and that I just found my way here. To this she replies,‘There is a place to earn money, don’t you want to go? When there’s a place to work and get money, you should go’, that’s what she said. ‘When you go to China and work, they give you 300,000Won or 500,000Won a month.’ (Son Yeongju, 2009, 3-4) There are people who you pay money to and who then get you over there. So we gave them money and bought these people. Because we really had to come to China. In China, there are soldiers guarding the Tumen River, you know. All these soldiers also need to be bribed. Yeah, by giving the soldiers money, as it were. (Yun Huijeong, 2009, 2-5) There was this kid who went in and out of our house when he learnt the guitar and other things from my uncles, there was this young man who came to our house frequently. His in-laws had escaped to China. They fled to China, went over there, so he went over to China to find them, couldn’t find them, went again, didn’t find them, and while doing this, while he moved back and forth a couple of times he got to know these things. That when you take single women there one by one, it’s like, ‘You will get this much in Chinese money’, because he got to know this kind of thing, he got involved in this work. But us, we didn’t know that. So just like that he talked my daughter into this. (Mun Gyeongsun, 2009, 2-7)