87 While brokers in North Korea helped North Korean refugee women across the border, brokers in China sold them to either Chinese or ethnic Korean men or to brothels. Brokers also assumed a role in arranging contacts with family members remaining in North Korea and in bringing them over to China. The next day, it was already 9 o’clock in the morning but they [i.e. the broker and my son] didn’t come, and it turned evening but they didn’t arrive, from that moment on I lost my mind. Whenever I saw someone walking outside hand in hand with a child… From that moment on I completely lost my mind. One month passed but they didn’t come and there was no word of them. I said, ‘Let’s report this somewhere’, but as we are &orth Korean defectors who have come from &orth Korea, where are you going to report this? You can’t report it. But I was sure that they had come over to China, that’s why I stayed in that restaurant for 3 months. Stayed with my cousin, because we might get contacted by chance. But no word of them, and this guy [i.e. the broker] didn’t have a mobile phone, so there was no way of finding [my son]. I just lost him. After we had spoken on the 29th of April 2000 and on the 3rd of May on the phone, there was still no word of him. Although they had made it to China, for sure. That is, when I talked to my child back then, when he asked me, [I should have said,] ‘I’m in Tumen right now.’ If we had told him this at least, if I had only told him that I’m in Tumen and had given him the phone number of the restaurant, but the [broker]told me not to say this and I was too inflexible, [I thought],’Yeah, my child is here and he will bring him to me’. That he would take my child somewhere else, that is something I could never have imagined, not even in my worst dreams. In this process, at that time, I lost my child. And until now there has been no news of him. (Hyeon Changhui, 2009, 2-6) After Hyeon Changhui (2009, 2-6) fled North Korea to China in 1999, she lived together with her husband and her eldest son who had arrived in China shortly afterwards and worked in a restaurant. Through her cousin she heard about a Chinese man who went in and out of North Korea selling goods and who could bring children over from there; on the 29th of April 2000, she asked him to bring her youngest son over the border. On the 3rd of May, she received word from that Chinese man that he had brought her son over to China, and spoke with her son briefly on the phone. After this, they lost contact. The Chinese man who had promised to bring this interviewee her son just took the money she had sent him and disappeared together with her child. As North Korean refugee women cannot freely cross the border, they rely on help from third persons to contact members of family and close friends left behind in North Korea, as well as for transporting goods back and forth. In the above case, a Chinese man who went in and out of North Korea legally to do business assumed the role of a so-called broker. The problem is that the contractual relationship between North