78 1) Living without a chance to obtain identity documents Since North Korean refugee women could not obtain official refugee status in China and were considered illegal residents, they themselves describe their lives as ‘a life worse than that of a stray dog’. What is the life without citizenship like that North Korean refugee women speak of? When I lived in &orth Korea we were busy scraping a living but there wasn’t anything like this. ‘This is my country, my nationality’, these kinds of things existed, but while I was living in China, although you somehow eke out an existence, but because you live without citizenship, again this wasn’t like a life for human beings. Even when you suffer [an injustice], there is nowhere to go to do something legally about it. When I lived like that for 1 year, 2 years, living here also was worse than dying. (Kim Jinsun, 2009,1-4) A life without citizenship means that people cannot appeal to the law even if they are subjected to injustice, and that they have to change their workplace just because the police calls in to ask whether someone is a North Korean; it is a life that is unworthy of being ‘lived by a human being’. As the account ‘When I lived in North Korea we were busy scraping a living but there wasn’t anything like this’ exemplifies, it is a vulnerable situation even when compared to women’s status in North Korea. To live without a citizenship means to be outside all political and civil rights and to be unable to get even the most minimal amount of legal rights protection. In modern nation states, the freedom of movement between areas and states, as well as the rights granted to ‘citizens as members of community’ and ‘national citizens’ generally derive from political and civil rights. In nation states, it is identity documents that signify being a ‘national citizen’. How important identity documents are, that’s something we really learnt on Chinese soil in very harsh ways. We do not speak the same language. Because we don’t have identity documents we never know whether the security police are going to approach us one day and arrest us. To leave the house was the most scary thing, and fellow Chosun-jok were the most frightening. Fellow Chosun-jok would again and again report &orth Koreans to the police, and while these people get money, we get arrested. That’s why the most frightening were the Chosun-jok. (Hwang Sunjeong 2009, 1-1) When we first agreed, when you work the farm for 1 year, they make several 100,000Won. And putting you on the family registry normally costs around 40,000 Won, you can do it with that amount. It’s around that level, but you get a fake family registration for around 20,000Won. If I do everything as told, they promised to get