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How did you find this story and these subjects?
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We were trying to figure out how to cover North Korea in 2005, and I spent 10 days there with a photographer during the six-party talks. The photographer wasn’t allowed to photograph almost anything. People would deliberately block his view. So we went back and talked to the editor, and we said, “The defectors will be the ones we can talk with. They will be the voice of the people we can’t get to.”
It took us another year. We met defectors in the U.S. We went to Seoul and met those helping to get people out. A pastor knew my wife from a church and wanted to help us. We agreed that we had to come up with ground rules—we wouldn’t use names or show faces that would endanger people or their families.
We got the call a few days later. We went to this little town on the Chinese border. It was freezing cold. We used false IDs. We had cell phones, we were changing the numbers all the time, to make it harder to trace. I met the two women, White and Red, the day after they had escaped the sex trade. Their employer was looking for them in this border town. We met them while they were waiting to leave.
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Do you speak Chinese? Did you have a translator?
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My wife [So-Young Lee] was my translator. These women were scared. They’d been imprisoned in this one room in front of a computer. I don’t know if they would have trusted an American journalist alone. But because my wife’s parents had escaped North Korea in the 1950s, and my wife was a woman, they opened up to her. That’s humbling, because we all think we can do things ourselves. In this case, I could not have done this story without my wife.
We brought them fruit, little things like that. My wife was asking them about their families. You can’t machine gun questions in that situation. It takes a while, and so I tried to focus on how their body language was and how they looked out the window. What few clothes they had. Details like those are at least as articulate as the answers you get from scared people.
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How much time were you able to spend with Red, White, and Black?
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That meeting started the trip, and we shared the same train. The photographer was coming, but we all traveled separately. We used internet chat rooms. [The Chinese] probably could have found us—they probably just decide when you’re stepping over a line of what’s allowable. But you never know what it is.
My wife and I were pretending to be honeymooners on tourist visas. The defectors were pretending to be drunk, to be asleep for a trip that lasted forty hours. At the end of the train ride, in Yunan province, we hooked up with them again.
Then they were going to be picked up by someone else on this escape route. And their contact—who was an ex-drug smuggler, a kind of mercenary working freelance—didn’t show up. They had felt emboldened because we were with them. But then they were stuck in this train station, where there were all these military people. I just had a sense they were going to get caught. That’s when I said, “I’ll put you in my hotel room.”
I know there are questions about whether or not you should step in and help in a story. It’s a tough thing, but by that time, I believed we were all part of the story. And as long as you say that’s what happened, I think it’s fair game. They weren’t strangers by this point.
So then they did make contact. We thought we were so smart, we could come along. But because the route was dangerous, they asked us not to go along to Laos. They thought we would draw too much attention to them.
So we waited on the other side of the Mekong. They got delayed, and then they were stuck in a Thai prison for three months. My wife actually snuck her way in there to talk to North Koreans and to get an idea of how crowded it was.
And then we flew to Seoul, where there are 15,000 defectors, mostly living off the grid. I tried to talk to people who had been living there—some for months, some for years—to get an idea of what life would be like for the new arrivals.
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But you talk to them later in South Korea. It seems important to your story. You went back?
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Eight months later my editor sent me back to find out what was happening with them. I had come up with a stopgap way to finish the article by talking with former defectors in Seoul, but this was really the rest of the story…
I’d been in touch on the phone, and the photographer had his parallel world of contact. We played by the rules. We showed all the pictures to the defectors, and they canceled a few that showed their faces. They were worried about their families.
It was one of those stories that almost wrote itself. There was this drumbeat. It had all those classic narrative devices. It had a journey. It had these people whose lives were different at the end.
All of us who go into the field—we don’t know who will be the main characters. Who will change in that short time we’re with them? Who is going to trust you enough? And maybe they only trust you at the end—so how do you decide who to follow?
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Many journalists feel that the most powerful narratives come from building a story around the experiences of a single character. You have three defectors in your story. Could you talk a little about the decision to include all three?
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My experience from reading stories about one character is that they’re compelling, but sometimes they feel depopulated if the story is dealing with bigger issues. Of course it’s the skill of the writer to bring in the bigger issues. But if you’re doing something in Indonesia, and you find one person, the reader can feel like they didn’t get a sense of the larger experience.
I didn’t want just one story. Men and women were different. They’d had different experiences. Including three people meant I couldn’t develop each one as much as I like. That’s a personal choice. We wrestle with it. Do you let situations and places tell your story as a narrative rather than putting that burden on one person? Sometimes a place or a town can be that character instead. It’s tough deciding how to do it.
The journey—the escape—was my character, and these were people who could help tell that story.
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Using the first person can be tricky. Did it feel risky to you? |
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First person can be self-indulgent, but it depends how it’s used. With this piece, I originally made my wife and I more of the story. But my editors thought that it took a little too much of the attention away from the main characters. They thought I was blurring the focus, and the first person can definitely do that.
Where it does work is the honesty and authenticity and placing the storyteller there and being transparent about it. You can be more direct about what kind of conditions the writer has to work in. It also works with conversation. You can engage people in a dialog as opposed to just dropping a sound bite into a story.
I like having it in there to say that there’s a human being reporting a story. And I also like when the writer reveals him or herself a little bit, so you know whose hands you’re in.
The people we were covering were hiding. They were afraid. They had to fake their IDs. I had to do that, too. I couldn’t come close to what they were feeling. But I wanted to let that similarity inform my writing. It’s so rare that you’re actually crossing into the same emotions your subjects are going through. I could really empathize.
I cut my teeth on new journalism. And I love that it broke the false neutrality of reporting. Where it’s most effective is when you say, “Come along with me, and see through my eyes.” For good eyewitness journalism, you have to imply that first person, whether you’re using the pronoun, or just in the way that you write, the tactile nature of your sentences.
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Were you worried about writing authoritatively about underground worlds in another culture, where it can be very hard to interpret what’s happening and the motivations of all the actors?
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I was lucky. I did a story on the DMZ and spent time looking at the border from that area. I spent 10 days in Pyongyang. I went back to Seoul a lot with my wife. I had a lot of depth in that area.
You’ve just got to hope you’ve done enough reading, and that your antennae are good. And I think these defectors told their story so strongly, I got a sense that they were speaking from a place that was true. All reporters have got to have a bullshit detector.
There are two NGOs that set about to interview all the defectors, and they have done almost all of them now. I went to meet with them for that very reason—to see if these stories sound generic or off the wall. They said the accounts were true to the experiences of those coming from the little towns. Their hunger stories sounded legit. Other small details fit.
I didn’t want to be gullible. If I had met them in Seoul, I would have done more research and taken a step or two back, but having seen them the day after they escaped, their stories rang true. They weren’t presenting a polished story yet. But it is a good idea to wonder.
You don’t want to be partisan. But every time you do a story on human rights or indigenous people, there is a response to weigh the power structure involved. In this case, what the Chinese said did not equal what these people said. I felt that these people were getting a raw deal, and I wanted the reader to know.
We put the stories of these people in play. We treated them with dignity. They’re still having a rough time. But they can speak out. I could see it, the moment I saw them in Seoul. They stood up straight. They were happy. I want stories like this to shift the earth.
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