Crossing the Desert of Illegality

Memoir by Jiwon Yoon

From coal mines in North Korea to hiding in China, a powerful memoir of hunger, survival, and the invisible lives of illegal migrants seeking hope.

By

Dr. Jiwon Yoon

— Understanding Korea, One Story at a Time

There are deserts you can see—seas of sand stretching to the horizon under a merciless sun. And then there are the deserts you carry inside you: a landscape of fear you enter the moment you cross a line on a map and your very existence becomes a crime. For years, I lived in such a desert. It was a wasteland made of held breath, of words swallowed like stones—a place of blinding sun with no shadows to hide in, where you must learn to become a shadow yourself.

An Oasis of Our Own Making

I was born in Aoji, North Korea. To most South Koreans, the name means one thing: punishment—a place where people are sent to disappear into the oblivion of a coal mine. But for me, it was simply home. It was the scent of burning coal mixed with kimchi, the warmth of neighbors who shared what they had whenever there was a need, and the sight of my father’s hands. This community was the water in our small world, a shared well of humanity that kept the larger desert at bay.

He worked at the Sunbong Coal Mine. Each evening, he would return from the tunnels, his face tired, but his eyes always held a quiet kindness. His hands were a map of his love, the lines etched permanently with black coal dust that no amount of soap could ever wash away. He was a cog in the wheel of a relentless state industry, but to me, he was a gentle giant.

He was also a farmer born of necessity. Around our home were unused, barren patches of mountain land. He would not let our lives become a barren land. Single-handedly, my father cleared that earth, turning it into a field where he first planted corn, potatoes, and soybeans—and later, even rice. It became a family affair. All four of us siblings worked alongside him, planting seeds, pulling weeds, and gathering the harvest.

To farm, you must first plow the land, which was not a simple task. Oxen were managed by the state and unavailable to individuals. So, my father built his own solution. When I was about six years old, he spent several evenings after work hammering and carving. One day, he announced, “Children, let’s go plow.”

“Plow?” I asked. “How are we going to plow?”

“Look there,” he said, pointing to his creation. It was a makeshift, man-powered plow—a gadeagi, as he called it. It looked like a smaller version of a real plow but with three long ropes attached.

“Father, how in the world are we supposed to pull that?” I protested. My sister added, “It’s shameful! Are we cows?”

My father looked at us for a long moment. “Then who will plow the fields?” he asked, his voice patient but firm. “We need to cultivate the land to plant the crops so that you children don’t go hungry. Plowing by hand is much harder, so I made this. No more backtalk—just follow me.”

He slung the makeshift plow over his shoulder and led the way. My two older sisters and I took the ropes. My father steered the blade deep into the earth and shouted a command as if to an ox: “Giddy-up!”

At his command, I lurched forward. We moved in unison, panting like animals. A hot shame washed over me. I was mortified, desperate to hide. What if someone sees us? I thought, my face burning. What if my friends see? They’ll call me a cow at school. I suddenly felt a wave of empathy for the cows. How could they do this work without protest?

Just then, I heard the distant sound of a train. The tracks ran alongside our field. It was an unwelcome sight. On instinct, I dropped my rope and waved at the passing train, pretending to be a carefree child just playing in the fields—a girl who had never been harnessed to a plow. After the train disappeared, I picked up my rope and we began again. Thanks to my father’s ingenuity, this became our yearly spring ritual: we became the oxen that tilled our fields.

In the autumn, our rooms would overflow with the corn we had grown, and the yard would be filled with bundles of soybeans. Every night, we had a quota of corn kernels to shell. At first, it was a game, but soon our hands would ache and our skin would peel from the repetitive labor. Summers were for a different kind of harvest. We would go out with baskets and knives to forage in the mountains and fields for wild greens and roots—water dropwort, fernbrake, and deodeok, a fragrant mountain root. On the way home from school, I’d pick the tips of mugwort growing by the road, stuffing them into my pockets. My mother would dry them and later use them to make rice cakes.

The Arduous March - The Desert of Hunger

Then came the famine.

The oasis of our community began to dry up as hunger sharpened the edges of our humanity. The official rations had long since stopped. We were surviving on what little we could grow, but a rumor spread that the Party was going to confiscate all privately cultivated land. Afraid of having our precious rice taken away, we faced an impossible choice. We were just ten days away from a proper harvest, the grains almost perfectly ripe. But we couldn’t risk waiting. We harvested the rice while it was still green and unripe. In those hungry, desperate times, I remember that green rice tasting unbelievably delicious.

Soon, even that was gone. The pots were empty. The gnawing hunger in our bellies became a constant, dizzying ache. It was no longer just a metaphorical desert—it was physical. Our stomachs felt like cracked earth. Our voices turned brittle, our bodies dried out from within. I remember my mother disappearing for a day. She said nothing—just wrapped her thin coat tightly around herself and walked out the door, heading toward the nearest major town, miles away. She was gone for the entire day. When she finally returned in the evening, she was a ghost. Her face was ashen, and she leaned against the doorframe to keep from collapsing, her breath coming in shallow gasps. In her hands, she clutched a small sack—just two kilograms of corn. It was a treasure.

I soon learned the price of that treasure. She had walked all those miles to the clinic to sell 400 grams of her own blood. This was not a one-time sacrifice. She did it again and again, more times than I could count, exchanging a piece of herself for a pouch of grain that would barely keep her family of six alive for a few more days. When she saw our heartbroken faces, she would try to comfort us with a devastating kind of optimism. “Isn’t it a relief that I have type O blood?” she would say with a faint smile. “It’s the type that’s needed the most.”

She had turned her own body into currency, her blood into food. It was the most brutal— and the most sacred—transaction I have ever known.

When even my mother’s blood was not enough, we started to eat things that were not food. I remember a rice cake my mother made from animal feed traded from China—a gritty mix of dust, pebbles, and husks. “Mom,” I whispered, “this tastes like dirt.” She looked at me, a painful smile on her lips. “Then we eat dirt today,” she said. This was the first taste of the desert, the feeling that the earth itself had turned against us, offering grit instead of grain.

A Handful of Soil - Crossing Into the Desert

We decided to leave, not in pursuit of freedom—I didn’t know I wasn’t free—but to escape starvation. As my father prepared to cross the Tumen River, the border that separates North Korea from China, my mind, still a tapestry woven with state propaganda, recoiled. “Father,” I cried out, “how can we leave the General behind?” My older sister was even more resolute. “Father, let’s protect socialism, even if we starve to death.”

My father looked at us, his face a mask of frustration and love. “It’s no use, no matter what I say to you here,” he said. “Then I will show you. I’m going first, so follow me.” Before his words had fully settled, he stepped onto the vast, frozen river—a white desert that promised a new world on the other side—and walked into the darkness until he disappeared from sight.

My mother led us down to the river’s edge. “Let’s bow to our homeland one last time before we go,” she whispered. I followed her, bowing deeply to the frozen earth. As I rose, I secretly grabbed a handful of soil—its cold grit a final, desperate anchor to the only world I had ever known. I will come back, I promised myself. I will definitely come back.

We finally stepped onto the ice and started our journey. We were about halfway across when we saw a figure walking toward us. It was my father, coming back. He must have grown worried when he couldn’t see us. There, in the middle of the frozen Tumen River, our family of six was reunited. That was the moment we stepped into the desert.

A Ghost in a Borrowed Room - The Desert of Illegality

China was not the oasis I had imagined. It was there I learned a new name for myself: illegal migrant. The word itself felt like a brand, searing away my identity as a daughter, a sister, a girl from Aoji, and leaving only a classification of wrongness. We were people without rights, without protection, without a voice. We had no papers to prove we existed, no country that would claim us, no place we could truly call home. We had crossed a river of ice only to find ourselves in a desert of scorching fear.

If caught, we would be repatriated to a fate of imprisonment, torture, or public execution. That fear became the air we breathed. We hid—behind drawn curtains, in borrowed apartments, our lives a series of whispers and furtive movements. We couldn’t trust anyone—not the neighbors, not the police, sometimes not even other North Koreans who might trade our location for their own safety. We had to live in a state of constant, quiet vigilance. In the desert, every moving shadow could be a predator; here, every stranger, every uniform, held the same threat.

I could not go to school. Instead, I worked. I found jobs in restaurants and, for a time, as live-in help at the home of a South Korean pastor. I was only a teenager, and I didn’t have the practiced efficiency of an experienced housekeeper, and I was often scolded. I remember one Christmas in that house. The pastor, his family, and their church members had gathered to exchange presents, but as I watched, I realized there wasn’t one for me. In that moment, I felt that even on Christmas, I was just the housemaid—someone excluded from the joy of celebrating Jesus’s birthday. Looking back, I understand that a gift exchange is reciprocal, and I had nothing to offer. But as a young girl, all I felt was a profound sorrow—the sorrow of being a tool and not a person, a pair of hands and not a heart worthy of a small, wrapped gift.

Those days were filled with moments like that—a deep sense of being out of place. I felt myself shrinking, trying to take up less space, to become so small I would finally be invisible. In the crushing silence of these days, a strange and painful nostalgia began to grow. I found myself missing North Korea. Not the propaganda or the hunger, but the solidness of my own life there. I even missed the shame of being harnessed to my father’s makeshift plow. I remembered the feel of the rope on my shoulders, the sight of the train passing by, my desperate wave to a world that could not see my humiliation. At the time, I had felt like an animal, mortified. But in China, I realized that even as an ox, I had belonged to someone. I belonged to my family, to that patch of earth my father had claimed. We were suffering together, under our own sky. In this Chinese desert, I was suffering alone—a ghost with no name, belonging to no one and nowhere. The desert, I was learning, was not just an absence of food or water, but an absence of belonging. The shame of being a beast of burden felt more real, more human, than the emptiness of being invisible.

That is the nature of this desert. There are no maps. There are no signposts. There is only the horizon of today, and the constant, burning fear of what lies behind you and what might lie ahead. You exist in a state of permanent transit, a ghost haunting the edges of other people’s lives. You forget what it feels like to stand on solid ground, to speak your own name without flinching. You learn to live with the taste of sand in your mouth, and you pray—not for an oasis, but just for the strength to take one more step.

About Jiwon

Dr. Jiwon Yoon is a Korean American writer, educator, and researcher who has spent over two decades working with North Korean defectors in both academic and creative settings. She is currently collaborating with Kumhee, whom she met in 2002 as a volunteer English tutor in South Korea, to co-develop a memoir chronicling Kumhee’s journey through North Korea, China, South Korea, and now Australia. This essay is part of that larger project and reflects Jiwon’s commitment to bringing Kumhee’s voice to a wider audience through literary nonfiction.

Jiwon also publishes a weekly Substack newsletter, Growing Up in Korea (yoonjiwon.substack.com), where she explores Korean childhood, education, and civic life. She is currently running a special series on Korea’s democratic spirit—not just documenting protest or impeachment, but tracing how such collective action became possible in the first place. Her goal is to offer hope, insight, and even a kind of civic blueprint to readers in countries where democracy is struggling to function.

You can find more of her work and connect across platforms at jiwon-yoon.com/links.