A Christian Underground Railroad Helped a Two-Time North Korea Escapee Flee China
The ending may seem happy, but the saga of the harrowing life she has endured is typical of the 34,000 North Koreans who’ve defected to South Korea over the decades since the Korean War.

WASHINGTON – Natasha Son says she survived 10 years of scrounging on the streets of North Korean towns and villages after both her parents starved to death. She was jailed for stealing zinc from a mine where her father had slaved away for 30 years and fled to China after her release. There, she was sold to a Chinese man and had two children before being kidnapped back to North Korea. She was imprisoned and tortured, but escaped again.
Ms. Son now lives in Seoul with the same Chinese man and their children, ages 14 and 13, plus a 5-year-old born “in freedom.” The ending may seem happy, but the saga of the harrowing life she has endured is typical of the 34,000 North Koreans who’ve defected to South Korea over the decades since the Korean War.
Natasha — she started going by the Russian first name as a child after friends said her hair style looked Russian — told her story through an interpreter at Faith and Liberty, a missionary group with headquarters on Capitol Hill near the office buildings of members of Congress.
“All I can remember about is trying to survive,” Ms. Son said while talking about growing up lonely and constantly hungry.
In a land in which worshiping any deity other than the dear leader, now Kim Jong-un, can be a capital offense and Christians pray in strictest secrecy, she remembers “seeing some book when I was young, thinking it was a bible.” She converted to Christianity when a Korean Christian pastor working in China assisted her on her final journey to South Korea, where she’s not only surviving but thriving on odd jobs involving buying, selling, and trading.
It was a long journey to this point. Tricked into thinking she could lead a great life in China, she waded across the shallow Tumen River border expecting to find work as a waitress. Instead, she found herself “treated like a commodity.”
“I was an investment,” Ms. Son said, and was soon sold to a poor Chinese farmer who’d been unable to find a wife. “I was constantly under surveillance by my husband and mother-in-law. They were afraid I would try to escape. For the first year they watched when I went to the bathroom.”
Her Chinese family, however, had nothing to fear after her first child was born. Ms. Son said she was so dedicated to her daughter and son that she had no notion of fleeing. She was growing a garden behind their small house.
She did, however, miss the land of her origins, and returned to the banks of the Tumen River for a glimpse of life on the other side even as the North Korean strongman was clamping down more severely than ever on defections. The number of defectors reached a record 2,914 in 2009, two years before Mr. Kim rose to power following the death of his father, Kim Jong-il.The numbers leveled off at more than 1,000 a year before declining to record lows during the pandemic.
While she was resting on the Tumen River bank, a North Korean guard “crossed the river to the Chinese side and kidnapped me,” she said. Hauled back to prison, “I was beaten and tortured every day.” That ended when she was sentenced to two years. The main problem then was excruciating hunger.
“They want to maximize the work,” she said. “I went to the mountains every day and cut down trees.” Always, she said she lived for the two children she had left behind. “For me the biggest hope, the reason to survive, was for my kids,” she said. “All that kept me going was to see my kids again.”
After a year, she said, “I was down to 60 pounds” — so thin she was able to squeeze through a fence and make a second escape while the guards were distracted looking for another prisoner who had gone missing earlier. “By God’s grace, I was able to cross the Tumen River safely,” she said. “God’s hand was in my life.”
Getting through China to South Korea also carried tremendous risks. More than 300,000 North Korean defectors are estimated to be living in China, merging into local society, constantly on the alert. If arrested in China, defectors may expect no mercy. They are returned to North Korea, where they face torture, imprisonment, and, for repeat defectors, death sentences.
Ms. Son, promising to bring her two children to South Korea, relied on a South Korean Christian pastor working secretly for defectors in China to arrange to get her through China to Laos, where she contacted the South Korean embassy in Vientiane and was sent to South Korea.
“I then worked hard to bring my kids out,” she said, saving money from jobs in a gas station and restaurant in Seoul and persuading South Vietnamese and Chinese officials to let them join her. “And later I brought my husband out the same way,” she said.
Asked if she would write a book about her ordeal, Ms. Son said she had “suffered so much, the whole story would take many volumes.” It was, she said, “truly torturous, heart-breaking.”
Considering the cruelty of her North Korean oppressors, she has difficulty understanding why some people in South Korea and the United States would want to reach a peace agreement with North Korea, as espoused by outgoing South Korean president, Moon Jae-in.
“They are doing the bidding of the Kim Jong-un regime,” she said. Beyond the capital of Pyongyang, “North Koreans are living miserably.”
She’s also aware first-hand of the sentiments of South Koreans who sometimes resent North Korean defectors in their midst. For her first two years there she told people she was from China.
Then, after gaining confidence, she began telling people she was from North Korea. “There are still a lot of pro-North people in South Korea who say we are ‘traitors’ for leaving North Korea,” she said, shrugging. “They can say what they want. I don’t care.”