Escape From The Sun

Chapter 18: Discovery

With the occurrence of raids happening more and more often, I finally decided I had to leave Dandong. The city was far too near to the border of North Korea and China for me to be comfortable, and as much as I wanted to stay as near as possible in hopes of finding Jong Hyun, the self-preservation part of my brain kept screaming at me to leave.

Taking a large chunk of money that I had, keeping just enough to make sure I had enough food for a few days, I spent all of it to buy the furthest ticket I could buy. In two days, I found myself in the very different, bustling city of Shenyang.

Unlike Dandong, which had been busy but still small, Shenyang felt like a city to the level I've never known before. 

I arrived at the main station in the evening, and when I stepped out and set eyes on the bright flashing eyes, hearing the traffic on the roads for the first time, it almost blinded and overwhelmed me with the overload on my senses. North Korea's streets had always been almost empty, and seeing a car was akin to see a unicorn each time. While I knew what a car was, and had been in one due to being who I am, it didn't mean I've ever seen so many of them at the same time. 

Buildings were built to heights that seemed dizzying to me but were likely normal to any other person who was used to living in cities. Could I even cope with being in this place?

My chest pounded with a mix of fear, excitement, and trepidation of uncertainty. Where do I even step out in this madness? So frozen with the number of lights, sound, and people, I didn't dare step out to start finding my way around until midnight had long taken over the city and many of the shops had closed. With the lights dimmed and fewer people and vehicles on the road, I looked almost like a mouse coming out in the dead of the night, a passel of soft, packaged bread in my hands as I tried to find out what do I do next.

The roads in North Korea had been simple, unassuming, not difficult to figure out where to go next. It helped that we had small buildings, with six or seven floors as high as I was familiar with. Here, your vision was blocked in every which way you looked at, and it was quite a terrifying feeling, claustrophobic even. What I did know, however, was that I needed to find a job or some way to make some money. It was the one thing I was beginning to learn in this curious new world of freedom and panic - money was necessary for anything I wanted to do. 

Thinking to leverage on my previous experiences, short as they had been, I started looking for something to do with waitressing. Luckily, with how busy Shenyang was, they were always looking for help, especially during the peak season for tourists. 

But it seems my luck would only get better.

The restaurant I worked in was popular both among tourists and locals for their food, and it was on one of those days, that I met Kim Eun-Seung. A volunteer worker who helped refugees of North Korea flee had flagged me down after he finished his meal, and for a brief moment, I panicked, thinking he was someone who had noticed my accent when I served him. I hadn't had the chance to get a proper ID yet! Despite wanting to hire the investigator to find Jong Hyun, after the last raid that had happened, I decided getting an ID was far more important at the moment. After all, what good would I be if I was deported back to North Korea? No amount of money or investigators would be able to help me then.

I didn't want to go speak with him, but my boss insisted. He was a cheap man (why else would he hire an ID-less individual? He knew he didn't have to follow minimum wage law to pay us, since we couldn't exactly go and complain to the labor tribunal), and did not want to create trouble for his business. To him, we were sacrificial lambs, and it was a hundred percent 'what the customer wants, they get' in his workplace.

I fumbled through my words, completely forgetting how smoothly I had practiced my speech during my stint as an online cam girl, but it was clear Kim was someone who had much experience in doing such things. I should've realized it when I first met him, yet his questions of 'where did you come from?' and 'do you have any friends?' only served to cause more panic than it made me alert. Scared and terrified of being found out, I answered as succinctly, shortly, and quickly as I can, and breathed a sigh of relief when he finally smiled and left.

But my relief was short-lived.

He came back the next day, and I could almost feel my breath catch in my throat. What did he want? Over the last month of me working here, I've met a few other defectors in Shenyang who have warned me of this Bureau 121 that operated in Shenyang. Apparently made up of a secret network of North Korean hackers, the defectors who remained in Shenyang took a wide route around the restaurant, hotels, and businesses owned and operated by our government in the city of China. The whole city in general, had a very North Korean flavor, that I was already starting to make my plans to get away from the city towards Hebei, and hopefully Mongolia. Being too near to the border was putting me on edge. 

Watching Kim walk in again made me solidify my decision to leave within the week, but it was who walked in after him that made me freeze.

Jong Hyun.