The
sad truth is many refugees fleeing North Korean are sold into marriage with
provincial Chinese men. The sadder truth is this is still usually an
improvement in their lives. “Mrs. B.” would know better than anyone. After
being sold by her traffickers, she became a trafficker herself. Her life has
been grossly complicated by geopolitical factors outside her control, but she
will still have to live with the consequences of her decisions in Jero Yun’s guerrilla-style
documentary Mrs. B., a North Korean Woman
(trailer
here),
which screens during this year’s New York Asian Film Festival.
Now
fluent in Mandarin, Mrs. B. tries to pass for Sino-Korean. As traffickers go,
she is one of the better ones out there. Obviously, she has empathy for her
customers, some of whom have also been family. Using her network, Mrs. B.
smuggled out her two teen sons and her first Korean husband. Somewhat to her
own surprise, she now prefers her Chinese husband Jin, but she still misses her
sons now residing in Seoul.
Once
again, the trafficker becomes the trafficked, when Mrs. B. sets off on the
arduous refugee route through China and Southeast Asia. The plan is for the
fully-documented Jin to join her once she has established her defector status. However,
things get rather more complicated once she arrives. Much to her regret, Mrs.
B. finds she and her family are under suspicious of espionage and/or drug
trafficking, which in fact she admits to some involvement with respects to the
latter.
Mrs.
B.’s life and circumstances are acutely dramatic, but they are maybe not as
damning an indictment of South Korea’s Cold War mentality as Yun presents them
to be. For the sake of survival, Mrs. B. has definitely cut ethical corners and
embraced the grey areas of extralegal commerce—judging solely from what she is
willing to cop to on camera. Frankly, she probably should be getting close
scrutiny from the ROK intelligence service. On the other hand, her Korean first
husband is such a broken man, it is hard to believe he could be any use to the
North Korean terror apparatus.
To
a far greater extent than his pleasantly humanistic short film Hitchhiker, Yun clearly advocates a détente
in the Korean Cold War, presumably as a first step towards unification.
However, his moral equivalency posited between the rigorous security vigilance
of the South and the total state control of citizen’s lives in the North simply
does not hold water. After all, the Kim Jong-un regime recently assassinated
his half-brother Kim Jong-nam in the Malaysian airport, during broad daylight.
Nothing is beyond the pale for the DPRK, so a little paranoia on the part of
the South isn’t merely understandable. It’s probably necessary.
