Border run

In April 2009, Joseph Hong received a distressing phone call from his father. Chinese officials had arrested Hong’s mother, Rachel Han, for what they viewed as a serious crime: She had organized a trip to lead 13 North Korean defectors across China to the border with Mongolia.

Hong, who was 23 years old and working in northern China at the time, felt shocked. He had just spent the Chinese New Year with his mother and the rest of his family. Although she had been helping North Korean defectors for the past year, it never crossed his mind that her work could land her in jail. After all, she was doing it for free, and for humanitarian reasons.

Chinese officials had a different view. They said Han could get 10 years to life in prison for human smuggling—unless Hong or his father was willing to offer money to reduce the sentence.

Rachel Han’s charge of “smuggling” was the result of her role in China’s underground railroad, a network of Christians who, on humanitarian grounds, help North Korean defectors make their way to South Korea. (WORLD has given Han and her son Hong pseudonyms to avoid jeopardizing their future work in China.) A North Korean who steps onto South Korean soil automatically becomes a South Korean citizen—but getting there is the difficult part. The Demilitarized Zone separating the North and the South is nearly impassable, lined with soldiers and land mines, so defectors instead take their chances heading north across the Yalu River into China. North Korean soldiers hidden in barracks have orders to shoot anyone swimming the river.

Once defectors arrive in China, they still aren’t safe. The Chinese government is Pyongyang’s closest ally, and Chinese officials who catch defectors routinely send them back to North Korea, where labor camps, brainwashing, or even death awaits. To protect these refugees, Christians in China have established routes to smuggle them into neighboring Mongolia, Laos, or Thailand, where South Korean authorities can pick them up and resettle them in South Korea. Beyond caring for practical needs—food, shelter, train tickets, money for the journey—members of the network provide for spiritual needs, telling defectors about the gospel and handing out Bibles.

More than 1,000 fleeing North Koreans reach South Korea annually, with nearly 3,000 arrivals in 2009, a peak year. Many of these escapees owe their freedom to underground railroad workers like Han—and her case illustrates the great personal risk local Christians take to help persecuted North Koreans.

After the phone call from his father, Hong traveled to Inner Mongolia (an autonomous region inside China) to meet with police, who wanted money in exchange for leniency. Hong, though, had little cash to offer.

At her trial, his mother received a 10-year prison sentence. Hong felt crushed. “I decided not to give up,” he says. “I told my mom, ‘I’ll find the right person to get you out.’”

HAN FIRST ENCOUNTERED CHRISTIANITY after a difficult year early in her marriage, according to Hong. Her in-laws had both passed away, and doctors diagnosed her baby girl—Hong’s older sister—with leukemia. The ethnically Korean couple lived in northern China’s Heilongjiang province: Medical care was poor in the region, and they couldn’t afford better treatment. The baby died.

Several friends came to comfort Han as she cried out, “What is the point of life?” One friend replied, “Do you know this person, Jesus Christ?” As her friend, a newly converted Christian, explained the gospel, Han also believed and eagerly professed Christ. Wanting to learn more about her new faith, she sought out a church—but the closest one was three hours away. During farming season, Han couldn’t easily take a whole day off to attend church, so she prayed God would move her family closer to church.

The answer to prayer came one day when a relative called and asked Han’s husband to relocate the family to Beijing to help him start a restaurant business. They moved to the capital, where Han had five churches nearby to choose from. As a child, Hong remembers attending not only Sunday services but Wednesday Bible studies and Friday night prayer meetings. Han went to church as often as she could and prayed that one day she could go into full-time ministry.

When Han’s husband got a job offer from another relative, he moved the family south to Shandong province. His new salary was enough to allow Han to quit her day job and do ministry work instead.

Despite having only an elementary-school education, Han decided to start a church in her home. She recruited her family to help: Hong and his sister would lead worship, Han would preach, and her husband would cook Sunday lunch for the attendees. The church grew to about 65 congregants before it began to draw attention from local authorities. She stopped hosting the meetings rather than fulfill a policeman’s demand to write down the names of attendees.

Han’s passion for ministry didn’t die, though, even when it sometimes took a toll on her family life. When she joined a group of Korean missionaries traveling the country to teach and disciple new believers, she was gone from her home for up to 10 months a year. Hong says the family suffered in her absence: His dad spent long hours at work, often returning home after midnight. Hong and his sister stopped attending church. Hong’s father threatened a divorce. Han realized she needed to quit her ministry, so she moved back home to tend to her family. Over time the marriage recovered and the children returned to church.

She found other ways to minister. With the help of Korean missionaries, she started an underground Bible school, renting a factory where students worked half a day to earn money for room and board, then spent the rest of the day learning about the Bible and how to lead worship and plant churches. Then, in 2008, Han decided to begin helping North Korean refugees.

Her role in the underground railroad went like this: After defectors made it across the Yalu River, Christian contacts would provide them a train ticket, a fake ID, some money, and Han’s contact information. The refugees traveled to Han’s apartment building, where she had rented a few rooms for them to stay free of charge. The defectors, ranging from young children to elderly grandparents, stayed inside during the day to avoid detection by local authorities. In the safe houses, Han taught them the Bible and showed them DVDs about Jesus.

After two or three weeks, when about a dozen people filled up the safe houses, Han would take them on a bus north to Inner Mongolia, and from a city near the border they would cross the Gobi Desert into Mongolia. Often it would be days before the Mongolians found them, so Han gave the defectors water, food, coats, compasses, flashlights, and signs that read, “I’m a North Korean refugee,” in Mongolian and English. They found the best route was to follow the railroad tracks, because workers routinely maintained the tracks and would stumble upon the defectors. (Chinese authorities later caught on and increased security along the Mongolia border—today most North Korean defectors travel south to Thailand or Laos.)

Han helped seven groups make the crossing over the course of a year—a total of 61 people. Some of the defectors called Han after they settled in South Korea to thank her for her help, and some told her they were attending church. Others she never heard from again, and she wonders if they made it to safety.

On the last trip she organized, in March of 2009, Han sent three students from her Bible school to lead 13 defectors to the border in Inner Mongolia. There, authorities ambushed them. The officials sent the 13 defectors back to North Korea and arrested the students. They also arrested Han at her home in Shandong: Not realizing that what she did was criminal, she freely told the authorities about her ministry helping North Korean defectors.

The authorities quickly realized this was not Han’s first crossing. They decided to make an example of her to deter others in the smuggling network.

AT HAN’S FIRST HEARING, her son saw police, prosecutors, and judges from across the region arrive to hear the case. “I felt like I was one person against the world,” Hong says. Han insisted that her lawyer get the students freed first, so with money from Korean missionaries, they successfully got two of the students, both minors, off on probation.

However, the court wasn’t so lenient with the third student, who was an adult. Along with giving Han a 10-year prison sentence, the court sentenced the student to seven years. “It was pretty devastating,” Hong recalls.

They decided to appeal. At the second hearing, the judge reduced the student’s sentence to five years and Han’s to seven. That meant Han could likely get out of prison in four years. At the time, Hong felt he had exhausted all his options, since he had run out of money.

Hong says that in the holding cell, jailers mistreated Han, whom they considered a big-time smuggler. But instead of quietly cowering, she sang worship songs and shared the gospel with her cellmates. Three times Hong bribed a prison doctor to smuggle a Bible to his mother, and twice the guards confiscated the Bibles. The last time, the guards decided to let her keep the Bible, hoping she would quietly read instead of loudly worshipping and evangelizing. “I don’t think she was ever quiet—she kept reading the Bible loudly to everyone there,” Hong says.

With the help of donations from missionaries, Hong hired a top lawyer for his mother. For five months, nothing happened, and Hong feared he had wasted the money. Then in the sixth month, the lawyer called and told him to go pick up his mom. The lawyer had reduced the crime to a minor infraction, which granted Han parole. She was going home.

Amazingly, since her release, local police have not required Han to report her activities. Today she is a deacon at her church—and her husband, seeing how God worked in his wife’s case, has also become active in the church.

Hong, too, is involved in ministry: He now works with a Christian group that provides humanitarian aid to North Korea. At the request of the country’s government, the group has built an orphanage, medical clinics, a day care, and a bread factory there.

One final zinger: According to Hong, Chinese officials seem to have misplaced their record of Han’s case. Perhaps they want to avoid scrutiny of the file, Hong suggests.

Or, he speculates, “Maybe God erased it.”