In 2020, North Korea enforced COVID quarantines even in the small mountain town of Chasong County, Chagang Province. The death of a woman surnamed Cho during this time still evokes grief among the community’s residents.
Many years earlier, human traffickers sold Cho to a Chinese farming community, where she had a son with a Chinese man. In 2016, she was arrested by Chinese police and repatriated to the North, where she spent three years in a re-education camp.
After her release in 2019, she wandered around Chasong County, eventually settling in a mountain hut in the small mountain town. When the COVID pandemic began in 2020, the government placed her in an isolation facility because she came down with a fever.
Locked away in the facility without much medicine or food, Cho complained of pain from her high fever. Hovering between life and death, she decided to call her husband and mother-in-law in China for help. Through a quarantine officer at the facility, she contacted her family in China using a smuggler with a Chinese cell phone. The letter Cho sent to her family in China contained this desperate message:
“Please help me, at least for your son and grandson. If my fever continues, they’ll never let me out of here. I’ll die if this goes on. I just need money. RMB 2,000 [around USD 276] is enough, but if you can’t, please send at least RMB 700 [around USD 96].”
But with the border closed, she was unable to receive any money.
Too little, too late
In January 2021, cash from Cho’s Chinese family finally arrived at the isolation facility. But she was already dead. Without proper medical care, she had died of a high fever in the isolation facility.
Her body was cremated. She was classified as a person without family or friends, so her ashes were scattered to the winds.
The quarantine officer at the isolation facility simply took the money Cho’s family in China had sent. He knew she no longer needed it.
A resident of Chasong County told Daily NK that Cho “was not the only one to suffer such a tragedy.” The person went on to say that people without family or friends “made up the largest number of people who died in isolation facilities in Changang Province in 2020.”
Cho’s son in China cried for several nights after learning of his mother’s death. He also expressed hatred for the people who not only failed to inform her family of her death, but also stole the money they had sent. Even today, people in the small mountain town are criticizing the quarantine officer who stole their money.
These days, many North Koreans say they will “no longer be silent about the tragedies of the past” and are telling the stories of neighbors who lost their lives during the COVID period. Many hope that keeping these stories alive will become the seeds of change.
Translated by David Carruth. Edited by Robert Lauler.
Daily NK works with a network of sources living in North Korea, China, and elsewhere. Their identities remain anonymous for security reasons. For more information about Daily NK’s network of reporting partners and information-gathering activities, please visit our FAQ page here.
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