North Korean workers at a textile factory in Jilin, China in 2017
FILE PHOTO: North Korean workers at a textile factory in Jilin Province, China, in 2017. (Daily NK)

“I cried a lot because I missed my child. There were also many days I suddenly broke down, feeling like I would die. One day, I wanted to run away from the factory and go home, regardless of whether I lived or died.”

These are the words of “Ri,” a woman in her 30s who works at a contract manufacturing factory in China’s Liaoning Province. Due to security concerns, Daily NK can only divulge her family name.

Ri came to China in 2019, before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, after giving birth to a healthy child in North Korea. 

Because her husband made so little money, Ri decided to go to China for just two years to work and put together a nest egg.

To leave her adorable child, who was just starting to talk, and come to China was no easy decision, but she thought two years would not be that long.

She told her child she would be right back, but she could not imagine their separation would be so long.

North Korea shut down its borders in January 2020, preventing many North Koreans working at factories in China from returning home over the past three years.

Despite the situation she faces, Ri holds out every day in the hope that she will be able to return home this year.

Below is Daily NK’s full interview with Ri.

Daily NK (DNK): Have you been able to exchange letters or call your husband or child while you’ve been in China?

Ri: “Not at all. I can’t make phone calls in this situation. You can’t call somebody just to say hello. All of us were deployed [to China] based on the recommendation of a trading company, so the companies ask local security guidance officers here to go around and call the workers’ families to ask if anything’s wrong. If not, the officers tell us that our families are all fine, not to worry and to work hard. That’s the end of it. I’ve never called them myself. Factory directors can place international calls, but it costs a lot to call home. Because international calls cost so much, we almost never ask to use their phones.”

DNK: Your child is young, which likely makes the separation even more difficult. How do you get through the pain? 

Ri: “I didn’t know it would be so hard to leave my child. At first, I cried almost every night. I cried before sleeping, and I cried after eating. Still, I chose to come [to China], so what could I do? I brought a photo, so I would grasp the photo and cry. I was driven to continue my work with the thought that I could use the money I earned here to give my child a good life. When there was a lot of work to do, I even worked 15 or 16 hours. Sometimes I just slept and worked, and on days when all I did was work, I think I didn’t miss my family as much [because I didn’t have time to think about them].

“There are about 15 women at our factory who came here after having kids back home. We all know how each other feels, so we get along better. Still, despite the fact that work sometimes makes you forget how much you miss your kids, being locked up and given so much downtime due to the COVID pandemic made some workers fall into depression, making it difficult to eat or do much of anything.”

DNK: Is your husband taking care of the child? Is there somebody to take care of your child while your husband is at work?

Ri: “During the day, my child goes to kindergarten, and in the evening, my husband takes care of them, but we live close to relatives. My older sister and her family live nearby, so when I left [for China], I asked her to take care of our child. I’ve bought my sister a present that I’ll give her when I return [to North Korea]. I’m full of worries whenever I think about whether my child is living a good life. But I’ll be returning soon, so I just push down those feelings and wait.”

DNK: When selecting workers to go to China, North Korean authorities have made it a rule to mainly select those who are married and already have children as part of efforts to prevent a further fall in the country’s already very low birthrate. What do you think of this?

Ri: “Frankly, I don’t know much about what kind of people they will select going forward. In my work team, there are a lot of young girls in their early 20s. For these young women, the work is really hard. Sometimes, I think they want to send married women because there are sometimes problems [that arise between unmarried women] and male cadres. But it’s hard for a mother to come to China and just work, unable to contact their family and be so far from their kids. Frankly, isn’t it going too far? It breaks my heart. The government must have its reasons, but if I’d known it was so hard, I would never have come. I haven’t saved that much money because of all the contributions I have to send to the Workers’ Party along with dues owed to the Socialist Women’s Union of Korea. If another mother were to tell me they wanted to come to China to work, I would definitely tell them not to come. I’m still tortured by the thought of my child growing up without a mother.”

Translated by David Black. Edited by Robert Lauler. 

Daily NK works with a network of reporting partners who live inside North Korea. Their identities remain anonymous due to security concerns. More information about Daily NK’s reporting partner network and information gathering activities can be found on our FAQ page here.  

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