Who’ll stop the pain?

Under the 2004 North Korean Human Rights Act, the United States offered fast-track processing for North Korean asylum-seekers. So far, 53 North Koreans have been granted refugee status here. Some tell stories that remind an old Asia hand of the worst Khmer Rouge atrocities. Others just remind us that evil is mostly banal—and sometimes the evils that kill us aren’t stunning or dramatic but simply the result of systemic neglect and an utter disregard for the individual, her health, her sanity.

Lee Jeong-Ae’s story is one of the saddest I have heard in 18 years as a journalist, covering some of the roughest regimes on the Earth. She died of lung cancer just three weeks after arriving with her family in Virginia, at age 35. She enjoyed exactly 21 days of U.S. political asylum. Her journey, I think, serves as a cogent reminder of the shadowy no-man’s-land inhabited by all illicit asylum-seekers, and none more so than the North Koreans who flee to every corner of the earth without access to even the most basic health care or legal protection.Lee and her husband, who uses the pseudonym Shin to protect family still in North Korea, lived with their son in Younseon, North Hamgyong province, near the Chinese border. Shin was working in trade with China when the couple decided to flee political repression and poverty in their tightly closed homeland in mid-2006. The couple took poison with them so they could commit suicide rather than risk repatriation, he said.

They fled through China, Laos, and Burma and finally Thailand, where they remained for two years while Lee’s health worsened dramatically. In Laos, he said, “we were in much better shape” than the hundreds of thousands of North Koreans believed to be living secretly, and in perpetual fear, in China. “We’d known she was ill since 2006. We went to a hospital after arriving in Thailand in 2006, but never got a proper diagnosis,” Shin said of his wife. In July 2007, doctors at a second hospital diagnosed metastatic, terminal lung cancer.

In September, the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok told them their U.S. refugee status had been approved, but they would have to wait. Lee remained alone in a Thai hospital, too, for three months when Shin was detained by Thai police as he gave directions to a group of North Korean defectors.

Finally, in February 2008, 16 North Korean defectors were cleared to leave Thailand for the United States—with one spot allocated for the Shin family. But U.S. law requires that refugee families stay together, so the spot went to a single North Korean. The family finally reached New York City on April 14 and settled in Richmond three days later. Lee died of metastatic lung cancer on May 7.