What they were in China - Yanji to be exact - to do, has been done by many, and will continue to be done as long as certain issues remain unresolved in North Korea. Issues like sex/marriage trafficking.

I have talked on this blog before of those evil men who wait at the China/NK border for desperate North Koreans looking for a new life, a decent meal, a little hope. They are offered all three. The price is pretty high, though: a lifetime of slavery to the sexual or marital needs of some lonely Chinese or ethnic Korean man.

In honor of those two who are under lock and key, while many pray for their release, I offer a story from the new HRNK book, Lives for Sale (2009). This is a book filled with personal accounts of women fleeing to North Korea. Like Ms Kim in China's Jilin Province: I quote directly from the book, page 33.

"I was married in North Korea and had two sons. My father died from an illness in 1996. My husband worked in a coal mine, and I worked in the restaurant of a motel. I was not in a good relationship with my husband and finally we divorced.

"My sister-in-law and her husband left North Korea in 1997 and went to China; she was caught and sent back to North Korea, where she was put in a detention center. After she was released, she persuaded me to go to China with her.

"In January 1999, I crossed the Tumen River with my sister-in-law. She was taken in by the same Chinese family she had been sold to before the arrest. I went to Tumen in Yanbian and stayed in the house of an old ethnic Korean woman who owned an orchard near the house. I worked in the orchard. There were a few more North Koreans staying there.

"One day, a friend of the old woman came to visit her and said she would get me a decent husband. A few days later, a couple who were ethnic Koreans living in Heilongjiang Province came to the house. Then, the five of us all took a train to Heilongjiang.

"We arrived at a house where I was introduced to a man who was about 30 years old. He was just smiling and speaking to himself. It turned out that he was the younger brother of the couple and had been mentally ill for the last ten years. Even the old woman who owned the orchard in Yanbian and had brought me there was shocked at seeing him.

"Nevertheless, her friend took 3,000 yuan from the man's sister and they went back to Yanbian leaving me there."

Unfortunately North Korean women in China often have no option but to marry Chinese men in rural areas, most of them poor, some elderly, where they become entrapped in the poverty, hardship, and unhappiness they left Korea to escape. Some are beaten and badly mistreated...