Across Siberia in a Train Carriage Half-Occupied by North Korean Slave Workers

I was sleeping heavily in the narrow upper berth of that 3rd-class carriage of a dated Soviet train traveling east along the Trans-Siberian Railway. My instinct, motivated by a desire to stretch my muscles and nicotine-yearning, aroused me as the train was coming to a halt. I slightly drew the curtain aside to have a peek out the window. It was early morning. We were at the Krasnoyarsk Railway Station.

I placed a cigarette in my mouth, climbed down the berth, and began striding along the aisle towards the exit. Halfway through, I found myself sandwiched between an unorderly mob of boarding Asians.

Forming a human chain of up to forty individuals, they were hauling a heap of suitcases and cardboard boxes from the platform into the carriage, raising quite a clatter in the process. The last ones on the line were cramming them on the racks and under the seats. I had to laboriously jostle my way past them to reach the platform. I assumed they were villagers from northern China, bringing in merchandise from Russia. 

The whole Asian gang, together with a few more Russian passengers, were eventually ensconced inside the train, and the hubbub subsided.

“Zahodim, zahodim!” (we move in!) the conductor’s voice resounded sharply over the now half-vacant platform, aimed at me and a handful of more passengers still lingering outside the train. I tossed the butt into the bin and climbed the steps back into the carriage.

Getting back to my place, I found the opposite seat occupied by one of those newly-boarded Asians. He was a man in his fifties or late forties. His stature was small even for Asian standards. He was already undressed and was sitting crouched with his feet on the seat, wearing only a pair of shorts. A hefty suitcase was lying on the little table between us.

“Shang, shang!” (up in Mandarin) I began repeating to him while pointing alternately between his bag and the empty spot on the upper rack with my index. He let off a slight smile after the few repetitions it took him to understand what I meant. With me giving him a hand, we lifted the heavy article and settled it in its proper place.

I couldn’t put what exactly it was in a neat thought, but something felt truly bizarre about him and the rest of his group. I mean: Chinese folks often seem strange to us Westerners, but these particular folks gave a profoundly incomprehensible, utterly otherworldly impression. There was something about that frigid and timid, yet earnestly curious at the same time, way he peered around while sitting in that never-changing phlegmatic pose.

I attempted to strike up a conversation with him – at least something of the sort, utilizing gestures and what little Mandarin I could muster. But he didn’t seem to understand a shit of what I was trying to say. My Chinese pronunciation must be really terrible, I concluded.

The day progressed in that slow tempo days usually go when traveling on a train through endless plains and taiga. Then night fell. I moved up to my bed and let my co-passenger fix the seats and the table into his underneath.

Strong sunlight penetrated inside the carriage and woke me up in the morning. The Asian chap below had unfixed his bed and sat in the same pose staring out of the window. I took my seat and did the same.

We were traveling along the shore of Lake Baikal. Its tremendous water mass was spreading beyond the horizon. Its boundless surface had adopted the deep blue color of the sky and was ripped apart by a glistening golden stripe aligned with the sun. Waves were splashing rhythmically on the cobble beaches. And gentle, green slopes were taking off after the lakeside, leading to numerous peaks of various shapes in the distance.

“Beautiful nature,” said my fellow traveler in strongly accented Russian. Surprised by both his ability to speak Russian and his will to talk, I nodded in agreement.

“Where are you from?” he asked, giving in to his loquacious mood.

“Greece,” I responded… again and again.

“Xila,” I tried in Chinese when I got convinced he wouldn’t understand the Russian word for it.

After several repetitions – bewildered and disappointed by how bad my Chinese accent may be that I cannot even make a single word understood – I had to take out my mobile and show him Greece on the map. An expression manifesting the successful – and excitedly curious – reception of this new information was then depicted on his face. He continued after a brief stop: “I am from North Korea.”

I experienced a fervent emotion. This otherwise tedious trip had just become very amusing. It goes without saying that I’d never met a North Korean before. I was, in fact, quite sure that such an occurrence could never take place out of North Korea. I was accustomed to believing that they never and for no reason leave their country. And now, all of a sudden, I realized I was sitting in a train carriage half-occupied by North Koreans.

Throughout the next few days (how many exactly it’s hard to keep count of when traveling on a train across consecutive timezones as if across suburban stations), we got to gradually get better acquainted with each other and had several short conversations. During the days’ calmest hours, when most of his comrades were either asleep or dozing in their seats, utilizing his rudimentary Russian, a tiny notebook with a handwritten Korean-Russian dictionary he kept hidden in his jacket, and Google Translate on my mobile when bandwidth was present, we engaged in communication exchange. He revealed particulars about his countrymen’s situation; things he apparently yearned to say to some of those uncanny inhabitants of the allegedly evil, Capitalist-Imperialist outer world.

One of the first things he told me was that there was a snitch among them. He was undercover. No-one knew who he was. But he definitely was there, working and living together with the rest of the team as if a perfectly normal member of it, but covertly assigned with the task to visit the secret police after their return and denounce any reactionary behavior on the part of his colleagues, selling the misdoer’s freedom or life for a bonus or favor.

Speaking too much with a foreigner was, of course, misdoing of the severe kind. That’s why he had to be highly cautious while carrying out his communication with me.

They were there for work. He spoke about an obscure agreement between their state and Russia, whereby the former has agreed to send over cheap workers to man the latter’s massive construction projects. This was his fourth time in Russia for such a working trip. Depending on the project, they stay between two months and a year each time. They always work hard, 7 days a week, 17-20 hours a day.

The work is depleting, but they earn money, so they endure it. The Russians pay ₽500 (around $7) per day for each worker. Half of it is paid directly to the North Korean government, and only the other half is paid to the worker. He was aware that this was a humiliatingly low wage for the capitalist world standards. However, he was still reasonably satisfied with getting hold of any amount of money whatsoever. In their country, they work as hard only to receive back their means of subsistence; they never are given any money. With the money he earns working in Russia, he will afford to buy something other-than-necessary for his kids.

At some point, he carefully extracted a photograph out of his jacket pocket and handed it to me under the table. It was a couple with two daughters posing under a portrait of Kim Jong-un. “My family in our apartment,” he described what I’m seeing.

As an extra means of security, they purposely select only workers who have a family to send abroad. It would anyhow be nearly impossible for anyone to escape. They live guarded inside the construction site; they are fed there and never are allowed to leave for any place. Even if they managed to run away, they wouldn’t go far. Not speaking the local language and with absolutely no knowledge of how a capitalistic society functions, it wouldn’t take long before they get arrested by the Russian police and deported back home to face execution. However, keeping their families back for pawn guarantees that even the slightest thought of escape is eliminated upon its inception.

Aside from speaking about his life, he was also keen to know about mine. He asked me different questions about how we work, what we earn for it, what we can obtain with what we earn, and many others concerning how we live in general. He was particularly curious about the internet: that baffling miracle thing they’ve been hearing rumors of taking over the outer world. I tried to explain to him simply what the web is about and demonstrated some of its applications on my mobile phone, but he seemed mystified and somewhat more perplexed than before, not being able to fathom what all this implied.

On the last evening of the trip, I went to have a chat with a new girl who joined in the carriage. When I returned to my seat, he asked me where she was from. 

“From South Korea,” I replied. “You should be able to understand each other, right? Why don’t you go talk to her?”

“Nonono! I must not talk to her. That would be very wrong,” he uttered out from a stunned countenance.

“Why so?” I asked rather stupidly.

Ideology stood written on that part of the notebook’s page he pointed his finger at.

Throughout the previous days, he had kept a cautious and conservative stance every time I tried to bring forth the subject of his country and its regime, basically meeting my inquiries with indifferent silence. But on this last evening, he showed a different mood – perhaps he’d been waiting for it to manifest his honest perspective. When I asked him to know what about that ideology of his, he furtively passed me the notebook. Words like poverty, repression, fear, violence, injustice stood on it, followed by a complete sentence: You must help, your country must help, the world must help.

We looked at each other silently and intently for a length of time. We bid each other goodnight – but not goodbye, as I expected they would also get off at Vladivostok. I climbed up to my berth. He fixed his underneath.

Sometime in the middle of the dark night, I abstractedly registered that same hubbub that took place during their boarding repeating. When I woke up, a few hours later, still dark, my co-passenger and his colleagues were not there anymore. They were dropped off at some obscure station shortly before we arrived in Vladivostok. They must have been boarded on some other train to bring them back to their homes and everyday lives.

The story you've just read is a part of my "Real Stories of Real People" collection, wherein I narrate my encounters with various remarkable characters I've run into while traveling around the world. The entire collection is published on my blog and may be read here. But if you'd like to get them with you to the beach in your ebook reader or as a physical book, and very appreciatedly support my creative activity, go ahead and grab your copy from Amazon for the cost of a cup of coffee.