On the Other Side North Korean women have been escaping to the South in search of freedom and happier lives. But what happens when hope leads to disappointment?

Years ago in Yonsa, a small North Korean town near the Chinese border, residents gathered to watch a man die. Executioners tied him by his neck, chest, and waist to a log in the town square, then shot 90 bullets into him. When it was over, all that remained were two legs. The man, an executive at a trading company, had been ratted out for illegally cutting down and selling trees to China. When the police came to his property, they found his ceiling papered with money and a getaway boat filled with wads of cash. Or so the story goesWon’s home in Yonsa was dominated by mountains dotted with potatoes in the autumn and strawberries in the spring. The range they called “the gasping mountain” barricaded Yonsa from the Tumen River; in some ways, it felt like a prison wall. Across that water was China and the rest of the world. Being so close to another life, in a way inland North Koreans were not, was the hardest part.

With two rooms and a plot of land for growing vegetables, the Kims’ home was spacious by North Korean standards. So Won lived with her middle sister, So Yeon, who was three years older, along with their mother and father, an engineer who later became the town drunk. “It was such a waste for him to live in North