Mike Kim is the first to admit that when he arrived at the China-North Korea border he was little more than a well-intentioned amateur with limited command of the Chinese and Korean languages and just three local contacts. It was his desire to do something to help North Korean refugees that led him to set up a non-profit organization that funnels them from the North to safety via a modern-day underground railroad.

Those journeys, as well as the plight of refugees ensnared in the sex industry, escapers’ tales of the gulags in the North and the state-sponsored trade in narcotics, form the basis of his book, Escaping North Korea: Defiance and Hope in the World’s Most Repressive Country.

“Back in July 2001, I was living in Chicago, I had my own financial-advisory business and was doing well, but I wanted to visit China and found myself close to the border,” Kim told a press conference at the Club on June 5. Playing with a young girl in the street, he was told she was a refugee from North Korea – to which he replied, “What North Korean refugees?”

He received a crash course in the famines that have devastated the country south of the Tumen River, of girls sold to Chinese farmers who cannot find a bride, of Koreans who flee their homeland to escape persecution. Back in Chicago and facing people who wanted advice on maximizing investment income, Kim says he felt “disengaged.”

The son of South Korean parents, Kim handed over the reins of his company, overcame his mother’s reservations and bought a one-way ticket to the border zone, arriving on New Year’s Day 2003, armed with a cover tale that involved studying North Korean taekwondo.

Kim envisaged his NPO, Crossing Borders, providing humanitarian assistance to refugees once they had entered China. That quickly escalated, and he found himself escorting escapees on their 10,000-km journey from North Korea to freedom, harking back to the secret routes that escaping slaves used to reach safe havens in 19th-century America.

“There are people on that route now, as we speak,”said Kim, who managed to get four teenagers into the British consulate in Shanghai and from there to Seoul, while elsewhere he recalls his journey from northern China to Bangkok with two women. On one occasion, a contact in the Chinese government made it clear Kim was being hunted by the authorities. He left the country.

Kim is currently studying for an MBA in Washington, D.C., and is setting up an import-export company. He remains active in NPO work, particularly on North Korean issues, and remains optimistic that change is coming.

“One of the first things that we make new arrivals do is to watch Chinese television, cable TV from South Korea and, for the first time in their lives, give them a glimpse of the outside world,” he said. That information trickles back over the border, Kim added.

To underline the impact, he recounts the experiences of a Western diplomat in Pyongyang approached by a North Korean woman, apparently of good standing within the government. She asked if he might be able to get her Desperate Housewives on DVD. ❶