Americans Find a Door to N. Korea

From a riverfront park where vendors hawk popcorn and cotton candy, Peter Han gazes across the Tumen River at the landscape that is North Korea and shakes his head in despair.

“Those trees you see are just for show,” he says, pointing at a tidy village on the North Korean side. “When you get further away from the river, there are no trees, barely any crops. The soil is too depleted for any of that.”

Yet it is precisely the dysfunctional nature of North Korea that attracted Han to these parts. Seven years ago, after retiring from his job as a Los Angeles County social worker, he rented out his house in Northridge and moved to this small Chinese city that hugs the North Korean border.

A lean, energetic man fueled by humanitarian zeal and a vast intake of coffee, the 63-year-old Han juggles half a dozen border projects designed to help North Koreans and the ethnic Korean community in China.

He runs two bakeries in North Korea that produce rolls with raisins -- from California, of course -- for schoolchildren. He has a factory in the North Korean city of Rajin that makes doenjang, a soybean paste, and an experimental farm for soybeans and corn.

The move to Tumen was something of a homecoming for Han, a naturalized U.S. citizen. He was born in the North Korean city of Wonsan but left as a child and grew up in South Korea before coming to the United States in 1964 to attend USC.

After retirement, he wanted to do something to help North Korea, but because it would be practically impossible to move to the hermetic and impoverished country, he set himself up in Tumen instead.

This northeastern corner of China is filled with Americans who have been drawn by its proximity to the forbidden land of North Korea lying just across the Tumen River.

“The view is unbeatable. It is as close as you can get,” said Carol Chung, a 22-year-old New Yorker who is living in a Tumen riverfront apartment that stares into North Korea. Chung, a recent Harvard graduate, is studying border cultures and working at the Tumen River Vocational School.

Most -- though not all -- of the Americans living here are of Korean origin. They work as teachers, doctors, dentists, agronomists, aid workers and, in many cases, missionaries, although such work is frowned upon by Communist China. They tend to avoid authorities and stay mum about their work.

“We run into a lot of Americans. We don’t ask what they are doing, and they don’t ask what we are doing,” said a Korean American retiree from Philadelphia who assists North Korean refugees in China.

The State Department says there are no restrictions on Americans working with North Korea because the assistance they provide has no military applications and therefore does not violate laws against trading with the enemy.

But North Korea vociferously proclaims the United States an enemy and often does not admit U.S. citizens. Han is an exception; he regularly scoots across the border to visit his bakeries and fields.

Han’s projects, which get funding from charity groups and employ about 140 North Koreans, are part humanitarian and part business. Not that they actually make a profit, but they are structured to give the North Koreans a crash course in the basics of business.

“This is not a handout,” he said. “I want to help rehabilitate the people and the land.... To do that, they have to learn to do things for themselves.”

His beliefs take concrete form at the Tumen River Vocational School, where Han has his headquarters. There, abandoned teenagers are trained in trades such as baking before they in turn go to North Korea to teach those same skills.

One of the most successful of Han’s projects is the factory in Rajin. Han chose soybean paste because it doesn’t require much electricity or equipment and is a traditional staple in the Korean kitchen.

“Some of the world’s longest-living people live on soybean paste,” he said. “This is a perfect food for North Korea.”

He is also considering less traditional soybean products, such as cookies, vitamins, ice cream and a Korean version of gnocchi. He dreams of starting an organic fertilizer factory to help revitalize soil that has become badly acidified after years of over-farming.

Despite his enthusiasm, Han shares many of the same frustrations of aid officials working in North Korea.

For instance, North Korean authorities have assigned mostly older workers to his factory. Though eager, they often are in poor physical shape.

“By 10 a.m.,” he said, “they are so hungry, they can hardly walk.”

But that is, after all, one of the reasons Han is here.