Kang* was 20 years old when she left her official job as a potato researcher in North Korea. She wanted to join the women who had taken up illicit market activities, first to survive the “Arduous March” (as the famine years of the mid-1990s were known), then to build better lives for themselves and their families outside the tight controls of the government.
Kang began trading goods like rice, metals and petroleum to generate an income well beyond what she could have expected from state-sanctioned employment. Eventually, before reaching South Korea in 2013, her most lucrative business was a brokerage service for young women who wished to work in factories in China.
