A Portrait of True Grit.(Park Choong Il)(Brief Article)

Park Choong Il is lucky to be alive, but is prepared to die. He keeps a small plastic bag filled with rat poison in his pocket. "I would rather kill myself than be taken back to prison in North Korea," says the 23- year-old former street urchin, who recently escaped from Kim Jong Il's dictatorship for the second time in 18 months. "I don't even like to remember what happened to me. It's too painful to think about."

Park is one of thousands of desperate North Koreans who've escaped from that impoverished country in recent years. Nearly all flee into China, and many are quickly arrested by Chinese police and, like Park, forcibly returned to the communist regime, where they are punished by internment in Pyongyang's brutal prison system. Frail and boyish- looking, Park is suffering from memory lapses as a result of the mistreatment he claims to have suffered during his eight-month ordeal. Thinking he was dying, North Korean officials released him from prison last August and allowed him to go to his uncle's house. But Park recovered. Last April he fled his country for the second time, swimming across the Tumen River into China. There, he met volunteers for the Japan-based Life Fund for North Korean Refugees, a nongovernmental organization whose goal is to protect escapees and prevent their involuntary return to North Korea. Last week three Life Fund members sat with Park in a Southeast Asian hotel room as he told a grim story of his capture and escape from the North.

Park comes from a broken family in the North Hamgyong province of North Korea. His parents divorced, and his father was thrown into jail for "economic" crimes when he was a child. His mother, unable to support Park, sent him to live with an uncle. There was little food or room for him at his uncle's house so, at the age of 14, Park ran away. For seven years he lived as a street beggar and petty thief, stealing food to survive. As the famine in North Korea worsened in the late 1990s, he began making quick trips to China to find food and money. During a November 1999 foray, Park ran into six other North Koreans in their 20s, including a woman, and together they decided to set off for South Korea via Russia, where they'd request political asylum.

From the Chinese city of Shenyang, the group traveled by bus to a small town named Milsan, near the Russian border. They rested there for three days, then at 2 o'clock one morning, began walking across the frontier. A Russian border patrol stumbled across the seven Koreans, robbed them and then hauled the group to a local prison. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees office in Moscow intervened with Russian authorities, but apparently without success. In late December 1999, the seven were driven to the border and handed over to Chinese forces. They, in turn, turned the group over to North Korean soldiers, who took them to the North Hamgyong Provincial State Security Building in ...