[4] In 1997, Lee crossed the frozen Yalu River alone in collusion with a friendly border guard to fulfill a dream she had, only planning to stay a short while before returning.

[4] Arriving at Incheon International Airport in January 2008, she entered the immigration office and declared her identity as a North Korean asylum-seeker.

She "was quickly ushered into another room," where officials inspected her papers, asked her if she was actually Chinese, and "informed me that I would be incarcerated for an unspecified period of time and then deported back to China if I violated Korean law.

"[5] Lee received word that North Korean police had intercepted money she had sent to her family through a broker and that her mother and brother were "going to be forcibly removed to a desolate location in the countryside.

At one point, when they were stopped and interrogated by a police officer, Lee told him that her family, who could not understand Chinese, were deaf and mute people that she was chaperoning.

[4] At the Lao border, Lee met a broker and paid him to take her mother and brother across and to the South Korean Embassy in Vientiane.

On her way to an airport in China to fly back to South Korea, however, she was informed that her mother and brother "had been caught as they crossed the border."

[5] She traveled with them to Vientiane, where her family members were arrested and jailed again, "just a short distance from the South Korean embassy.

"[4] Lee went back and forth between the immigration office and the National Police Agency for almost 50 days,[5] "desperately trying to get my family out … but I didn't have enough money to pay the bribes.

To her luck, an English-speaking stranger — identified in her autobiography as an affable Australian named Dick Stolp — asked her: "What's wrong?"

She explained, in her broken English, with the use of a dictionary, and "the man went to the ATM and paid the rest of the money for my family and two other North Koreans to get out of jail."

In China, she had devoted a great deal of time to learn Chinese, but "never thought I would be under this much stress about language in South Korea."

In addition, she was one of "50 college students who had escaped from North Korea for the 'English for the Future' program sponsored by the British Embassy in Seoul, which helps [her] keep up [her] English studies."