WESTERN LIAONING PROVINCE, China — The North Korean woman drives a motorbike slowly down a narrow lane shaded by tall corn to the farmhouse where she lives with the disabled Chinese man who bought her.

It’s been 11 years since she was lured across the border by the prospect of work and instead trafficked into a life of hardship. In those years, she’s lived with the dread that Chinese police will arrest her and send her back to be jailed and tortured in North Korea. She’s struggled with the scorn of neighbors who see her as an outsider.

But most of all, she’s been haunted by grief and regret over the children she had to leave behind.

“When I first came here, I spent all day drinking because I worried a lot about my kids in North Korea,” said the woman, who asked to be identified only as S.Y. due to safety concerns. “I was quite out of my mind.”

Experts estimate that thousands, and perhaps tens of thousands, of North Korean women have been trafficked across the border and sold as brides since a crippling famine in North Korea killed hundreds of thousands of people in the mid-1990s. Brokers tell the women they can find jobs in China, but instead sell them to Chinese men, mostly poor farmers in three border provinces who struggle to find brides in part because Beijing’s one-child policy led to the abortion of many female fetuses.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3827245&forum_id=2#34906465)