The morning of July 1 last summer began like any other for Peter Hahn, a 74-year-old who had come to do extraordinary things in a place that he would never call godforsaken but which, nonetheless, is.
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Tumen, China, sits on the border with North Korea; it's a gritty city of 140,000, more than half of which is ethnically Korean. Like most of the region fronting this desolate border, it is poorer than much of the rest of eastern China.
This is where, in 1997, Hahn decided to set up shop with his wife, Eunice, abandoning their comfortable life in suburban Los Angeles to pursue what would become his life's work: trying to help the impoverished people on both sides of the border—but in particular those from North Korea, where, in 1942, Hahn was born, in Wonsan, 90 miles east of Pyongyang. He lived there as a child before his family moved to the South.
After moving to China almost 20 years ago, Hahn set up a vocational school in Tumen, one that trained poor kids in everything from cooking to auto repair to English. He set up an industrial-scale bakery on the North Korean side of the border, bringing in wheat and flour from China to feed North Koreans. He then got permission from the government to build a fertilizer plant and then a food processing plant in a new "special economic zone" in the northeast corner of North Korea. "We feed 22,000 people a day," he told a reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald.
At the core of his decision to move to the China–North Korea border—and all the charitable work that followed—is Hahn's faith. Like many of the aid and nongovernmental organization workers who assist North Koreans, Hahn is an evangelical Christian, called to what he believes is a sacred duty to help those who drew what is surely one of the shortest straws on this planet: the citizens of North Korea, the world’s most despotic regime. And it is because of his faith that Hahn's world got torn apart that July morning, and he became yet another victim of a vanishing tolerance on both sides of the border for the work he and Christians like him pursue. Caught between countries run by Kim Jong Un to his east and by Xi Jinping to his west, Hahn now sits in a detention center, first placed under house arrest that morning in July, then formally detained last November.