The World Through the Eyes of an Immigrant (Part 1)

How the free world welcomed me when I escaped from Iran

When I was eighteen, I packed my bag and escaped my home country, Iran. As a gay person, and more importantly, as someone with ambitions of becoming a scientist, my life was simply impossible in Iran. Leaving wasn’t easy. I wasn’t rich enough to qualify for an American or European visa. So I went for the best option available to me: South Korea. I had to leave everyone I knew behind; including all my friends, and my dear little brother, whom I had raised. My parents disowned me for leaving.

I arrived in Seoul, South Korea in November 2017.

Seoul was a wealthy metropolis of 25 million people. And I was staring at everything in awe. It started as soon as I boarded the airplane: the flight attendant looked like the most beautiful and happy woman in the world to me, because she smiled, confidently showcasing her hair and naked arms without fearing jail or lashes. Then it was the clean toilets of the airport, the architecture of the train station, the lack of beggars and trash-rummaging paupers. I wasn’t even feeling the tiredness of my 24-hour long journey; like a child in an amusement park, everything filled me with joy.

I felt like a newborn seeing the world for the first time. I had never been outside Iran. Everything around me was now brighter; color and light were abundant, people were well-dressed and looked light-hearted and down-right happy compared to Iran.

Up until then, I had only seen free countries in movies. And I was so used to being surrounded by propaganda that I couldn’t fully believe what I saw in foreign movies. But that day, I realized that I never watched a movie, no matter how glamorous, that was able to capture the everyday glory of everyday life in a free country.

My breath was significantly lighter. All my life, my main concern was “what if I’m going to die tomorrow?” But then, my main concern was “how am I going to live tomorrow?” Never again would I have to fear the police. No more would my muscles freeze and my jaw lock itself up in fear of being jailed, lashed, executed, kidnapped, or robbed by the government; This was the free world!

For the first time, I felt at ease with people. Shadows and footsteps no longer scared me. I wanted to hug and talk to strangers. I was not afraid to talk, smile, or think anymore. My limbs felt stronger and my mind was working better than ever before.

It is very hard to overstate how happy I was. I felt I could overcome any challenge. I was for the first time blessed by peace and security.

I was to learn Korean in a building next to one of Korea's prestigious universities. In the orientation, an English-speaking Korean woman said: “under no circumstance should you work in Korea without a work permit.” She said that it was a crime and many people were sent to jail for it every day. She handed us a pamphlet showing us where to go to get a work permit.

I thought: “It is strange that working needs a permit here. It’s probably for liability reasons. Like how you have to have a driver’s permit. You know, you fill a form and bring a 2 by 2 picture and it must be done.”

With documents in hand, I went to the immigration building. It was in a high rise, and I was really curious to see the inside, to see how a free country’s government works. But I was not even allowed to enter. At the door, they checked my passport and said that I didn’t have the right visa. Perplexed, I walked to my school and talked to the English-speaking lady at the international office. She told me that my visa only allows me to study and I’m not eligible for a work permit.

My heart was racing. I couldn’t believe her. I thought she had mistaken me for someone else. I went home and Googled it myself. I learned that actually, all free countries, from US to Japan, South Korea included, have made it illegal for foreigners to work except in very narrow circumstances.

From that day on, the shops, the streets, people’s faces–everything looked gloomy to me. I counted my money. I had about $200. It could only sustain me for a month. And without a work permit, I had either jail or starvation ahead of me.

My head was spinning. I sat down. I had to know why would a free country pass a law like this? This, what I read on my screen, sounded like Iran!

I needed to understand the logic behind that. I needed to know why I was condemned to starvation. The only way I could explain this hateful law, this pointed gun, was that foreigners actually hated me and wanted me to starve.

That made perfect sense in my mind. I came from a country where others were hated, where they shouted “death to America,” “death to the UK,” and “death to Saudi Arabia.” That was the Iranian way of approaching others. And when I saw that free nations take such a vital thing as the right to work away from foreigners, the most plausible explanation in my mind was that they wanted to eradicate foreigners. And that terrified me.

I started skipping meals, living on a $1 a day budget. It was freezing cold and I didn’t have a coat–even a pair of gloves. I had been coughing for a while. I had caught the flu, and it started getting worse every day. I was living in the cheapest place I could find. A 6 by 6 feet room in a tenement with no windows.

One day, I became nauseous and started coughing up blood. I hadn’t eaten anything for two days, and didn’t have any appetite. I thought if I sleep I can muster enough energy to walk to the convenience store. When I woke up, I realized I couldn’t move my legs. “Oh, this is serious,” I told myself in a passive tone, “I know I don’t have enough money to see a doctor but I’m going to die soon if I don’t get help right now.” I pulled out my phone and called 119 (Korea’s 911). It didn’t go through. I had forgotten that I didn’t have a sim card in my phone.

“I must yell for help,” I thought. But my throat was infected and I couldn’t raise my voice beyond a whisper.

I looked up at the short ceiling above my head, closed my eyes.

I remembered when my mother used to say “the best way to get rid of bugs is to starve them.” And here I was, sick and starved. “What is the point?” I asked myself. “They wanted this. They wouldn’t help even if I asked for it.”

I looked up at the short ceiling above my head, closed my eyes, and accepted my death.

Near death experience is grand and horrifying. When you’re about to die, your life will flash in front of your eyes in vivid detail. You will remember the best moments in your life, your hopes and dreams, the people who you love, and resist to accept their loss.

I remembered the sewer scene in Ratatouille. I remembered how I promised myself to never give up without a fight. With the savage effort of self-preservation, I opened the drawer and took my two $10 bills. I put on my shoes and walked downstairs. I spent 5 in the grocery store to buy pre-packaged chicken and rice, and took a bite right there. I was coughing hysterically and getting blood on my sleeves. The cashier looked at me with terror. He wanted to call the ambulance, but I stepped out and walked to the pharmacy.

There was a young lady behind the counter. Once she saw me she said that I needed to go to a hospital. I was afraid of admitting that I only had $15 left. I was worried that she would call the government on me and deport me for having no money. I just kept telling her “No. I’m okay, I’m okay.” She gave me 5 different medicines, which totalled to $30. I refused to take them and started to walk away. She called me to come back. I looked at her. She was wearing a mask, but from her eyes, I could see that she understood. She opened her wallet, put her own money in the cash register, and handed me the medicine in a plastic bag.

I got better after a few days. I went back to resume my classes, where I realized I was kicked out of my Korean language school for failing to show up for more than three sessions. I explained to my Korean teacher that it was because I had caught the flu. She felt sad for me and said that she would talk to the office and fix it for me if I gave her my doctor’s note. I told her that I couldn’t visit a doctor. That was when she, too, understood. Since day one, she had been asking me to wear warmer clothes. She put the puzzle pieces together and found that I must be extremely poor. She kept apologizing. She said that she would’ve helped me if the school didn’t strictly prohibit exchange of money or goods between teachers and students. She held my hands and cried.

My interactions with my teacher and that pharmacist made me question whether foreigners were as heartless and cruel toward me as I thought.

I ran out of money and had to ask others for help. But I had to keep that a secret. I would’ve been deported if identified as a beggar. I was really afraid to ask other locals, fearing that they could talk to the government. I went around near the US military base, in the only English-speaking neighborhood, and with a sad voice, whispered to foreigners and tourists, “can you buy me food, please?”

I was a naive teenager, raised in a religious society. I never had experienced sex or knew what prostitution was. It is only in retrospect do I realize that many of them had mistaken me for a prostitute.

There were other young boys in Korea, mainly from Thailand and Malaysia, who were in a similar situation and were making their living by selling their bodies. I was an eighteen year-old with soft features, extremely thin, no coat, no gloves, and looked gloomy. I looked like a miserable immigrant, just like they were.

One night, a drunk middle-aged European man approached me. Without a word, he pulled me next to his side and put his hand under my shirt and touched my back. It was the first time I had been touched sexually. My muscles froze. I pulled myself away and quickened my pace.

He walked after me and said that he wanted to pay me. I asked “for what?” He looked into my eyes and grinned. But after a few seconds, his sardonic grin went away. He started apologizing. He said that he thought I was someone else. I just said that I’m going to walk home before it gets more cold. I started to walk away, until he said “can I invite you to dinner?”

I stopped. The back of my throat was burning and I had a headache. I hadn’t eaten anything for twenty-four hours. I walked back and meekly said: “Yes.”

He took me to an Italian restaurant nearby. It was close to midnight and outside was covered with snow. I didn’t know any of the words on the menu. I pointed to a random word. It was ravioli. When the plate came, something about the rush by which I ate the food seemed to affect the man. He asked me about myself, and after a brief introduction, I started talking about what the articles I had read. Reading was a habit I had kept even in my desperate condition. I talked to him about genetics, IT, and economics. He was shocked to hear me speak so enthusiastically and well in English. His brows furrowed. He expected to find a prostitute, but had found an innocent intelligent boy in depths of despair.

He asked me for my phone number, I said I didn’t have any because I could not afford one. He instead wrote his email on a piece of paper and handed it to me. He said that he is a Polish executive on a business trip and is going back to Europe the next day. He asked me to send him an email.

After packing some more food for me, he got me a cab, and paid for it in cash. Once the cab drove a safe distance, I asked the driver to pull over and walked home, in order to keep the rest of the money to myself.

I felt dirty for having talked to that man. When I arrived at the room where I was sleeping, I threw that piece of paper away.

Two weeks later, I was around the same area when I saw him again. He ran to me and grabbed my arm. I thought he was a local and had lied to me about being on a business trip. But he said that he came back to Korea hoping to see me. I didn’t believe it until he showed me the entry stamps on his passport. He asked if I was hungry, and took me to a pizza place.

He asked me why I hadn’t sent him an email. I said “So what? My life is over anyway.”

He took my email address this time and made sure he had typed the address right. The next morning, I received an offer in my inbox.

I still have his email in my inbox. I could copy it here, but don’t want to condemn myself to weeks of nightmare by looking at it.

In his email he offered to bring me to Poland and pay for my education. He said that he has hired many young people and knows talent when he sees it. He said that the Polish Foreign Minister was his buddy and he could guarantee me a visa.

I ignored his email. Someone had told me about something called asylum, and I was preparing to apply for it to be able to stay in Korea.

I reached out to a Korean immigration lawyer to ask a question about the asylum process. He said that I should look for other means to stay because the Korean government only grants 4.2% of asylum applications. I looked it up. I learned that it was true. And that if I apply for asylum I won’t be able to get a visa from any other country ever again. And that applying for asylum doesn’t entitle me to a work permit. Regardless, I preferred to take my chances with the asylum system than to be trafficked to Europe by a strange Polish man.

The person who had told me about asylum was named Nick. He was a 55 year-old American man who started to help me after I approached him on the street. He seemed to be my friend; he bought me dinners almost every day, invited me to his house, empathized with me, and told me that he was against the laws that put me into this situation. He became a protective, grandfatherly figure in my life.

On Saturdays, he took me to an American pub, where I met someone named Ismail. He was a 20 year-old Malaysian boy. He tried hard to talk to people and to laugh and smile. I sensed the presence of a tragic pain on his face. He was very sweet and looked very intelligent. He talked about all the countries he used to visit with his parents. After I told him my story, he hugged me and cried with me. I told him that I plan to apply for asylum, and if rejected, stay and work illegally, he yelled “No! You can’t do that!”

He told me that he had come to Korea when he was 17 after his parents died in a car crash and everything they had was stolen in Malaysia. He said that he had come with a boat from Jeju island, south of the Korean peninsula, and made his way to Seoul. He was living illegally and working in an underground factory in Seoul.

“Do you want to know what underground work is like?” He showed me his hands. His thumbs were bandaged. He unrolled the bandage and showed the severe blisters, one of them had turned yellow from infections. He explained that the owner forces them to work sometimes twenty hours a day, and threatens to call the police on them if they don’t work hard enough. He said that the other night he and twenty other people were locked in the factory for two days with no light as punishment.

Nick, the 55 year-old American, saw me talking to Ismail. He took me to his home, and yelled at me: “Listen, the most important thing in a relationship is faith. You need to be faithful to me. Why were you talking to that Malaysian guy? Were you trying to cheat on me?!”

I didn’t say anything. I looked at him with a bewildered face. “What? Did you think I’m feeding and sheltering you for nothing? Sooner or later you’ll have to get on my bed. And not even talk with no one else. Then we’ll marry and I’ll get you a green card,” he said. Then he added: “That’s the only way I can save you.”

I was dumbfounded. The only person who I thought was helping me from the goodness of his heart was really looking to exploit me. I didn’t have a sexual or romantic interest in anyone, much less the man whom I looked at as my grandpa.

I sat down and nodded my head. After a while, I made an excuse to leave and never went back.

That week, I met Ismail. He looked strange. His eyes were drowsy and his head was hanging low, like a hunchback. “What happened?!” I asked, with a terrified face. “What? This?” he pointed to his neck, “it’s a little gift from my boss. My skeleton has popped… in my back.” He turned around and showed a bump on his backbones.

“Have you gone to a doctor?” I asked, with shock and tears in my eyes.

“Doctor? For illegals like me?”

He looked at my terrified face and his expression changed. He started giggling uncontrollably. Unable to seek medical help, he was likely on some street drugs.

I just started to run. I went to the subway station. People were indifferently laughing and scrolling on their phones. I turned away. I walked back to my pod. The enthusiasm and love of my early days was all gone. Now everything about this city repulsed me.

Seeing your own blood is not as scary as seeing someone else's. Seeing Ismail in that situation made it clear to me the depth of that country’s inhumanity. How could any doctor sit behind his desk knowing there are people with herniated discs who are not allowed to seek medical help? How could any woman sleep knowing that the shirt she wore today could’ve been made in a slave workshop? How could the policeman, the judge, the janitor, put on his clothes in the morning knowing that their government is pressing its boots on Ismail’s back?

I needed to get out of Korea. I looked through my inbox, found the European man’s email in my trashbox, and replied to it my acceptance of his offer.

He fulfilled his promise, and got me out of Korea. But everything in my life took an even darker turn.

I will explain the rest in the next article.