After fleeing more than 300 kilometers across the Yellow Sea, the dissident’s only regret was that he did not bring night vision goggles.

At the end of his escape from China last summer on a jet ski, Kwon Pyong looked out into the darkness at the South Korean coast. As he approached the shore, he saw seagulls bobbing as if they were floating in the water. He kept going, and then ran aground: The seagulls were squatting in the mud.

“I brought everything: sunscreen, spare batteries, a knife to cut the ropes of the buoys,” he recalled in an interview. He was also prepared to use a laser pointer to signal his location if he got stuck, and a lighter to burn his notes if he was captured. He also had a visa to enter South Korea, and he said he had intended to arrive at the port of entry rather than run aground on the mudflats.

These are not all.

Kwon Pyong, 36, an ethnic Korean who has mocked China’s authoritarian leaders and criticized the ruling Communist Party for persecuting dozens of democracy activists at home and abroad, said he was banned from leaving the country by the government and faced years of detention, imprisonment and surveillance.

But escaping to South Korea did not bring him the relief he had expected. He said he was still being pursued by the Chinese government and was also detained for a time by the South Korean government. Even after his release, he was in legal limbo: neither wanted nor allowed to leave.

It was 10 months before Kwon was allowed to leave South Korea. Days before his flight out on Sunday, he returned to the same tidal flat off Incheon where he ran aground last summer and publicly recounted for the first time the details of his elaborate escape.

Court documents from his criminal case in South Korea, past interviews with his friends and family and a statement last year from the Incheon Coast Guard all confirm many of the details of his story.

On the morning of August 16 last year, Quan Ping set off from the foggy coast of Shandong Peninsula in a motorboat. In order not to attract the attention of the police, he withdrew a total of $25,000 in cash from several banks and bought a Yamaha WaveRunner motorboat.

He said he wore a black life jacket and a motorcycle helmet all the way, dashing into 3-meter-high waves and dodging rice wine bottles floating on the sea. His skin was burned by the scorching summer sun, and he fell into the sea twice and lost his sunglasses.

He refueled with five barrels of gasoline tied to his motorboat. He prepared five bottles of drinking water and five ham and tuna sandwiches for himself. He navigated with a marine compass and a smartphone he got from someone else.

As the setting sun cast a warm glow over the islands off the coast of South Korea, Kwon Pyeong finally saw land. What was supposed to be an eight-hour journey took 14 hours. When he arrived in Incheon, the pink sky he had stopped to admire had turned pitch black.

Kwon said he did not see any ships or vessels on guard, even though he was entering a heavily militarized area where the navy monitors for any signs of trouble, including defectors from the North.

Kwon, who speaks Chinese, English and some Korean, called local police for help. During the hour he waited, he paced around the jet ski in beige Crocs, trying to shoo away mosquitoes.

He said the Incheon Coast Guard and South Korean marines rescued him that night, then took him into custody and began investigating him with South Korea’s National Intelligence Service.

Authorities in South Korea, which rarely accepts refugees, issued him a deportation order, but he was barred from leaving the country in the months that followed as he fought criminal charges of illegal entry, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.

He said he was curious about how things would have turned out if he had arrived in South Korea as planned.

South Korean prosecutors lifted the ban on Kwon Pyong’s departure from the country only after his criminal case was concluded this month. Kwon Pyong said he planned to apply for asylum in the United States or Canada. His flight on Sunday was to Newark Airport in New York.

“I want to live my life,” he said. “I want to live a quiet life.”

Quan Ping is from a city in Jilin Province, China, near the North Korean border. He has been visiting South Korea, where his grandfather was born, frequently since he was a child. He spent his college years in the United States, where he went by the name Johnny, and he participated in the Army Reserve Officer Training Corps program at Iowa State University and took flying lessons.

He studied aerospace engineering for a few years in college and returned to China in 2012 to run an online clothing brand and trade cryptocurrencies. He continued to travel, he said, taking trips to Lebanon and Syria as an aspiring photojournalist.

He first ran afoul of Chinese authorities after he began criticizing the Communist Party online. In 2016, he posted on social media about his participation in anti-government protests in the Chinese territory of Hong Kong. He wore a T-shirt that called Chinese leader Xi Jinping “a“Xitler”.

Chinese authorities arrested Kwon Pyong that year and sentenced him to 18 months in prison in 2017 on charges of “inciting subversion of state power,” a charge often used against dissidents and human rights lawyers.

After his release in 2018, he said, police monitored his communications, tracked his movements and questioned him regularly. He also said security agents were wary of his ties to leaders of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, including Wang Dan, once one of China’s most wanted men.

“I couldn’t live a normal life,” he said.

China’s Ministry of Public Security did not respond to a request for comment.

As police investigated Kwon’s family and friends, he became desperate to leave. He said he planned to leave China by sea, inspired in part by the 1994 film “The Shawshank Redemption” and by the adventurers who sailed around Australia on jet skis.Lindsay WarnerHe saw South Korea as the only viable option.

He left behind his e-commerce and cryptocurrency businesses, as well as his friends, family and girlfriend.

Kwon said investigators seemed confused by his story after he was rescued from the mudflat and interrogated him, threatened to torture him and rejected his request for a lawyer. The Incheon Coast Guard, which is leading the investigation, said in a statement that “no human rights violations” were found during the probe.

In court, Quan Pyeong argued that he was a political refugee who had intended to legally arrive at Incheon Port, more than 1,000 meters from the mudflat, on a tourist visa. In November, the judge found him guilty of illegal entry and sentenced him to one year in prison, suspended for two years.

The ruling freed Kwon but did not end his legal woes: Prosecutors appealed the judge’s decision and immigration officials imposed a travel ban on him.

While living at his parents’ home in Ansan, south of Seoul, Kwon would go to the gym, read books about cryptocurrency trading and volunteer at an English school for adults. He also joined a soccer club with a group of Nigerian refugees and became friends with them, he said.

But he didn’t let his guard down. He stuck to the habits he’d developed in China: constantly checking security cameras, using encrypted text messaging apps and a Faraday bag that blocks signals.

Lee Dae-sun, a South Korean activist who helped Kwon Pyong, said he had warned him about the Chinese overseas police.Operation Fox HuntThe action forcibly repatriates Chinese dissidents living overseas.

Lee said South Korea’s National Intelligence Service confirmed to him that he and Kwon Pyong were targets of the operation. The NIS did not respond to a request for comment.

“It’s not safe for him to continue living in South Korea,” Lee Dae-sun said.

In May, the Court of Appeal rejected the prosecutors’ appeal and Kwon Pyeong’s lawyer’s efforts to reduce his sentence. Kwon Pyeong’s lawyer, Kim Se-jin, said that in order to leave South Korea as soon as possible, Kwon Pyeong decided not to continue his appeal and the prosecutors lifted the travel ban.

On the tidal flats, Quan Ping said he was looking forward to leaving China and starting new business endeavors. Some of his friends and relatives live in the United States and Canada, he said. He will travel to the United States on a tourist visa.

“I want to start my second life,” he said.

One immigration law expert said that while the grounds for seeking asylum in the United States appear strong, waiting for a decision from authorities could take years. Yael Shah, an expert at Refugees International, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, said Kwon Pyong must also prove that he has a “well-founded fear” of further persecution if he is deported back to China.

He said goodbye to his parents and friends in South Korea at Incheon airport on Sunday, where he will be banned from returning for five years because of his criminal record.

He disappeared into the security line, holding his ticket for seat 17A and the black tactical backpack he brought with him when he fled China, which contained his Chinese passport and South Korean deportation order. He confirmed by phone that he had boarded the plane.

“I’m happy and sad at the same time,” he said minutes before his flight took off. “And angry,” he added, “that it took me so long to leave Korea.”

At around 10 o’clock in the evening, the flight status display showed that his plane had taken off.