North Koreans adrift in South
Lost at ‘home’
SEOUL, South Korea, April 4, (AP): A middle-aged man is walking through a quiet Seoul neighborhood when he suddenly stops. He lights a cigarette, cupping his hands to shield the flame from the winter wind, and takes a deep draw, remembering how things used to be. He’s a former policeman, a broad-shouldered man with a growling voice and a crushing handshake.
Back where he came from, he says, he was someone who mattered.
“In North Korea, people were afraid of me,” he says. He says it wistfully, almost sadly, like a boy talking about a dog he once had. “They knew I could just drag them away.”
That fear meant respect, and bribes, in the North Korean town where he lived, a place where the electricity rarely worked and the Internet was only a rumor. It meant he could buy a TV, and that he had food even as those around him went hungry. It meant that when he grew exhausted by the relentless poverty and oppression around him, and when relatives abroad offered to advance him the money to escape, he had connections to a good smuggler.
Just over a year ago, that smuggler showed him where to slip across a river and into China, on his way to South Korea. His new home is one of the wealthiest and most technologically advanced nations in the world. It has a thriving democracy and a per-capita income at least 12 times larger than the North’s. Seoul is a city of infinite shopping choices, glass-fronted office towers and armies of exquisitely dressed businesspeople. He used to dream of the easy life he’d have here.
Regret
And what does he think now? “Sometimes, when my work is too hard, I think about my job as a policeman,” says the man, who spoke on condition his name not be used, fearing for the safety of relatives who still live in the North. “I didn’t have problems with money back then. I ate what I wanted to eat.” He pauses, thinking about his decision to leave: “There are times when I regret it a lot.”
Every year, thousands of North Koreans risk imprisonment, or worse, to leave their homeland, many hoping to eventually reach the South. Instead, they often find themselves lost in a nation where they thought they’d feel at home, struggling with depression, discrimination, joblessness and their own lingering pride in the repressive nation they left behind. Surveys have shown that up to onethird would return home if they could.
Take the former policeman, an increasingly bitter day laborer who now supports his family hauling bags of cement through the sprawling apartment blocks constantly under construction around Seoul. His hands are rougher than sandpaper now. His fingernails are warped. He sleeps most nights in a dormitory near his latest construction site, just outside the city, only occasionally visiting his wife and the rest of his family, who live in a middleclass Seoul neighborhood.
“I knew that South Korea was a capitalist country, that it was very rich. I thought that if I can just get there, I can work less but earn a lot of money,” he says.
Naivete
He grimaces when he thinks of his naivete.
More than 27,000 North Koreans exiles live in the South, most arriving since a brutal famine tore at the country in the mid-1990s. Government control foundered amid widespread starvation, and security loosened along the border with China. While security has again tightened, nearly 1,300 refugees reached South Korea last year, according to statistics compiled by the Seoul government. For most, the journey required bribing border guards, life underground in China for months or years, and weeks of travel through still more countries.
Even success doesn’t make life easy.
Gae-yoon Lee, who was raised on a collective farm, left North Korea in 2010 with only a high school diploma. Six years later, she’s a published poet who often writes about her childhood and the famine, and is midway through a degree in Korean literature at one of Seoul’s top universities.
A quiet woman with a stylish purse and braces on her teeth, she finds herself intimidated by southerners’ intense focus on success.