Escape from North Korea (33 page)

Sarah Yun has her hands full making sure the house runs smoothly and keeping up the spirits of the residents. Everything is quiet at the moment, but new arrivals are expected in a few days. LiNK colleagues currently are guiding a half dozen North Koreans across China. They are scheduled to cross the border soon and make their way to the safe house. As Yun knows from experience, the entry of newcomers could upset the current equilibrium. Yun has a degree from Harvard, which gave her a good education on Korean history. But she acknowledges that Harvard did not prepare her for working with North Korean refugees. The group dynamics can be challenging. She sometimes wishes she had a degree in psychology.

The shelter is run under a strict set of house rules. Every resident is required to sign a pledge at the outset of his stay agreeing to abide by them. The rules are intended to ensure the security of the refugees and guard individual privacy: Do not disclose any information about anyone other than yourself. No personal cellphones. No email. Do not leave the house without permission. Yun enforces a three-strikes policy. If a resident breaks three major rules, he must leave the shelter. She turns him over to the local immigration authorities.

Yun notices a difference in attitude between North Koreans who arrive directly from North Korea after having spent only a few days or weeks in China and those who have lived in China for extended periods. “Those who come straight out are pampered,” she said. It's an odd word to use to describe people who have just left the world's
most repressive state. She puts it another way: Many North Koreans go through a version of adolescence once they reach a free country, she says. They are used to having decisions made for them in North Korea. Now, for the first time in their lives, they are expected to take control of their own lives. They don't understand how to handle their newfound independence, she says, and they can be overwhelmed with choices and responsibilities. Life in North Korea has left them with few problem-solving skills. They go through a period of trial and error that can be very frustrating to them. The Americans who work at the shelter provide structure and support but try not to be too nurturing. They understand that the North Koreans must learn to make it on their own.

North Koreans who stayed in China for extended periods of time have different kinds of adjustment problems. They lived a kind of half-life in China, Yun observes. “They were always worried about deportation in China. They had no rights. They were exploited.” Once they reach a third country, the anxieties they've been living with don't simply go away. It takes a period of adjustment. At the same time, she says, North Koreans who have lived in China have a better understanding of the meaning of their new freedom and a better appreciation of it. “Everyone expresses huge gratitude and is very cooperative,” she says. “I don't have to remind them to do chores. They appreciate the fact that they can trust someone.”

A few days after we meet, Yun is scheduled to take part in her first rescue mission. She is driving to the border to meet the group of North Koreans who are now making their way across China. She and another LiNK colleague are to pick them up at a prearranged location and drive them back to the shelter. She is nervous. Will the group make it out safely? Will Yun and her colleague be able to find the correct spot and pick up the North Koreans as planned? “It's notable how well established the underground railroad has become over the past decade,” she says, almost as if she were reassuring herself. “It's relatively easy to get someone out these days.”

That said, she will be happier once the North Koreans are across the border, safely seated in her van and en route to the shelter. Escorting North Koreans out of China on the new underground railroad is someone else's job. Welcoming them to freedom is hers.

UNIFICATION DUMPLINGS

T
he story of a Chinese watermelon illustrates the difficulties North Koreans face adjusting to their new lives outside the closed, totalitarian state they fled. The watermelon in question belonged to a North Korean family hiding in the mountains of northeast China. They lived in a tent and ventured out of the woods only occasionally to look for odd jobs or to beg for food in the community. One day a local farmer took pity on them and gave them a watermelon from his field. Later in the week, the farmer dropped by and noticed that they hadn't touched his gift.

“Why haven't you eaten the melon?” the farmer asked.

One of the North Koreans replied, “We don't have a pot to boil it in.”

Identifying fruits is of course the least of the problems that North Koreans encounter when they reach South Korea or the West. It is easy for a newcomer to learn what a watermelon is and how to eat
it. It's far more difficult to learn how to thrive in a modern culture, a free-market economy, and an open political system.

The record is mixed. Many North Koreans progress painfully and achieve limited success in their new homes. Others move forward quickly and adapt to their new environments more easily. A few achieve a high level of success in a relatively short time—a college degree, a profitable small business, a well-paying job. The newcomer's age, level of education, length of time spent in China and whether he has relatives in his new country all are factors in determining how well and how quickly he is likely to adjust. The energy, persistence, and ambition that characterize a refugee's escape from North Korea and China don't always transfer well to life in a free society.

This holds true even in the one place where a North Korean might be expected to fit in relatively easily: South Korea. Most of the North Koreans who flee China end up in South Korea, where they receive generous resettlement benefits from the South Korean government. But government support isn't everything. Despite a shared language, history, and culture, refugees from North Korea often have a tough time in the South. On the surface, the statistics are discouraging: North Koreans in the South earn less than South Koreans do. Their rates of joblessness are higher. Their children are more likely to drop out of school. They suffer more from psychological and emotional disorders. A disproportionate number turn to drugs, alcohol, or crime. A tiny few are so unhappy that they actually have returned to North Korea.

But we need to put such statistics in context. Most of the North Koreans who live in South Korea have arrived since 2000. That is, they have been there for less than a generation. In 2001, there were only 1,357 North Koreans living in South Korea.
¹
A decade later, there were 22,000. South Korea is one of the world's richest countries. It's unrealistic to expect immigrants from a place as poor and backward as North Korea to perform at South Korean levels in such a short period of time. As is typical with immigrants everywhere,
full integration probably belongs to the next generation. The refugees' children are more likely than their parents to achieve comfort, wealth, and status in South Korea.

That said, the South Korean people could do a better job of welcoming North Koreans. Too many refugees encounter ignorance, apathy, and discrimination in their new home. Some South Koreans tend to perceive North Koreans as outsiders, even interlopers. Stereotypes characterize North Korean refugees as losers—lazy, uneducable, and uncooperative. The Northerners are aliens among brothers, as a pair of South Korean commentators have put it.
²

An award-winning South Korean feature film,
The Journal of Musan
, portrays the discrimination faced by some North Korean immigrants in South Korea. A scene early in the movie shows a young man on his way to a job interview in Seoul. An older South Korean man gives him a piece of advice: “Don't tell him you're from North Korea, OK?”
³
The implication is clear: If the interviewer finds out that the job applicant is from North Korea, he'll be less likely to hire the young man.

It doesn't help that some South Koreans, especially young people, are profoundly ignorant about North Korea, sometimes even to the extent of not fully grasping the repressive nature of the Kim family regime. Everyone knows that North Korea is poor, but there is a tendency to compare it to the South Korea of the 1950s or '60s, when the South's economy was developing and its political system was under authoritarian rule. The younger generation of South Koreans don't have a good understanding of what life is like in North Korea, said Patrick Daihui Cheh, one of the producers of
Crossing
, a South Korean feature film about a father and son's escape from North Korea. “They know, but they don't really know.”
⁴

A former inmate at the infamous Yodok prison camp who now lectures in South Korea is stunned at the responses he receives from his audiences. After giving a speech to a group of South Korean soldiers, he told a reporter that no one in the audience was interested in
learning more about the atrocities being committed against their fellow Koreans. Instead, the questions were trivial and reflected a lack of basic understanding about the nature of life in North Korea. One listener wanted to know how many vacation days a North Korean soldier received. Another asked whether North Korean soldiers were permitted to visit their girlfriends. Some South Koreans do not believe the gulag even exists, according to another prison-camp survivor who now lives in South Korea.
⁵

South Koreans' ignorance and apathy can be laid in large part at the feet of former Presidents Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun. They are unfortunate side effects of the now abandoned Sunshine Policy of engagement with Pyongyang. The Sunshine Policy was initiated by President Kim Dae-jung in 1998 and continued by his successor, Roh Moo-hyun, who held the presidency from 2003 to 2008. Kim and Roh wanted to win public support in South Korea for their efforts to engage Pyongyang, a path they believed would help open North Korea. They also wanted to avoid public statements that might ignite the fury of the Pyongyang regime. As a result, they deliberately glossed over the Kim family regime's human rights abuses. South Koreans who work on the new underground railroad often refer to the years of Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun as the Lost Decade. For ten years, the South Korean government did its best to prevent South Koreans from having a full and accurate picture of the true nature of the Kim family regime. The Sunshine Policy made it easy for South Koreans to overlook the atrocities in the North. If their government did not seem to care, why should they?

The callous attitude of the two former presidents, both now deceased, is all the more peculiar given their personal histories as champions of the rights of the South Korean people. Kim Dae-jung was a prominent human rights activist before he became president, but he lost his voice when it came to the human rights horrors in the North. Roh Moo-hyun was a human rights lawyer before he took office, but human rights north of the DMZ were way down on his
priority list during his presidency. Their silence about the suffering of the North Korean people was one of the great moral travesties of our time.

The Sunshine Policy was abandoned by President Lee Myung-bak, who took office in early 2008 on a promise of tougher policies on North Korea. His government began to speak out about the North Korean regime's atrocious treatment of its people. At the United Nations General Assembly in New York City that year, South Korea co-sponsored an annual resolution on human rights in North Korea. This was a reversal of the policy of the previous Roh administration, which not only had refused to join the European Union and Japan as a co-sponsor of the human rights resolution but had twice refused even to vote for it.
⁶
In 2009, the South Korean Human Rights Commission published a report on human rights in North Korea, the first time that it had offered a public assessment of the Kim family regime's abuses of its people.

The Lee Myung-bak administration appears to understand the future value of the North Korean refugees in a reunited Korea and has taken measures to prepare for that eventuality. In 2011, President Lee appointed a North Korean defector to head a new government-affiliated education center on what things will be like when the two Koreas reunite. It was the first time a North Korean had been named to a high-level government post in Seoul.
⁷
More than a dozen North Koreans now work at government agencies, and the Lee administration has introduced an affirmative action program to encourage government offices to hire more North Koreans. These are symbolic gestures, but they signal that the South Korean government considers the North Koreans living in South Korea worthy of respect.

Also on President Lee's watch, the South Korean government selected five North Korean students at South Korean universities to study in the United States under a joint American–South Korean program. That was a small but important step. If North Koreans are going to succeed in the highest ranks of business and government in
South Korea, they need to speak English. Speaking English is also an essential skill if they are going to be effective global spokesmen on North Korea. Right now there are few, if any, North Korean refugees or defectors who speak fluent, accent-free English.