Escape from North Korea (34 page)

The tiny number of defectors who arrived in South Korea from the 1950s through the mid-1990s received heroes' welcomes. They benefited from generous resettlement packages that included apartments and large sums of cash. That changed in 1999, when the annual number of refugees reaching South Korea exceeded one hundred for the first time and it became clear to the government that its lavish support of defectors was too unwieldy and expensive to continue. The new arrivals were more likely to be ordinary citizens than defectors bringing state secrets with them.

That year Seoul opened a resettlement center for the newcomers. Its official name is the Settlement Support Center for North Korean Refugees, but everyone calls it by its nickname,
Hanawon
, or “house of unity.” Hanawon was shrouded in secrecy until 2009, when President Lee Myun-bak's administration invited journalists to tour the facility on the occasion of its tenth anniversary. The Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun administrations had played down Hanawon's role. They did not want to risk upsetting Pyongyang by broadcasting how well South Korea treated refugees from the North.

Hanawon is an hour's drive south of Seoul set on a sprawling campus in the heart of the Korean countryside. The facility is surrounded by a fence that is topped with barbed wire and too high for intruders to scale easily. Armed guards inspect visitors' credentials at the entrance. But first you have to find it, which is no easy task. For security reasons, the Ministry of Unification does not publish the street address, and there are no road signs directing visitors to the facility, which is off a country road and nestled amid cornfields and
tile-roofed farmhouses. Authorized visitors receive driving instructions, but on the morning of my visit, my driver had to stop several pedestrians to ask for directions and also make a phone call to the director's assistant before we finally located the entrance.

As we pulled into the parking lot, we passed several dozen young women strolling toward two buses that were waiting for them nearby. The women were dressed identically in gray athletic pants, sneakers, and puffy winter jackets in a metallic silver color. Slung over each woman's arm was a tote bag inscribed in Korean with an inspirational quotation from Helen Keller: “Hope is the religion that leads to success. Without hope, nothing can be accomplished.” Foreign visitors are rare at Hanawon, and the women stopped to stare at me as I got out of the car. I guessed that I was the first Westerner some of them had seen. When I first lived in Asia in the early 1970s, this kind of reaction was not uncommon. But there aren't many places in Asia anymore where a white face, green eyes, and brown hair will stop someone in her tracks. Their stares are a measure of North Korea's isolation.

Hanawon is the second stop for North Koreans who reach South Korea. Upon arrival in the country, refugees are whisked away to a secure facility, where the National Intelligence Service interviews them. The aim of the debriefing is twofold: to weed out spies and to see if the refugee has information that could be useful to the South Korean government. Even ordinary people can provide useful information for South Korean researchers on life in the North. The information they impart can point the way to political or social trends that might prove to be significant. These intelligence debriefings can last from one to several months.

The refugees then head for Hanawon and a three-month crash course to prepare them for life in the South. Hanawon's curriculum is intensive: 420 hours of required course work, 80 hours of vocational training at off-site locations, and 386 hours of elective classes. Students rise at seven in the morning and are required to attend classes
from nine to five. The mandatory curriculum includes courses in history, political science, and economics. A lot of time is devoted to unlearning what they were taught in North Korea. In North Korea, for instance, schoolchildren learn that the Korean War began when American troops invaded their country on June 25, 1950. At Hanawon, the refugees learn the truth: The war started when Kim Il Sung ordered his troops to invade the South.
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The North Koreans at Hanawon spend hours studying the Korean language as it is spoken in the South. They learn South Korean slang and the myriad English words that South Koreans have adopted into their vocabulary. North Koreans who have settled in the South often complain that they can't understand what their bosses or neighbors are saying, or that they can't read something seemingly as simple as a billboard or a newspaper ad. Similarly, South Koreans say they can identify someone from North Korea the moment he opens his mouth. The language study is both a practical necessity and a confidence builder for the newcomers.

Vocational training is aimed at preparing the students to work immediately after graduation from Hanawon. It focuses on factory work for men, and food preparation, hairdressing, and nurse's-aide jobs for women. The women I saw in the parking lot were boarding buses that would take them to their vocational internships. Hanawon also offers prep courses for the examinations for vocational licenses.

By far the most popular elective is computer training. The new arrivals' eagerness to become computer-savvy is a positive indicator of their determination to succeed in South Korea's wired society. Unless they became computer-literate while staying in China, most of the new arrivals will sit in front of a computer screen for the first time only after they reach Hanawon. The center has five sixty-seat computer labs. In the evenings, all are packed with North Koreans learning how to manipulate a mouse and surf the Web.

Students also take courses in the practical basics of everyday life in South Korea. They learn how to use an ATM, how to signal the
bus driver that they want to get off, how to use a credit card, how to operate a kitchen stove and a hot-water heater. They take field trips to supermarkets, the subway in Seoul, and a local bank. They have a chance to go on a two-day homestay with a South Korean family. Nearly all the refugees are able to read, write, and do basic arithmetic, but many have had only several years of formal education. Hanawon offers remedial training to help them brush up such essential skills.

The hardest thing to teach new arrivals is South Korea's work ethic. “In South Korea, you need to work very hard,” said an official at the Ministry of Unification. “Almost all the refugees complain that it is too hard to work in a South Korean company. It's too demanding.”
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The director of Hanawon, Youn Mirang, explained: The North Koreans “don't understand the real meaning of competitiveness or competition,” she said. Teaching such concepts is difficult. North Korean refugees are good at taking directions, but they are very passive workers. “They accept orders, but that's it,” Youn Mirang said. “They don't have any initiative.”

Given the culture they grew up in, that shouldn't be surprising, Youn pointed out. In North Korea, initiative and creativity are dangerous attributes. A worker who speaks up could face serious consequences. “It's safer to be passive.” At her invitation, North Koreans who have settled successfully in South Korea give guest lectures at Hanawon and offer tips about how to behave in the workplace.

All this support is expensive for the South Korean taxpayer. Almost half of the Ministry of Unification's annual budget is devoted to the resettlement of refugees. In 2010, that amounted to $67.2 million, up 27 percent from 2009. In addition to the Hanawon training course, every refugee is entitled to an array of benefits, including a rent-free apartment for up to fifty years, medical care, job training, and educational assistance. Upon graduation from Hanawon, refugees receive a payment of $2,644, with additional payments of
an equivalent sum in quarterly installments over the following year. Refugees used to receive their resettlement money in one large lump sum, but the South Korean government changed that practice after it found that too many refugees either went on shopping sprees or were taken advantage of by con men.

As an incentive to work, refugees are eligible for additional bonuses of up to $20,000 if they complete five hundred hours of job training and hold down a job for at least six months. To encourage the hiring of refugees, the government gives companies that employ a North Korean a subsidy equal to half that employee's wages for up to three years. Refugees are eligible for full tuition at public universities and half tuition at private universities. In 2009, the Lee government established a series of Hana Centers in communities around the country staffed by social workers and others. The Hana Centers provide support, counseling, and advice to refugees.

All this adds up to a generous package aimed at integrating North Koreans into South Korean society. Refugees are assisted, too, by dozens of nonprofit organizations, many run by churches, that provide a wide range of services, including job support, English classes, and personal counseling.

The government will support qualified North Koreans who want to set up small nonprofits or go into business for themselves, and it offers loans or grants to refugees with approved business plans. Choi Jung has done both and agreed to talk to me about her experiences opening a dumpling factory and establishing a nonprofit dance troupe. Both are located in Daegu City, south of the capital.

Mrs. Choi arrives at my hotel in Seoul in a whirlwind of pink. It is Saturday morning, and she stands out from the lunchtime crowd of fashionable Seoulites who are studiously dressed down for the weekend in designer jeans and leather jackets. In contrast, she is dressed to kill in a flamingo-hued dress. Her three-inch heels herald her arrival as she click-clacks her way across the lobby to greet me. She is impeccably coiffed and made up, and holds a cellphone in
one hand and a handsome leather handbag in the other. It would be easier to mistake her for a businesswoman on her way to a meeting than for what she really is: a North Korean refugee who has made it big in a provincial city in the South.

Mrs. Choi is trailed by an entourage of fellow refugees, including her husband and three younger women. She greets me warmly. We have been introduced by Phillip Buck, the Seattle pastor who guided both Choi Jung and her future husband out of China. Pastor Buck calls her on her cellphone later to make sure we have connected. She would do anything for him. “It's not easy for us to talk about North Korea,” she tells me later. But Pastor Buck asked, so she agreed.
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After the introductions, Mrs. Choi takes charge. She has prepared a presentation for me and wants to go upstairs to my room to play two DVDs she has brought. The first DVD is a recording of a recent performance by her dance company at the Daegu City Center. The performers—dancers, musicians, drummers, comedians—are North Korean. They all have day jobs; dancing is a sideline.

As I watch the DVD, the lead dancer, a tall, slender, graceful woman, looks familiar. I realize that's because she is sitting on my couch. She is one of the ladies in Mrs. Choi's entourage. The dancer, who appears to be in her late thirties or early forties, tells me she is a graduate of an elite music and dance university in Pyongyang. She left North Korea after a friend threatened to expose her as an enemy of the state for watching a videotape of a South Korean TV show. The dancer had made the error of telling her friend that she believed what she saw and heard on the forbidden tape. Fearing arrest, she took a train to a city near the Chinese border and handed over all her savings to a broker to guide her across the river.

In South Korea, the woman is ecstatic to be dancing again. In North Korea, she says, she had been selected by the government when she was a child to be a dancer. But in South Korea, the government does not direct your future, she explains. She speaks emphatically. From her point of view, she is making a great revelation, and
she wants to be sure that I grasp the importance of what she is saying. If someone in South Korea
wants
to pursue a career, she tells me, she can
choose
to do so. It is a matter of personal preference. “
That's
the difference between South Korea and North Korea,” she announces. She adds that if she were still living in Pyongyang, she would no longer be permitted to perform. North Korean women are not allowed on stage after the age of thirty, she tells me. She then reveals another great truth she has learned about the South: In South Korea, dancers can perform as long as they are able.

Mrs. Choi's second DVD is about her dumpling factory. She started it in 2008 with a bank loan guaranteed by the government, investments from friends, and all the money she had in the world. She arrived in South Korea in 2003. She accumulated her savings from five years of working in a restaurant during the day and cleaning offices at night. She reels off a list of the factory's offerings—red pepper dumplings, scallion dumplings, vegetable dumplings, meat dumplings, kimchi dumplings, red bean paste dumplings. The dumplings have a distinctive North Korean taste, she tells me—very spicy and very delicious. She apologizes for not bringing me samples.

Mrs. Choi has another goal in addition to building a successful business. She wants to bring Northerners and Southerners together through food, by introducing traditional North Korean cuisine to the South. In honor of this attempt at dumpling diplomacy, she named her business Unification Dumplings.

Mrs. Choi describes the ups and downs of the dumpling business. “When I finished Hanawon, I was daydreaming about life in South Korea,” she explains. “I thought that as long as I worked hard, I could accomplish anything. But there were a lot of difficulties.” She goes through a long list of problems she had to solve before her factory could begin to operate: perfecting the recipes, finding suppliers, testing the market, devising a budget. Her biggest mistake, she says, was hiring employees before she had any work for them to do. She had to pay seven salaries for four months while she developed her
product line. “I was thinking more about helping people than about my budget,” she says. Today the Unification Dumpling factory has fifteen employees. Most of them are from North Korea. The factory has a daily production of fifteen thousand dumplings, which it sells largely to restaurants.