This Friday, I was attending a lecture by a defector from DPRK. He was a 38-years-old nice man, who spoke pretty good English (he had learned it in South Korea and the UK, where he went for exchange from a South Korean university). Today he works in an NGO that studies transitional justice in North Korea. He defected in 1999 by fording the Tumen river on Korean-Chinese border. He then had lived in Yanbian Korean autonomous prefecture of Jilin Province of China before emigrating to South Korea in 2002. In North Korea, he lived with his parents and two sisters, an elder and a younger one. His father served in Korean People's Army, while his mother was a worker before she married, after the marriage she was a household. His mother died from heart decease during the famine in the 1990s. The defector's parents had university education but they talked their children out of getting higher education, as higher education does not give any advantage unless you are a member of the...