Lecture by a Defector from North Korea

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 Workers' Party. That’s why this story’s protagonist did not get higher education while in DPRK. To my question, whether higher education is available for everyone in North Korea, he answered that the availability of higher education depends on the family’s hierarchy in the songun (“military first”) system, as well as on family’s and prospective student’s common backgrounds. If that background is not “good” than the prospective student becomes restricted from getting the higher education, even if that student was brilliant at high school. There were examples of restriction from higher education even among protagonist’s own high school classmates.

In some time, protagonist’s father had to abandon active military service, and his family settled in the city of Haeju. Father was employed at a state firm in Pyongyang, which imported some simple foreign goods, like window curtains. Unemployment is considered a crime in North Korea, and its citizens must constantly have a job in order not to be sent to a labor camp. The only exemptions are for school and university students, active military personnel and married mothers.

The protagonist finished high school in 1995 when he was 17, and started to work in a project bureau that made projects of houses for so-called “propaganda villages” along the demilitarized zone (DMZ) that could be seen from South Korean territory. His elder and younger sisters tried to do legal business after school, but without aby considerable success. Private entrepreneurship is not officially banned in North Korea, but entrepreneurs need an official license to do business and have to pay a very large tax to the government, including by the immediate products of business, if any.

Of course, you can do business illegally without license with the help of bribes. Bribery solves many problems in North Korea and corruption has incredible scale there. Bribery is especially developed in trade: there is a huge black market in DPRK. That black market is so formidable that it even has some features of an underground political organization, which’s members quite actively and relatively successfully defend their interests. Sometimes, black market traders can even physically resist policemen in attempts of goods confiscation. Some experts qualify the North Korean black market as one of the most significant strongholds of dissident thinking in North Korea, even though that thinking is rather limited and narrow-scoped.

There is a belief that DPRK inhabitants know nearly nothing about the outside world and about South Korea. Of course that’s not the case. Yes, North Korean state propaganda describes the United States and Japan as DPRK’s “archenemies” to its citizens, while persuading them that South Korea is just a puppet state of “American imperialists”. But on the other hand, North Korean television quite often shows foreign tourists coming to DPRK, including those from “enemy states”. The presence of those tourists on North Korean soil made the protagonist ask himself a question: why does DPRK freely accept tourists from its “archenemies”?

DPRK inhabitants really have not heard about such familiar brands as Coca-Cola and others. Still, they are acquainted enough with foreign goods that are smuggled into North Korea. Some North Koreans wear South Korean second-hand clothes, women use South Korean contraband make-up, while country is full of smuggled VHS cassettes, CDs and flash drives with K-drama and Western movies. In DPRK’s southern regions it is possible to listen to South Korean radio, and in the vicinity of DMZ it is even possible to catch South Korean operators’ signal by mobile phones, which have been allowed in North Korea for several years already (although an attempt to phone South Korean numbers would have grave consequences for North Korean citizens). While interviewing more recent defectors, the protagonist learned that even Chinese tablets are smuggled into North Korea, even smuggled tablets are not allowed to be used by ordinary citizens.

Ordinary North Korean inhabitants know about the existence of labor camps, where they can be sent for “parasitism” or illegal penetration to the border zone (without breaching the border). On the other hand, most North Koreans have not even heard about the concentration camps for political prisoners and certain social groups of North Korean inhabitants. The protagonists did not know about them, either: he learned about the gulags’ existence only in South Korea.

He escaped from DPRK because he just wanted more freedom and personal responsibility in his life. One day in 1999 he just took a train to the northwestern part of the country to the Chinese border, leaving all his documents at home in order not to be deported back by Chinese authorities. Despite the quite small country’s area, he had travelled there for seven days due to frequent blackouts without having any meals. In the end, he reached the Tumen river coast, where he was detected by North Korean border guards. They transported them to the nearest border station, where he was questioned about what he was doing on the river coast. He lied about waiting for his grandmother, whom he claimed to be a legal trader trading in China, while he himself had lost all his documents. Unexpectedly, they released him. After that, he went to the nearest rice field to pick up some rice to eat. In the field, he was detected by the same border guards who found him on the river coast. They were surprised that the protagonist was so easily released without punishment and gave him a knife to cut the rice. They also offered the future defector to spend time at their border guard point to wait for his grandmother, and asked him to bring them some rice.

The protagonist stayed overnight at a state-owned inn, where twelve people were sleeping on the bare floor with only a thin bedsheet on it. Inn’s administrator allowed the defector to sleep for free only after 30 minutes of persuading. The next morning, though, he asked the protagonist to pay, but he had no money. Luckily, another random man paid for him and he went to the border guard point, where there was nobody. He left the rice there and went out. The fog was so thick on that day that he hardly could open his eyes. He understood that is the brilliant moment to defect, and he forded the shallow Tumen river.

On Chinese territory, the first building he encountered was a building with a red cross on it. The defector thought it was an International Red Cross office, but it appeared to be just a private hospital. Hospital staff, mostly Chinese Koreans, allowed him to take shower, change his clothes and have a meal, but they did not allow him to stay and told him to go further to the countryside. At every shop he entered he was told to go further. In the end, he found a village house, whose owner allowed him to spend a night. The owner then advised the defector to go to the nearest Christian church. He went there and then spent three more years with them. In China, he still did not feel free enough, and that was the reason for emigrating to South Korea in 2002.

In South Korea, it was quite difficult to adapt because of a different way of thinking of South Koreans in comparison to North Koreans. South Koreans are more individualistic, they tend to plan their lives by themselves, while in collective North Korea society and state mostly construct your future without your own participation. In South Korea, the defector was strongly advised to study in the university, even though back in DPRK he did not see any sense in attending it. He followed the advice, and majored in Chinese and English.

Despite considering himself a South Korean, he still feels nostalgia about his time in North Korea, mostly because his family is still in DPRK. He misses his family, and he would like to learn about his sisters’ fate, but he can’t do that. He has had no contact with his family since defecting. He was not able to answer, whether he believes that Korea will be unified soon, either.

The Tumen river, which was forded by the protagonist. This is the view from Chinese coast to North Korea

Street scene in the defector's home city of Haeju