Newsday January 19, 2003
Life After North Korea
By Edward A. Gargan
Seoul, South Korea - Twice Jung Myung-sook was caught at the edge of the ice-locked river, scant minutes from her goal, and twice she was thrown into prison. For three and a half months, she said, she endured beatings, starvation, frostbitten limbs, relentless harangues from brutal warders. Through it all, though, her determination to escape North Korea never died.
Now, in a claret-colored dress, her legs curled under her on the floor of a small Seoul apartment, Jung laughs gently at the memory. Sentenced to a labor camp, "I had to work very hard. If I went out of line, I was beaten. We only had a little food," she recalled, a meager portion of rice daily.
Only on her third try, in 2001, did Jung manage to sneak into northeastern China. Her family, 12 in all, escaped from North Korea in the past six years, gathering in China before sprinting to sanctuary - one group into a United Nations office, another into a Japanese consulate.
They are among 2,584 North Koreans who, in the past decade, escaped their Stalinist country and found refuge and citizenship in the South, according to South Korea's Ministry of Unification. The monitoring group Human Rights Watch estimates another 300,000 North Koreans are in China. South Korean and other analysts say the figure is lower.
For most North Koreans, the transition from lives inundated with propaganda, from an utter ignorance of the outside world - and from rationed food and little electricity - into the affluence and freedoms of South Korea is wrenching. Not all manage the shift to a society where individual effort is prized, where independent thinking is critical, where an ordinary day's life requires decisions greater than any they've been used to making.
Others, however, thrive amid this country's growing affluence. Kim Hyung-deok was one of 52 northerners who reached South Korea in 1994; the previous year, just eight people arrived here from the North. At age 20, he left his parents and six siblings - farmers who lived on the outskirts of Pyongyang, the capital.
"Our family was little better off than people in Rwanda," Kim, 29, explained."There were blackouts all the time. We didn't have a lot to eat, just corn gruel."
Kim walked and hopped trains to the Chinese border, sneaked across and made his way to China's southern coast. From there, he swam to Hong Kong, then a British colony, which sent him to South Korea.
Nine years later, Kim has a business degree from Yonsei University in Seoul and works on energy planning issues for Daesung, an industrial conglomerate. Still, he said, "I think a free market economy is difficult for people to adjust to," and 90 percent of North Koreans have a hard time at it.
With his success, "It's really hard to have friends among North Koreans" in the South, he explained, "because they live a really hard life for the most part. They are really poor." So his friends now are South Koreans and he has distanced himself from other northerners.
Married to an accountant and father of a 2-year-old son, Kim is troubled by news he has gleaned - through a net of brokers, smugglers and contacts - of his relatives in the North. "My family is very restricted because I left," he said. "I don't now why my family should suffer so much because of me. They were exiled to the provinces, near the mountains, after I left. In a communist state, being ostracized is the worst thing that can happen to you."
Kim hopes to get his family smuggled out. "If you have money, anything is possible in the North," he said, "except of course opposition to Kim Jong-il," the dictator.
Barely 18 months after Jung Myung-sook and her family began arriving, life in the South is still new and more precarious, although their reason for leaving echoes Kim's.
"As a person, you can't live in that society," said Jung's father, Jung Yeon-san, the 70-year-old patriarch. "If you tried to make a living as a merchant there, the government would confiscate your merchandise," he explained. "You could not talk freely. ... I actually was sent to prison for calling Kim Jong-il 'president' instead of 'dear leader.' I was in prison for 100 days."
The family's escape took six years in all. Jung's wife, Kim Bun-nyu, fled in 1997 to northern China, where she worked to raise money for others to follow. Jung joined her a year later.
"There are a lot of guards along the river so I disguised myself as a peddler," Jung said. "I had a backpack with items for sale in it. It's easier for merchants to go about. I went to the place where train tickets to China were sold and waited until dark. I walked about a kilometer or so to the border. I saw the guards pass by so I took that as a chance to go."
In China, the family scraped by with odd jobs "selling rice, hawking vegetables, even repairing bicycles," Jung said.
But China does not recognize North Koreans who flee there as refugees. "If we were discovered by the police, we would have been returned to North Korea," he said. "Even though it was hard for local people to tell we were from North Korea" - Chinese of Korean origin predominate in the border region - "other people would find out because of the way we talked to each other or our habits. We kept moving every five to six months."
By 2001, the family had all its members in China. Still, "We wanted to go to South Korea instead of going to a foreign country where we would be looked down upon," said Kim, 69.
That June, Kim, Jung and five other family members sprinted past guards into one of Beijing's diplomatic compounds and rushed into the offices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. After days of negotiations between UN officials and the Chinese government, the Jungs were quietly flown to Manila, where South Korean officials put them on a plane to Seoul.
Like all North Korean defectors, the Jungs were taken to a halfway house where they were taught about life in the South, and then were given money to get settled, about $12,000, and a monthly stipend of $300 for three years. The Jungs moved into the small flat amid a jumble of new 13-story apartment blocks on the city's edge. Across the highway, Holstein cows plodded through a meadow.
Kim, relying on survival skills learned in the North, began peddling sweet pastries and red bean cakes from a small cart. Local authorities made her stop because she did not have a license, she said, but she expects to sort out the mysteries of South Korea's bureaucracy soon.
Already the family has acquired a big color television and VCR. They have eschewed furniture, except for a piano, in their living room. In May, five more members arrived after storming into the Japanese consulate in the Chinese city of Shenyang.
Jung Yeon-san admitted to often being stunned by life in the South. "I was amazed I could go and vote last month to elect the president of South Korea. I was amazed that this was a society where people can express themselves and elect their president."
The Two Koreas
Separated following World War II, North and South Korea have become two distinct societies. A look at life in the Stalinist North and democratic South.
North Korea South Korea o Population* 22.2 million 48.3 million o Annual Population Growth 1.1% 0.85% o Life Expectancy 71.3 years 74.9 years o Active Military 1.1 million 686,000 o Annual Military Expenditures $5.12 billion $12.8 billion o Labor Force 9.6 million 22 million o Gross Domestic Product $21.8 billion $865 billion o Annual Imports $1.7 billion $152.3 billion o Annual Exports $708 million $168.3 billion o Leading Industries Military products, Electronics, machine building automobile production o Annual Electricity Use 31.06 billion 254 billion kilowatt-hours kilowatt-hours o Telephones (non-cellular) 1 per 20 people 1 per 2 people o Radios 1 per 7 people 1 per person o Televisions 1 per 19 people 1 per 3 people o Paved Highways 1,240 miles** 40,605 miles***
SOURCE: CIA World Factbook, globalsecurity.org
*July 2002 estimates
** About one-tenth of Long Island total
*** About one-third of New York State total
Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.
