Fleeing the North, adrift in South Korea

[yuiyoshida]

Exiled North Korean Lee Gae-yoon, who left North Korea in 2010, at her home in Seoul, South Korea. AP


A middle-aged man is walking through a quiet Seoul neighbourhood when he suddenly stops. He lights a cigarette, cupping his hands to shield the flame from the winter wind, and takes a deep draw, remembering remembering how things used to be. He's a former policeman, a broad-shouldered man with a growling voice and a crushing handshake.

Back where he came from, he says, he was someone who mattered.

"In North Korea, people were afraid of me," he says. He says it wistfully, almost sadly, like a boy talking about a dog he once had. "They knew I could just drag them away."

That fear meant respect, and bribes, in the North Korean town where he lived, a place where the electricity rarely worked and the internet was only a rumour. It meant he could buy a TV, and that he had food even as those around him went hungry. It meant that when he grew exhausted by the relentless poverty and oppression around him, and when relatives abroad offered to advance him the money to escape, he had connections to a good smuggler.

Just over a year ago, that smuggler showed him where to slip across a river and into China, on his way to South Korea. His new home is one of the wealthiest and most technologically advanced nations in in the world. It has a thriving democracy and a per-capita income at least 12 times larger than the North's. Seoul is a city of infinite shopping choices, glass-fronted office towers and armies of exquisitely dressed business people. He used to dream of the easy life he'd have here.

http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/special-reports/921545/fleeing-the-north-adrift-in-south-korea