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Hyeon means sunshine.
Leaving North Korea is not like leaving any other country. It is more like leaving another universe. I will never truly be free of its gravity, no matter how far I journey. Even for those who have suffered unimaginably there and have escaped hell, life in the free world can be so challenging that many struggle to come to terms with it and find happiness.
A small number of them even give up, and return to live in that dark place, as I was tempted to do, many times.
when I left, I discovered only gradually that my country is a byword, everywhere, for evil. But I did not know this years ago, when my identity was forming. I thought life in North Korea was normal. Its customs and rulers became strange only with time and distance.
I hope it will encourage others like myself, who are struggling to cope with new lives their imaginations never prepared them for.
we can do without almost anything – our home, even our country.
Songbun is a caste system that operates in North Korea. A family is classified as loyal, wavering or hostile, depending on what the father’s family was doing at the time just before, during and after the founding of the state in 1948.
People in the hostile class, which made up about 40 per cent of the population, learned not to dream.
No one was ever told their precise ranking in the songbun system,
it was very easy to sink, but almost impossible to rise in the system,
Her safekeeping of the cards ensured the family’s high songbun. Those who destroyed their cards as the Americans approached were later to fall under suspicion.
In the Korean way of measuring age, a child is one year old at the beginning of its first year and not, as in most countries, at the end of the first year. I was age one.
Most North Korean families never got to go anywhere. They stayed in the same place all their lives and needed a travel permit even to leave their local county.
The banjang was usually a woman in her fifties whose job it was to deliver warnings from the government, check
that no one was staying overnight without a permit, and to keep an eye on the families in her block.
About once a month officials wearing white gloves entered every house in the block to inspect the portraits. If they reported a household for failing to clean them – we once saw them shine a flashlight at an angle to see if they could discern a single mote of dust on the glass – the family would be punished.
Since there was no aspect of life, public or private, that fell outside the authority of the Party, almost every topic of conversation was potentially political, and potentially dangerous.
Growing up, I sensed this danger. I knew it was out there, but at the same time it was normal, like air pollution, or the potential for fire to burn.
Saying Kim Il-sung’s name, for example, and forgetting to affix one of his titles – Great Leader, Respected Father Leader, Comrade, President or Marshal – could result in serious punishment if anyone reported the offence.
These vigilantes would prowl the city looking for violators of North Korea’s myriad social laws – anyone in jeans, men whose hair was a touch too long, women wearing a necklace or a foreign perfume – all of which were unsocialist and symbolic of moral degeneracy and capitalist decadence.
Those caught could find themselves with a delicate problem. No one could say they had ‘simply forgotten’ the Great Leader.
wearing trousers in public, not a skirt. This was prohibited, since the leadership had decreed that trousers were unbecoming of the Korean woman.
the more people you knew the more likely you were to be criticized or denounced.
From our youngest years we associated the Great Leader and Dear Leader with gifts and excitement in the way that children in the West think of Santa Claus.
Kim Il-sung created everything in our country. Nothing existed before him.
there were informers everywhere – on the military base where we lived, in the city streets, in my kindergarten. They reported to the provincial bureau of the Ministry of State Security, the Bowibu. This was the secret police.
The translation doesn’t convey the power the word Bowibu has to send a chill through a North Korean. Its very mention, as the poet Jang Jin-sung put it, was enough to silence a crying child.
The Bowibu weren’t interested in the real crimes that affected people, such as theft, which was rife, or corruption, but only in political disloyalty, the faintest hint of which, real or imagined, was enough to make an entire family – grandparents, parents and children – disappear.
North Korea is an atheist state. Anyone caught in possession of a Bible faces execution or a life in the gulag.
Kim worship is the only permitted outlet for spiritual fervour. Shamans and fortune-tellers, too, are outlawed, but high cadres of
the regime consu...
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since every child knew that a single slip by an individual could ruin a display involving thousands of performers, every child learned to subordinate their will to that of the collective. In other words, though we were too young to know it, mass games helped to suppress individual thought.
Tales of heroes struggling against oppression were permitted as long as they fitted the North Korean revolutionary worldview, but any inconvenient details got blotted out.
Watching foreign TV stations was highly illegal and a very serious offence.
There are two kinds of prison in the gulag. One is for prisoners sentenced to ‘revolutionary re-education through labour’. If they survive their punishment they will be released back into society, and monitored closely for the rest of their lives. The other is a zone of no return – prisoners there are worked to death.
In North Korea, suicide is taboo. Not only is it considered gravely humiliating to the surviving family members, it also guarantees that any children left behind will be reclassified as ‘hostile’ in the songbun system and denied university entrance and the chance of a good job. Suicide in Korean culture is a highly emotive means of protest. The regime regards it as a form of defection. By punishing the surviving family, the regime attempts to disable this ultimate form of protest.
It is mandatory from elementary school to attend public executions. Often classes would be cancelled so students could go.
He asked if they had any last words. He wasn’t expecting a response, since all three had been gagged and had stones pushed into their mouths to stop them cursing the regime with their final breath.
starvation can drive people to insanity. It can cause parents to take food from their own children, people to eat the corpses of the dead, and the gentlest neighbour to commit murder.
My curiosity had always been greater than my fear –
In truth there is no dividing line between cruel leaders and oppressed citizens. The Kims rule by making everyone complicit in a brutal system, implicating all, from the highest to the lowest, blurring morals so that no one is blameless. A terrorized Party cadre will terrorize his subordinates, and so on down the chain; a friend will inform on a friend out of fear of punishment for not informing. A nicely brought-up boy will become a guard who kicks to death a girl caught trying to escape to China, because her songbun has sunk to the bottom of the heap and she’s worthless and hostile in the
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In her world, the law was upside down. People had to break the law to live. The prohibition on drug-dealing, a serious crime in most countries, is not viewed in the same way – as protective of society – by North Koreans. It is viewed as a risk, like unauthorized parking. If you can get away with it, where’s the harm?
Without the two-month stay there, most North Koreans would not be able to cope. As many discover, freedom – real freedom, in which your life is what you make of it and the choices are your own – can be terrifying.
It is hard for outsiders to grasp how difficult it is for North Koreans to arrive at a point where they accept that the Kim regime is not only very bad, but also very wrong.
North Koreans who have never left don’t think critically because they have no point of comparison – with previous governments, different policies, or with other societies in the outside world.
I’ll admit that, as a Korean, I’m sensitive to how I’m treated. In our hierarchical culture, everyone is either above or below you. Honorific language is used with anyone further up the hierarchy.
I also knew that plenty of them were actually bad – content to destroy lives for their own gain.
Among the 27,000 North Koreans in the South, two kinds of life have been left behind: the wretched life of persecution and hunger, and the manageable life that was not so bad. People in the first group
adjust rapidly. Their new life, however challenging, could only be better. For the people in the second group, life in the South is far more daunting. It often makes them yearn for the simpler, more ordered existence they left behind, where big decisions are taken for them by the state, and where life is not a fierce competition.
One of the main reasons that distinctions between oppressor and victim are blurred in North Korea is that no one there has any concept of rights.
