A middle-aged man is walking through a quiet Seoul neighborhood 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 how things used to be. He is a former policeman, a broad-shouldered man with a growling voice and a crushing handshake.
Back where he came from, he said, he was someone who mattered.
“In North Korea, people were afraid of me,” he said.
Photo: AP
He said it wistfully, almost sadly, like a boy talking about a dog he once had.
“They knew I could just drag them away,” he said.
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 rumor. 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 more than 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 the world.
And what does he think now?
“Sometimes, when my work is too hard, I think about my job as a policeman,” said the man, who spoke on condition his name not be used, fearing for the safety of relatives who still live in the North. “I didn’t have problems with money back then. I ate what I wanted to eat.”
He paused, thinking about his decision to leave: “There are times when I regret it a lot.”
Every year, thousands of North Koreans risk imprisonment, or worse, to leave their homeland, many hoping to eventually reach the South. Instead, they often find themselves lost in a nation where they thought they would feel at home, struggling with depression, discrimination, joblessness and their own lingering pride in the repressive nation they left behind.
Surveys have shown that up to one-third would return home if they could.
Take the former policeman, an increasingly bitter day worker who supports his family hauling bags of cement through the sprawling apartment blocks constantly under construction around Seoul.
“I knew that South Korea was a capitalist country, that it was very rich. I thought that if I can just get there, I can work less, but earn a lot of money,” he said.
More than 27,000 North Korean exiles live in the South, most arriving since a brutal famine tore at the country in the mid-1990s. Government control foundered amid widespread starvation and security loosened along the border with China. While security has again tightened, about 1,300 refugees reached South Korea last year, according to statistics compiled by Seoul.
Tens of thousands of North Koreans are believed to live underground in China. For many, though, the lure of a wealthy, Korean-speaking nation is strong, even if refugees’ expectations of the South are often shaped less by reality and more by the bootlegged southern soap operas that are wildly popular in the North.
Those who go find themselves living in one of the most brutally competitive countries in the world, where education is worshiped, toddlers are offered exam-prep classes and a drive for perfection has produced one of the world’s highest rates of plastic surgery.
“Life in South Korea is competitive,” South Korean Minister of Unification Hong Yong-pyo said in a recent speech to a group of defectors. “For you to succeed in this competition, you need to push yourself on your own.”
However, that can be very difficult. Despite government programs that include an immersive three-month program, along with assistance in getting apartments and jobs, the exiles are immediately marked by their accents and their confusion over everything from checking accounts to job applications.
Many are noticeably shorter than southerners because of malnutrition, a serious issue in a country that sees height as a measure of attractiveness and success.
When it comes to finding work, they have none of the school or hometown connections that are often key to getting hired, and many South Koreans dismiss them as lazy and difficult.
When they do get jobs, seemingly simple things — such as knowing they need to arrive at work on time — can leave them flummoxed, their pride badly battered.
“It has happened so many times: They show up for work for one or two days, then get into a fight with their colleagues and quit,” said Ahn Kyung-su, a Seoul-based researcher who has spent years working with exiles.
Even success does not make life easy.
Lee Gae-yoon, who was raised on a collective farm, left North Korea in 2010 with only a high-school diploma. Six years later, she is a published poet who often writes about her childhood and the famine, and is midway through a degree in Korean literature at one of Seoul’s top universities.
She finds herself intimidated by southerners’ intense focus on success.
“Even between friends, people are always competing here,” Lee, 30, said. “It can be really stressful to live here.”
With an accent that still gives her away as an outsider, she sometimes resorts to pretending she does not belong at all.
“There are times when I’m too afraid to be tagged as a North Korean,” she said. “So when I’m talking to South Koreans, sometimes I’ll use a few English words that I remember so that people think that I’m a foreigner just learning to speak Korean. At that moment, I really want to be a foreigner.”
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