“I escaped from North Korea in 2002 to China for food, but came to South Korea in 2006 for freedom,” says Kim Eunju, 38, a defector who now lives in Seoul, during an exclusive video interview with The Indian Express.
Her life as a refugee gains significance against the backdrop of Madeleine Gavin’s Beyond Utopia on experiences of North Korean defectors bagging an Oscar nomination in the best documentary feature category.
“My friend is a part of the documentary,” says Kim, a known human rights activist whose 2012 book, A Thousand Miles to Freedom: My Escape from North Korea, written under the pen name Kim Eunsun, captures the traumatic experiences she faced while trying to escape from her motherland with her family.
With the East Asian nation maintaining an iron grip over the flow of information in and out of the country, researchers and journalists have always relied on testimonies of defectors like Kim to understand more about daily life there.
Scheduled to travel to India in January to create awareness about “human rights violations” faced by North Korean refugees, Kim had to cancel her trip due to “unforeseen circumstances”.
“I wanted to share my experience with India and the world,” says Kim, who works for Freedom Speakers International, an organisation that helps North Korean defectors settle in South Korea. According to South Korea’s Unification Ministry, which handles inter-Korean affairs, as of the beginning of 2024, nearly 30,000 North Korean refugees lived in South Korea.
The reason behind her awareness drive was an October 2023 incident — Beijing, which refers to undocumented North Koreans as illegal “economic migrants”, forced nearly 600 refugees to go back as per a 1986 bilateral border protocol. The incident led to UN experts remarking that China should “respect the principle of non-refoulement (not forcing refugees to return to a country where they are at risk) guaranteed under international law”.
Kim says she escaped from North Korea twice. The first time was in 1999, when she crossed into China but was sent back soon. She was successful in escaping in 2002 and ended up settling in South Korea in 2006. She adds, “We are economic migrants, but our situation is much more complex. The penalty for being deported to North Korea is terrible for refugees.”
A terrible famine and a preteen’s last will
A resident of North Korea’s Eundoek town, Kim was just 10 years old when a devastating famine struck the nation in the mid-1990s. International aid organisations suspect that nearly 1 million North Koreans died due to severe food shortages. The crisis was severe enough for the government to acknowledge the famine as the “Arduous March”. It was also severe enough for the then preteen Kim — who was “certain that she would not survive the hunger and cold” — to “draft a last will and testament”.
“Many men died in the famine but women survived. In North Korea, it is believed that women are stronger. It is also believed that when women cooked the little food they had for their families, they inhaled the aroma and despite eating the smallest of portions, they managed to fill their stomachs with that aroma and live,” she recalls.
Though she defected to China with her family, it was easier said than done. “I can say now that it was much easier when my family fled North Korea in 1999. The Tumen River border (the natural boundary between China and North Korea) was physically manned by soldiers and it was easier to evade them by timing their movements. Now, border guards have CCTVs and sophisticated technology. Traffickers who smuggle defectors into China charge a lot more now than they did in the 1990s. Still, North Koreans are desperate to flee,” she says.
As per the Unification Ministry, most refugees since 1998 from North Korea have been women. More women defectors has also meant physical and sexual violence. “On our first day in China, my older sister was kidnapped on the street and sexually abused in a car. She was also threatened right there on the street. We did not speak about the incident for more than 20 years,” Kim says.
According to her, most refugees from North Korea these days are youths, which shows their increasing disillusionment about their prospects in their homeland. “For youth refugees, it is less about hunger, and more about freedom and desperation for a better life. They are driven by fear for their future and small frustrations like not being allowed to wear hot pants, dye their hair or have a different haircut,” says Kim.
An example of this lack of freedom, she says, is North Korea’s stringent monitoring of electronic devices since 2004 to repress the consumption of foreign pop culture content smuggled through its borders with China and Russia. The author-activist says, “This crackdown is becoming more intense there because South Korean dramas and pop culture are causing the youth to question North Korea’s propaganda.”
Death for use or spread of South Korean-style language
In 2021, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un dubbed Korean pop or K-pop music as a “vicious cancer”. In January 2023, the nation’s legislative body adopted the Pyongyang Cultural Language Protection Act, which stipulates “public executions” for North Koreans who use or spread South Korean-style language.
A March 2023 report by South Korea’s Unification Ministry stated that “executions are widely carried out (in North Korea) for acts that do not justify the death penalty, including drug crimes, distribution of South Korean videos, and religious and superstitious activities”. This was in line with UN investigations and NGO reports that were based on over 500 testimonies by North Korean refugees collected from 2017 to 2022.
“People in North Korea are addicted to Korean dramas. They don’t have freedom, but are familiar with the concept due to South Korea’s pop culture content,” says Kim, adding that fewer youth are interested in following regulations on clothing and hairstyles.
Obsession with South Korean pop culture content has existed for several years in North Korea, Kim says. “Its impact was restricted to people’s homes earlier. Now, it is influencing daily life, fashion and even vocabulary. Young women cannot wear hot pants or short skirts in public, unlike the screen stars they love. Young people want to wear jeans, but can’t since blue jeans are a symbol of capitalism in North Korea. So women wear short skirts and hot pants at home,” she says.
As the interview is wrapping up, Kim’s three-year-old daughter jumps into her lap and impatiently enquires about dinner. “In North Korea, we always worried about food since we had no choice. In South Korea, I have far too many choices.”
Though Kim knows she can never return to North Korea to visit her father’s grave, she says she has some good memories from her life there. “On every holiday, the government would give workers a ticket to buy nokma guksu (cold noodles). My father and I would get cold noodles from a restaurant in town and the entire family would eat it together. I miss that sometimes,” she says.
To a question on what drives her to keep fighting for North Korean refugees, Kim says “My best friend is still back home. I want her to have a life like mine one day, which includes the freedom to study, travel the world and speak her mind.”