The Hidden People of North Korea: Everyday Life in the Hermit Kingdom
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When the NIS is convinced that an individual is a genuine defector, he or she is transferred to Hanawon (“one community”), a government halfway house located in the vicinity of Seoul. Established in 1999 and put under the authority of the Ministry of Unification, Hanawon has been expanded as more defectors arrive, and as of 2008 it could accommodate six hundred people for a three-month period of orientation and education. The three broad goals of the Hanawon program are to provide emotional and psychological support for the new arrivals, to teach them about South Korean and Western capitalist culture, and to provide job training and contacts. The task of acculturation is immense, and a few months at Hanawon can hardly counter a lifetime of indoctrination and experience in a totalitarian socialist state. Most North Koreans have never driven a car, used a computer, or made a call on a cell phone. They have never even imagined a supermarket or a Western-style department store. They do not know how to earn, save, or invest money. Defectors who need further assistance can spend a few additional weeks at one of several Hanawon satellite centers located around the country, and school-age defectors can enroll in the unification ministry’s Hangyoreh middle and high schools.
Defectors usually want to live and work in the capital city of Seoul because, in North Korea, the capital of Pyongyang is the city of the privileged class. The unification ministry runs a lottery to determine who gets to live in Seoul and who must begin life in one of the other cities, which, contrary to what most defectors think, may well provide a more pleasant and welcoming environment. To help them get started, defectors receive a grant of $20,000 (the amount changes from year to year) paid in installments over two years; families receive $37,000.23 Individuals can receive up to $15,000 in additional payments for completing educational and job-training programs, and additional monies are granted for special needs such as medicine and apartment down payments. To help defectors find employment, the government also subsidizes half of their wages for two years. Special monetary compensation and research positions in government think tanks are provided to a few defectors whom the government believes may have something special to offer in terms of intelligence on North Korea.
In most cases a local police officer is assigned as a defector’s case officer. In the past, the police officer accompanied the defector almost everywhere, providing both cultural guidance and protection from confidence tricksters and other criminals—and in some cases from North Korean secret agents. These days, a police officer is simply on call, although defectors considered to be at greater risk from North Korean agents receive more protection, and a few are even housed in the NIS compound outside of Seoul. It is not known how many defectors have actually been threatened by North Korean agents, although it is not unusual for them to receive threatening telephone calls, some of which may come from South Koreans who, for one reason or another, object to their presence. The only known case of assassination was the death of Yi Han-yong (mentioned earlier in chapter 2), a distant relative of Kim Jong-il. Yi came to South Korea in 1982 and published his memoirs in Korean (the English title is Kim Jong-il’s Royal Family). He was murdered in February 1997, presumably by North Korean agents, perhaps as a warning to Secretary Hwang Jang-yop, who had just defected to the South.
After they arrive in South Korea, defectors expect life to get easier, although they do experience some apprehension based on the stories they have been told since childhood about South Korea being a dog-eat-dog world where only the strong survive. They quickly learn that money is a primary value in South Korean society, and their desire to get rich makes them vulnerable to all sorts of swindles. Because their lives in North Korea were so controlled, they look for freedom in their employment, for example, by becoming entrepreneurs, but they do not realize what a high failure rate new businesses face in a capitalist economy. Often their only area of expertise is their knowledge of North Korea (or rather, their own experiences in North Korea), which they can put to use by giving lectures, but with thousands of defectors already in the South, competition on the lecture circuit is stiff, and only a few defectors can make any money from speaking or writing.
As in all Asian cultures, personal and family connections count for a lot in South Korean society, putting North Koreans at a disadvantage, and employment surveys paint a bleak picture of their chances of finding a job. A 2006 survey of 451 defectors found a 67 percent unemployment rate, and those with jobs were earning only about half the legal minimum wage.24 Part of the employment problem is that defectors do not want to take the more difficult, less desirable jobs, for example, in manual labor, even though they may be the best entry-level jobs for them.
The annual job turnover rate for defectors has been estimated at 60 percent.25 Low wages seem to be the biggest complaint, with one poll finding that only 17 percent were satisfied with their income.26 Rather than consider their jobs the first step up the occupational ladder, many defectors feel that they have already paid their vocational dues in North Korea and deserve a job comparable to the one they had there, even if they gained and kept it by the grace of the party rather than through open competition. In South Korea’s relatively hierarchical society, defectors’ lack of job seniority within a company also works against them. After several job failures, defectors become discouraged; many simply quit looking for work and fall into poverty. A 2004 unification ministry study found that 70 percent of defectors were receiving government welfare payments.27
Success on the job requires personal as well as job skills. Defectors often encounter social and job-related situations in which they do not know how to behave, leading to misunderstandings and awkward relations with other workers. A 2005 survey of five hundred defectors found that 67 percent believed they were treated unfairly in their workplaces, and 40 percent said they felt ostracized by their colleagues.28
Defectors suffer from a variety of adjustment problems on and off the job. They have a somewhat different dialect and vocabulary from South Koreans. For example, they are not familiar with words borrowed from other languages because the Kim regime has decreed that only “pure” Korean expressions should be used, although the younger generation is beginning to adopt foreign loan words like “menu,” “diet,” “music video,” “single,” “wife,” and “fast food”—all commonly used in South Korea as well. Reading can also be a problem. Older South Koreans can read several thousand Chinese characters, some of which appear in newspaper and magazine articles and books, but Juche theory has banned the use of these characters in North Korea. In public, the defectors’ dialect immediately identifies them as North Koreans. South Koreans tend to keep their distance simply because the defectors are considered different—perhaps like poor relatives whom one is not eager to meet. Their complexion is often slightly darker than that of South Korean city dwellers, making them look like country bumpkins. Their clothes may be too flashy, and their body language somewhat diffident. In short, at least in the first years after they arrive, defectors are viewed by many South Koreans as coming from an inferior culture.
Defectors have trouble making new friends. Life in North Korea is lived in groups: work groups, school groups, neighborhood groups, and party-affiliated social and political groups; individuals who spend time alone immediately fall under suspicion. This communitarian culture puts pressure on individuals to conform, but it also provides social support. South Korean society is far more individualistic. With no restrictions on communication or travel, South Koreans have geographically broader friendship networks than North Koreans. Defectors with distant relatives in South Korea are often disappointed that the relatives do not seem interested in them, which is hardly surprising because in most cases they have not met since before the Korean War. When the Southern relatives become aware that some of their kin have come down from the North, they may not want to get too close for fear of incurring a financial responsibility. For lack of friends and relatives, many former North Koreans join a church, which provides the same kind of complete social environment they were accustomed to i
n North Korea, and the religious teachings are similar in form to the worship of Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, and Kim Jong-suk—the father, son, and mother.
And then there is the problem of marriage. Although the practice of arranged marriages has disappeared in South Korean society, it is still not uncommon in the North, where personal connections are stronger. As outsiders, defectors are somewhat limited in their choice of marriage partners. Imagine, for example, what South Korean parents would say if their child proposed to marry a defector. Some defectors marry other defectors, but most eventually marry a native South Korean. Once married, the new partners must cope with the difficulties that arise from their different backgrounds and experiences, along with the marital strains caused by defectors’ low self-esteem and employment problems.
Finding a spouse is even more difficult for defectors who were married in the North. Because the South Korean government has conferred citizenship on all Koreans who live in the North, if the defector left behind a spouse, his or her marriage is considered legal until the courts determine otherwise. In some cases the defector was escaping from an abusive spouse (North Korea is still a male-dominated society, and poverty can make people mean); in other cases, the spouse was left behind for economic reasons, and there is no news of what became of him or her. In early 2007, the Seoul Family Court ruled that petitions from defectors for divorce can proceed as long as the unification ministry has issued a determination that the missing spouse does not reside in South Korea. Shortly thereafter, the court granted divorces to thirteen defectors—the first of 429 cases that had been filed at that time.29
Personality problems make jobs, marriages, and social relationships more difficult. Most defectors have lived a difficult life and faced physical and emotional challenges that few South Koreans can imagine. A lifetime of coping with fear and deprivation leaves emotional scars. Defectors also suffer from strong guilt when they think of the family and friends they have left behind, who may lose their jobs and their homes and, in the worst cases, be sent to a prison camp. Some defectors also feel guilty about having turned their back on their country, and even some South Koreans blame them for having done so.
Defectors who have left members of their immediate family behind suffer the most. One defector we interviewed said that she had voluntarily left her husband and son because her father had recently been branded a member of the hostile class. Although she was not responsible for this misfortune, her in-laws blamed her for jeopardizing her husband’s welfare, so she decided to leave for China, where her mother was living. She gave her son a package of candy and kissed him goodbye, saying that she would be gone for a few days. She told her husband she planned to stay in China (although she really intended to go on to South Korea), and she said that if she didn’t return in several months, he should divorce her and remarry. After she arrived in South Korea, she heard that her husband had indeed remarried, and she was working to earn money to bring her son out.30
A more tragic story involved the loss of a child. The mother and her husband, who was a security official, were fleeing across the border in heavy snow, with border guards in close pursuit. The mother knew that if they captured her husband, he would be tortured and perhaps killed because of his job. Their little boy began crying, and frightened that he would give away their location, the mother buried him in the deep snow in order to save her husband and herself. They escaped to China and then to South Korea, but she never recovered from the horror of having killed her child and ended up in a psychiatric facility.31
Although North Koreans exhibit a broad range of personality traits, as do any large group of people, a South Korean psychiatrist who conducted a survey of 528 defectors in 2001 identified several characteristics that they shared widely: passivity, belief in equal distribution of wealth, reluctance to disturb the status quo, reluctance to express thoughts, a tendency to attribute success to special opportunities rather than individual effort, and a strong need to justify their actions.32 In some respects, North Koreans hold to more traditional values than do South Koreans. The psychiatrist suggests that defectors have more in common with older South Koreans than with the younger generation, which he notes is ironic because the younger generation of South Koreans tends to be more enthusiastic about reunification.
Several surveys conducted in South Korea have attempted to assess defectors’ physical and mental health. The most common physical ailments are digestive problems and arthritis, whereas the most common psychological problems are depression and anxiety.33 Defectors already suffered from most of their physical illnesses before leaving the North, but the trials of defection exacerbate the psychological illnesses.34 In a mental-health survey of 196 defectors conducted in 2007, 37 percent were found to be suffering from depression serious enough to require treatment, and 30 percent had milder forms of depression.35
North Koreans love their homeland, and were it not for the impact of their collapsed economy, most would probably be willing to live under a dictatorial government—at least for the time being. Only when their basic economic needs were met might they turn their thoughts to gaining more freedom. Albert O. Hirschman’s exit-voice theory, introduced at the beginning of the chapter, includes a third factor: loyalty. The more loyal people are, the less likely they are to defect (and if given the opportunity, the more likely they are to complain in an attempt to change the organization or state to which they are loyal). The Kim regime has worked mightily to instill loyalty in its people, but its efforts have had only mixed success in the face of North Korea’s failed economy.36 As a consequence, the regime must depend on its social- and information-control mechanisms to keep more North Koreans from defecting.
Compared to the 4.5 million East Germans who fled to the West between World War II and German unification (about half of them coming before the Berlin Wall went up in 1961), the number of North Koreans reaching the South is a mere trickle. Should that trickle become a flood, it will put severe strains on both North and South Korean society—strains that the South Koreans, at least, are not prepared to cope with.
CHAPTER NINE
The End Comes Slowly
North Korea is designed and run for the benefit of the Kim family and their elite supporters. The fact that Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il have remained in power for over half a century under difficult circumstances is a testament to their sagacity, and the political edifice they have so painstakingly constructed will not be quickly torn down.
The portrait of North Korea drawn in the preceding chapters looks something like this. Kim Jong-il is not crazy: he is callous of the welfare of his people, distrustful of almost everyone, and sometimes emotional and even impulsive, but he knows what he is doing. The model of government the two Kims have chosen to adopt and perpetuate is totalitarian dictatorship— although government control is not as total as it might at first appear. Once dictatorship has been chosen as a governing style, the social structure is to a large extent determined, thus explaining the marked similarity of dictatorships around the world.
A totalitarian dictator must run a centrally controlled economy in order to regulate the lives of the people, and it helps if the economy is collective in nature, the better to prevent people from going off on their own. An economy of shortages has the virtue that it focuses people’s attention on earning a living and prevents them from cultivating other desires, for instance, for political participation. Government control of information is an important lever of power, and the Kim regime has quite successfully kept its people ignorant of both the outside world and their own society, although this ignorance is not as great as it once was. On the other hand, repressive constraints on information flow pose a problem for the regime, creating what Ronald Winetrobe calls the “dictator’s dilemma”: people are afraid to tell the dictator what they truly think, and as a consequence, the dictator’s knowledge is flawed.1 To stay in power, Kim must be above the law, and the law must serve his interests; consequently, he is the only person in North Korea who enjoys
full human rights. To legitimize his extralegal status, Kim has equated himself with the state, saying, “Without me, there can be no North Korea.”
While few foreigners would want to live in a country like North Korea, not all North Koreans live a life of misery. The majority are probably sufficiently satisfied with their country that they would not want to leave, even if given a chance. They are devoted to their families, treasure their friendships, find meaning in their lives, and hope for a better future. They have picnics in the park, go to movies, and enjoy parties with friends—just like people everywhere. They do not have access to the variety or quantity of food that South Koreans do, and they are sometimes hungry, but they enjoy a good meal on occasion. Still, their existence is precarious and subject to changing economic and political conditions. According to a World Food Program (WFP) survey conducted in 2004, one-third of the people never have enough to eat, half sometimes do not have enough, and only 10 to 20 percent always have enough to eat.2 The food situation has not materially improved since then, with the WFP and other organizations reporting in 2008 that North Korea was experiencing its worst food shortages since the mid-1990s.
Regardless of their situation in life, whether they are members of the upper political class whom foreign visitors may come into contact with or are poor people living in the mountains, North Koreans could and should be much healthier, happier, and freer than they are now. Preventing their lives from improving is, to put it simply, the Kim regime.