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Troll_Bait
Joined: 04 Jan 2006
Location: [T]eaching experience doesn't matter much. -Lee Young-chan (pictured)
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 Posted: Sun Jun 24, 2007 6:14 pm Post subject: "Hero" in N.Korea,"zero" in the South |
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| For North Koreans in South, the journey has just begun |
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/06/22/news/profile.php
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When the elevator reached the 17th floor, the doors opened to reveal Lee Chan waiting in the hallway, looking far older than he had last autumn, his face creased and sunburnt, his entire body, it seemed, shrunken.
Back then, he had emerged as the unofficial leader of dozens of North Korean refugees held at the immigration detention center in Bangkok. Standing in a visitation pen filled with detainees from all over Southeast Asia, openly smoking cigarettes he had somehow managed to get, speaking in a c0cksure manner, he seemed a natural born leader. He loomed large.
Despite the hardships he had endured in North Korea and during his escape through China, he looked younger than a man in his late 30s.
The months since his arrival in South Korea last December have changed him. He now lives in a place he never imagined occupying, one of the brand-new, nondescript towns outside the periphery of Seoul, dotted with identical white-and-blue high rises that make him look small.
"I've lost a lot of weight," Lee said. "It's the stress from living in South Korea." He shifted uneasily inside his own apartment, which he had furnished sparsely with part of the resettlement money given by the South Korean government to each North Korean arrival.
It was a quiet, sunny Sunday - his one day off from the water-purifying company where he had recently started working - but worries were ruffling Lee. He had to pay the $3,400 he owed the brokers who had smuggled him across China and through the Golden Triangle, a region where the borders of Laos, Myanmar and Thailand meet, into Thailand itself. He had to find a way to bring over his 62-year-old mother, living in hiding in northeast China. He had just broken up with his girlfriend, a North Korean who had shared the journey with him to South Korea and had sustained him during the bleakest moments.
And there was also South Korea, the country he had longed to reach.
Differences stemming from half a century of a divided peninsula, his telltale accent from the North, a word misused, all these things immediately betrayed him as an outsider. He had found, like the 10,000 North Koreans now living in the South and holding South Korean passports, that he was not in from the cold, not yet.
"When I think about all the things I have to do here, I'm overwhelmed," he said. "I feel so small."
Lee had bought secondhand appliances and furniture for his apartment, though he had made it a point to stock the living room with a new wall unit and flat-screen television. His favorite television program was "Global Talk Show," which features single foreign women sharing their experiences of living in the homogeneous, sometimes disorienting South Korean society.
"What they're feeling is exactly what I feel in South Korea," he said, adding that his favorite was a half-British, half-Japanese regular named Eva.
It took Lee, now 39, almost half of his life to make it to South Korea. His troubles began when he was in the military at the age of 20 and became entangled in a dispute with a superior, Lee said, declining to reveal details. According to his account, he tried to leave the North but was caught and sentenced to 10 years in prison; after his release, he held a series of jobs, ranging from maintaining telephone lines to working in a fertilizer factory. His father, he said, died in the great famine of the late 1990s.
Then in late 2005, Lee made it to China and joined his mother, who had already been living there for a couple of years. After working seven months and earning enough to pay part of the fees to the smugglers, Lee made it to Bangkok and, following six months in the detention center there, arrived in South Korea, at long last.
At the airport here, a fellow North Korean, a young man wearing earrings, was ordered with an expletive by a South Korean security official to take them off.
"That was our first impression of South Korea," Lee said. "It wasn't a warm embrace."
Like all North Korean refugees, Lee was then detained for about a month by the South Korean National Intelligence Service. He was interrogated for several days before being put into solitary confinement, he said. He felt intolerably lonely, so he began keeping a diary for the first time in his life.
In a children's scrapbook, "Pinky and Jimmy," which Lee now keeps on his bookshelf, he wrote in a clear handwriting of his "suffocating" loneliness in solitary confinement. With a broken television set in his cell, he wrote, "How am I going to get through the night?" He wanted larger portions of food but could not bear the humiliation of asking the guards, he wrote, adding that he could see "contempt" in their eyes. |
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He longed for his girlfriend, though he could not hide his misgivings. "She lacks perseverance and temperance, just like me," he wrote. "She cries a lot. She has the most beautiful eyes when she cries. I read in a book somewhere that if you are too emotional, you'll have a lesser chance of succeeding in life."
Lee then stayed for a couple of months at Hanawon, an institution that offers North Koreans a crash course on living in the capitalist South.
There, he was retaught history, including the point that it was the North, not the South, that started the Korean War. Lee said that he had already gleaned the truth from South Korean films and television programs increasingly smuggled into the North from China. Hanawon also offered computer classes.
"I just focused on getting my driver's license," he said.
North Koreans say that they are treated like second-class citizens in the South. But at the Sorae fish market near Lee's apartment, operators of food stands looking for customers called out to him, "Chairman! Chairman!"
"Everything's about money here," he said, taking a drag of a Dunhill Slim, popular cigarettes here. "You go to work in the morning - you can't even take phone calls on your cell at work - then you go home and go to sleep. In North Korea, there is a fence around people to control them. But it's very collective, so people help one another out. In that system, people do find ways to have meaningful relations with one another."
As with many North Koreans, Lee's nostalgic comments about the North have increased in direct proportion with his sense of alienation in the South.
At a small noodle shop, he asked the owner to turn on the fan but got only a puzzled look - because he referred to it with a word used only in the North.
It was getting late, and maybe because he had to wake up early for work in the morning, Lee's mood darkened. He had already worked at three jobs in as many months, including as a hand aboard a small, sun-baked fishing boat.
He lingered outside a butcher shop near his apartment, delaying, it seemed, his return to his empty apartment.
After they left Hanawon, he and his girlfriend spent nine days together, then split up. They had shared their journey to South Korea. But, once here, they saw that the reality of their relationship, as with many things, was different from their expectations.
"It was so hard to get here," Lee said. "Before, I thought that once I got to South Korea, everything would be all right. But now I know that I've just opened the front gate and come in. The journey's just begun." |
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Kimchi Cha Cha
Joined: 15 May 2003
Location: was Suncheon, now Brisbane
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| Posted: Sun Jun 24, 2007 7:12 pm Post subject: |
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I really feel for the North Korean refugees, they endure so many hardships throughout their life, further hardships making it to South Korea, and once they reach here . . . yet more hardships and alienation.
Yet, South Koreans are always the first to boast we are ONE people. |
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mithridates
Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency
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| Posted: Sun Jun 24, 2007 7:14 pm Post subject: |
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| Kimchi Cha Cha wrote: |
| Yet, South Koreans are always the first to boast we are ONE people. |
North Koreans say that WAY more than people from the South. |
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Kimchi Cha Cha
Joined: 15 May 2003
Location: was Suncheon, now Brisbane
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| Posted: Sun Jun 24, 2007 7:27 pm Post subject: |
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| mithridates wrote: |
| Kimchi Cha Cha wrote: |
| Yet, South Koreans are always the first to boast we are ONE people. |
North Koreans say that WAY more than people from the South. |
I guess that just makes the North Koreans that actually make it here feel all the more alienated and isolated when they find out that's not necessarily how many South Koreans feel. |
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Guri Guy
Joined: 07 Sep 2003
Location: Bamboo Island
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| Posted: Sun Jun 24, 2007 9:01 pm Post subject: |
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| Most South Koreans don't want reunification. At least not for a long, long time. I really feel badly for the North Korean refugees. I'd love to teach English to them. Sounds like they could use the help. Are there any government programs related to that? |
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billybrobby
Joined: 09 Dec 2004
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| Posted: Sun Jun 24, 2007 10:07 pm Post subject: |
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| She cries a lot. She has the most beautiful eyes when she cries. |
It's touching stuff.
Those poor North Koreans are going to have it tough when this country reunites. 50 years is a long time in any age, but in this age, in this country, it's an especially long time.
On a somewhat related note, has anybody ever checked out Pyeongyang on google maps? It's pretty cool. |
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mateomiguel
Joined: 16 May 2005
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| Posted: Sun Jun 24, 2007 10:52 pm Post subject: |
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Man, Korean people are insular beyond compare. I used to think that the strange reactions to me, the waygookin, were unique, but I'm starting to realize that Korean people further divide themselves into regions, and towns, and gu's and dong's within that town. It seems like they'll look for any reason to snub someone else.
South Korea is politically and socially divided into its provinces, with Jeolla province being the runt of the litter. People here want nothing to do with other provinces. Heaven help people from Jeju-do, they might actually be second-class citizens.
If North Korea and South Korea get re-united, the lowest of the low in this country is going to be the North Korean male. |
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Ilsanman
Joined: 15 Aug 2003
Location: Bucheon, Korea
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| Posted: Mon Jun 25, 2007 1:10 am Post subject: |
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I have heard there are immigration booths ready to be manned up at the DMZ. Basically meaning, if they reunify, they're not just going to let NK people come down here at will.
It's going to be a new caste system worse than any that's ever been seen. |
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horang
Joined: 16 Jun 2007
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Mon Jun 25, 2007 1:34 am Post subject: |
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Why are they trying to leave their country - they call it a paradise under the leadership of the late great leader Kim Il Sung and dear leader Kim Jung Il.
We already have enough of north Korean defectors, eating up our tax money. And 30% of them are in prison for various crimes, and now taking free meals and filling up prison cells. |
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oskinny1
Joined: 10 Nov 2006
Location: Right behind you!
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| Posted: Mon Jun 25, 2007 4:26 am Post subject: |
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| horang wrote: |
| We already have enough of north Korean defectors, eating up our tax money. And 30% of them are in prison for various crimes, and now taking free meals and filling up prison cells. |
Link?
And if it is true, why do you think they commit crimes? |
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happeningthang
Joined: 26 Apr 2003
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| Posted: Mon Jun 25, 2007 4:50 am Post subject: |
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| It's the same for any group of recent migrants. It's a little more poignant for Korea, and Germany back in the day since it's like migrating to your own country. |
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billybrobby
Joined: 09 Dec 2004
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| Posted: Mon Jun 25, 2007 7:07 pm Post subject: |
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| Ilsanman wrote: |
I have heard there are immigration booths ready to be manned up at the DMZ. Basically meaning, if they reunify, they're not just going to let NK people come down here at will.
It's going to be a new caste system worse than any that's ever been seen. |
Well, yeah. I think letting the NKers come down at will would be an outstandingly stupid idea. Immigrants are like water, they flow towards stability and wealth like it's low land. And the border between the two countries represents a massive cliff-like difference in standards of living, so you're going to have a waterfall of people heading South if you just open the border right up. I'm no wise ruler, but I'd keep the border pretty closed for a long time, and trade with NK as if its a foreign, developing country, which it basically would be. |
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