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Today, dear readers, I would like to introduce you to Ms. Park, a person whom I met recently and who appears to be a very typical North Korean refugee in the South.
Park was born in the late 1940s, so she is a bit older than the average refugee, but in all other regards she is highly representative of refugee demographics.
She is a woman, a high school graduate, who once did a low-level clerical job in North Korea. She has no illusions about the North Korean system, but she is also by no means a politically motivated dissenter.
From the very beginning of her life, Park faced a serious problem; her family had a number of close relations in China. In Kim Il-sung's North Korea this fact alone closed many avenues of social advancement to her.
North Korean authorities have always been very suspicious of people with overseas connections ― remarkably, no exceptions were made for the supposedly fraternal communist countries.
Had Park had exceptional academic gifts, she might have succeeded in getting accepted to a university or college. However, her marks while good were not outstanding, so she was sent to work for a local factory.
She had no choice in North Korea of the late 1960s; every high school graduate was assigned a workplace by the state.
In the early 1970s, Park married. Her husband was chosen by her parents. Such things were considered natural and she did not mind.
Park's husband was a man who had recently finished his military service and had become a worker at the same factory. In due time, they had two children ― a fairly typical number for a North Korean woman of her generation.
In the late 1970s, Park become a minor clerk (it helped a lot that she was lucky to be accepted to the ruling Korean Worker's Party). She remained a production team leader until the mid-1990s, when things began to fall apart.
When food rations were cut off in the early 1990s, Park, like a majority of women around her, turned to private trade to survive.
For a while she ran a food stall and then used the capital (admittedly quite small) to start a trade in footwear. Her husband helped, but she generally remained in control of the money.
Her relatives in China suddenly ceased to be a career obstacle and rather became a blessing. They helped her with money, and also arranged good wholesale deals for her in China.
In the early 2000s, Park travelled to China on a number of occasions. All these trips were illegal, but at those times the border was poorly protected and the chances of her being detected were low.
Soon, Park was attracted to a good vacancy. She was invited to become a domestic helper for an affluent ethnic Korean family in China. The money was significantly better than the income from her small footwear store, and the job itself was not particularly demanding.
Technically speaking, she was an illegal alien in China, but with minimal precautions she felt relatively secure.
Park eventually became a church-going Christian, though this author cannot help doubting the sincerity of her beliefs. However, we should not be too quick to accuse her of hypocrisy ― in China, missionaries are some of the only people who really care about North Korean refugees.
It was a sympathetic missionary who eventually helped her to locate a relative in South Korea. This relative provided her with $3,000, which was more than enough to pay for a broker (an intermediary/guide who specializes in defections and refugee-related services).
With the help of the broker, she travelled across China and Laos, eventually finding herself at the Korean embassy in Bangkok and finally making it to Seoul.
In the South, Park has done a lot of unskilled and semi-skilled jobs in order to earn enough money to arrange the escape of her husband and daughter (her son refused to come to the South).
Now she lives a life of a relatively poor ajumma on the outskirts of Seoul. She is positively happy about the way things have turned out.
This is what the average North Korean defector looks like. Neither a freedom fighter nor daring intellectual, but an aging woman with a humble background who is quite happy because she can eat as much rice as she wants as frequently as she wishes. No more, no less.
Professor Andrei Lankov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and now teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul. You can reach him at anlankov@yahoo.com.
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