“That person who defects has reached the point where their very existence is dead . . . by the time they arrive at that point to put their decision into practice,” Jae-young Yoon (45) explained; to make the decision to defect, one had to already be dead in a sense. The people who shared their stories with me are exceptional in the sense that they represent a tiny minority of people who have left North Korea. Regardless of the varied factors that precipitated their departures, the mere fact of their crossing into China places them in an infinitesimal class of people in relation to the rest of the population of North Korea, the vast majority of which remains and possibly will never contemplate leaving. Just looking at the numbers, choosing to leave for any reason is an exceptional act. The estimated 26,124 North Koreans now in South Korea are exceptional, adept, and lucky, which does not exclude those who remain in the North from these same characteristics.1 In the history of the divided peninsula, the total number of defections has never been so high. However, if we consider that the population of North Korea is about 24 million, then the number of defections to South Korea and further afield is minuscule.2 Although defection is on the rise, particularly since the famine, the majority of people stay put.
In defecting, the risk to life is great. Travel into China without a legal permit is deemed punishable by up to five years of labor reform under Article 233 of North Korea’s Criminal Code, and deemed an act of treason against the nation under Article 62 of the Criminal Code; however, former North Korean officials report the existence of a shoot-to-kill policy that dates back to the early 1990s.3 China classifies North Korean migrants as illegal and economic, not as refugees. As such they are not provided legal channels to access refugee status. Getting through China and other countries to South Korea or elsewhere means risking everything. Even before the act of crossing from North Korea into China, the most typical route of defection, an exceptional decision has to be made. This chapter explores the resistance to this ultimate decision in the oral accounts of interviewees, and the threshold of physical and mental suffering at which it is made. The argument here is that defection was an option for an exceptional minority, but increased thresholds of suffering led to intranational choices for many others. I caution against the interpretation that increased suffering—albeit a measure not strictly or universally quantifiable—will lead inevitably to increased likelihood of defection. From this cautionary observation another follows. We cannot assume that those who defect are necessarily those who were worse off.
Could the vast majority of North Koreans have stayed because they are under duress? We may be quick to guess that people stayed for reasons of social pressure, coercion, or threats of violence and imprisonment, but the oral accounts suggest that the decision to remain inside North Korea is informed by more complex, nuanced factors. Some cannot leave because of geographic restrictions in areas that are so mountainous, remote, or isolated that they cannot safely depart. Others believe their country is the best place to live and do not want to leave. Even among my interviewees, a majority expressed a longing attachment to home, often because they missed family, friends, and community. Some missed what they called the purity of the North, attributed both to the landscape and the character of the people. The decision to cross the border, even if initially a temporary reprieve for present difficulties, was not a decision made easily. The practical difficulties of crossing had given pause, as had the web of social attachments.
Why did some people stay rather than leave? This may seem like an unusual question to ask, particularly if we perceive the North as a totally inhospitable country or a veritable prison camp where people are desperate to escape, but the vast majority of people remain despite the difficulties. It is important to acknowledge that although the number of people choosing to migrate out increased during the famine, the majority stayed.
Interviewees identified border crossing, along with returning home, as a means of ensuring their livelihoods in the North. North Koreans were reluctant to leave their country, and though they might have traveled to China to get supplies, they were determined to return home. In the oral accounts, interviewees explained that their main reasons for leaving the country were driven by economic necessity. They did not link economic and political aspects of life in North Korea when it came to border crossing. Instead, their reasons were connected to being unable to endure the hunger and related problems any longer. The most common refrain was “I never would have left if I had not been so hungry or so ill.” In migrating to China, they might encounter border guards who could kill them for committing the treasonous act of border crossing, or guards who were open to receiving bribes. If they were lucky enough to have the opportunity and the means to do so, bribing guards with cigarettes, alcohol, and money meant that they could pass into China without risking death or imprisonment.
Of course this was not a fail-proof plan. Rather than suggesting a softening of authorial lines of power and a weakening of the political system within the country, these tactics reveal the ambiguity of power relations and the arbitrary ways that power was sometimes exercised at the level of life and death. Instead of a certain line of power and control that is obviated by uniform, occupation, and stature, uncertainty takes the place of certainty and generates an arbitrary delivery of power. In such cases, the value attributed to bribes and the resulting power manipulation of bribes is unclear. Bribes are by nature difficult to regulate and ascribe value. Approaching guards to exchange bribes for favors invariably involved a risk that could mean the loss of one’s home country and one’s future host country, all at the unknowable whim of a border guard.4
Remaining was the choice of the collective majority; departing was the choice of the individual few. Decisions to cross into China were connected with ambitions to return to the North and live more comfortably afterward. Departing the North without the hope of return was rarely described. At heart, departure was an individual act, and the breaking point leading to the decision was often negotiated at the level of the self, often deliberately excluding others from discussion and debate about the decision because so few could be trusted.
As previously mentioned, the appearance of humor and jokes in North Korea is evidence that at least some people were aware of the arbitrary attribution of value and power within society. It might be possible to say that discrepancies between day-to-day life and ideology generated a lack of confidence in the political apparatus of the country overall. Kong Dan Oh and Ralph C. Hassig observed that North Koreans are politically disengaged, emphasizing the lack of necessary energy to become politically engaged.5 I think it is more accurate to say that the busyness of daily life in North Korea may only allot opportunities to engage with dissatisfaction on the level of creative linguistic channels and, further, that political dissatisfaction may only materialize when daily life improves enough that people can begin to solve problems other than the most basic.
By way of contrast, consider Soviet Georgia. There people engaged in something called Keipi, collective social feasts that provided opportunities for large groups of people to gather. It was typical at such gatherings for people to sing songs and share proverbs and folktales. Through these methods of oral communication people could speak more freely than usual. Written communication, by contrast, was controlled.6 The Keipi were collective avenues where the public could engage clandestinely with dominant and minority opinions. However, even in the limited circumstances where such meetings occurred there remained multiple layers of observation and supervision within the social structure that hindered communication from becoming totally free. The balance between accepted and unacceptable views had to be delicately negotiated.
It is evident from the oral accounts that self-talk was a way of expressing dissatisfaction internally but also a way of generating encouragement to continue. Opportunities in North Korea to share opinions, suspicions, and doubts where such thoughts could be safely explored and challenged appears nonexistent. Instead, even the most minor of frustrations could, if voiced, result in life-or-death punishments. Having seen others take this risk and gain nothing, people often deemed it better to leave. So while there is evidence in the interviewee accounts of sociopolitical dissatisfaction in the North, there is no means by which people can transmit this information to each other safely. Still, it was explained to me, even if it was clear that your family felt as you did, nothing could be done. The sense of impossibility, defeat before trying, was a refrain that echoed through the interviewee accounts. It was as if the population had been preemptively disarmed and dissidence squashed before it could be imagined.
Keep in mind that while revolt and revolution are born in the same family, their lifespans are rarely the same, and revolt does not always become revolution. While it is arguably true, as Foucault says, that there is no authority “capable of making it utterly impossible” to revolt, to generate change revolt needs longevity, revolution, and staying power, and none of the coups in North Korea achieved this.7 They were crushed by authority. Interviewees shared anecdotes of revolts in an unidentified prison camp in the northern province of North Hamgyong where several prisoners rioted but were all killed in their uprising. Revolts or struggles were rare but not nonexistent. Revolt or struggle is not in question, to confirm Foucault’s earlier point, but the likely success of it is. The individual act of leaving the North, while not personally identified as political or resisting authority, was the only way of generating the possibility for positive change in an individual’s life trajectory. These revolts happened internally, and the risks and benefits were often those of the individual alone.
North Korea promotes the idea of collectivism in everything from factory work to farming and self-criticism sessions. Where the famine was concerned, there was a distinct lack collective action in the form of rebellion, common dissent, or mutual complaint. Instead resistance took a very individual form, and it was toward resisting hunger itself rather than the political apparatus that facilitated the famine. Avoiding hunger in North Korea was a complex operation. Trying to contain the capitalist behavior of individuals was also difficult for the government. Resistance to hunger will not always or necessarily take the forms we expect. The circumstances in North Korea were such that the priority of national sovereignty dictated government response to the famine. This resulted in the strict regulation of coping strategies as well as the interpretation and expressions of the famine because these activities were presumed to be forces that would dissolve the imagined self-sufficiency of the government system. The capture of North Koreans crossing into China and the subsequent treatment of these individuals in detention centers are among many indications that the North Korean government placed national sovereignty above the well-being of its population, all the while failing to provide a legal means of sustaining life. During the famine period, supposed traitors of the nation faced torture, imprisonment, and public execution. Yet, if my interviewees are any indication, loyalty to the government was not always in question. Many crossed into China to ensure survival and had every intention of returning. The government willfully neglected the population’s most urgent need for a legal means of acquiring sufficient food. Instead military resources were prioritized over humanitarian need, and migrants leaving the country were targeted as traitors.
Breaking points were present in many ways in North Korea. Sometimes they existed within individuals, where hunger reached extreme starvation and the individual perished. Loyalty and belief in the government system motivated people to wait for the famine to turn around. The increasing numbers of people who died waiting served as a warning to those who remained. Kyung-ok Park (63) eventually decided to depart, but—as with all interviewees—there was the earlier phase of choosing to remain. This deferral and delay is remarkable, particularly since Kyung-ok Park had lived in Japan and recalled her former life there.
I guess it was between 1992 and 1993, and then in 1994. Things got very busy. There were people in North Korea who simply decided that they could not live any longer and killed themselves. From 1994 onward, people didn’t have enough to eat. They would go to the mountain and eat grass. Worse than animals. It’s really unspeakable. When I think about it now, it’s so ridiculous, I am speechless.
I didn’t plan to leave. When my daughter said we should flee to China, I did not object. “Fine, you go ahead. I’m going to stay here and starve to death. Do whatever it takes to get out of here.” That’s how I sent my kids away. She promised she would come back to get me, and I waited for a bit to see whether or not there would be some news. But nothing came, so I was concerned if I could really flee to China.
My husband and mother-in-law were dying. We would have died like that. So we decided. During that time, many people were going into China. Many of them succeeded. “Let’s flee to China now,” I said. My daughter had gone first. I could not even walk properly. She said, “I’ll come back for you with good news.” She was sorry about leaving me. The poor people died of hunger and beatings, they all died like that.
At last a man came and took me, telling me not to worry, so I went. When I arrived in China, after crossing the Tuman River, I suddenly got nostalgic for Japan. “I’m actually in China,” I thought, and then I realized I had finally got out of North Korea. When I got to China I ate food every day. I had a banana for the first time in forty years. We had nothing like that in North Korea. When I was eating the banana in China, I thought, “I am actually eating a banana!” I was so well treated and I thought of how my siblings were doing back home, but I couldn’t stay in China indefinitely. I heard that they come and arrest you in the night, so I couldn’t sleep after that. I fled here and there. I couldn’t live like that. In China there was a contact route to Japan. “I have to go to Japan,” I thought. I went to the embassy and got connected. I got to Japan safely. It felt like a dream. I took a plane for the first time. I had succeeded. (Kyung-ok Park, 63)
Her account demonstrates reluctance in the face of the difficulty in crossing to China. One needs to be physically up to the task, as she mentions she had trouble walking. Many North Koreans cross out of North Korea on foot. She saw the fate of her in-laws dying of hunger, what would be her fate. Even at this stage, although she makes her decision, it is not followed by action until a man comes (a broker, sent by her daughter) and assures her not to worry and helps her leave. Kyung-ok Park is an ethnic Korean who grew up in Japan and moved to North Korea in the 1960s at a time when Japan-based Koreans were encouraged to return to the homeland.8 That history was one marked by regret and confusion, which doubtless led to the tamping down of frustrations. It is only when Kyung-ok Park is in China eating a banana that she seems to allow herself for the first time to remember her life in Japan.
Some people decided to defect to China after getting severely ill in the North and being unable to find the medicine they needed. Many came to this breaking point when they saw that they could not continue living inside North Korea, either because they lacked essential medicines or because there was no longer a possibility of securing enough food and they saw death around the corner. Although the consequences of the decision were political, the reasons for making such a decision were rarely expressed as such. Nearly every interviewee reported that ultimately the decision to defect was a practical one prompted by the death of a family member or friends, by witnessing killings, or by their own imminent death. None expressed their defection as an arbitrary or incidental decision, or one where they intentionally resisted the government. Rather, it was a decision they were compelled to make, one that was made reluctantly.
North Koreans reported that they would not have left if they had had enough to eat. Hye-jin Lee’s (23) loyalty to North Korea was unwavering. Although she was very ill and needed medicine she couldn’t find in North Korea, she was reluctant to try crossing because such a journey requires strength and physical endurance. She explains how, prior to departure, she tried everything, such as buying medicine in the black market and seeking local medical attention to fix her condition:
In a place like North Korea, there are lots of contagious diseases going around. The majority of people have measles or other kinds of contagion. So I was in that situation, I had completely lost consciousness. It was like any day I would be dead. There was nothing to eat. My hair fell out. I had a high fever. In North Korea the treatment that they give you is free, but even if you go to the hospital there is no medicine. Patients buy medicine elsewhere and take it to the hospital, where it is administered. Sick as I was, eating and selling were very difficult things to accomplish. You have to have money to buy medicine. It was a complicated situation. I was just at home, getting more ill.
My father knew a doctor, knew him personally. I was in a lot of pain. My father put me on his back and brought me to that doctor. We went at night. I was given an injection and had a boil lanced. The doctor couldn’t see very well because all of this was taking place in the dark. There was no electricity to see what he was doing. So the needle wasn’t put in right, and I got worse. I was close to dying. I would die in a day or two. I was at home like that, dying.
My brother had been going to China a bit. So when it seemed like I was going to die my brother put me on his back and brought me to China, all the way to China on his back. That was our motivation for going. We crossed the Tuman River. It was my great fortune that my brother had been going back and forth to China in order to eat and live. I lost consciousness. My brother put me on his back and carried me. It was pouring rain, so much water poured down. We were down in the Tuman River, my brother was in the water with me on his back. We were crossing into China. The reason we went to China was because of my illness. When we got there we had every intention to return, but once we got there we decided against it, and to just go on to South Korea. (Hye-jin Lee, 23)
The relationships Hye-jin identifies with her father, the doctor, and her brother are key to her survival. She identifies the country’s limitations, such as the lack of electricity and the need to travel at night for the safety and security afforded by clandestine timing. She identifies these, but she does not criticize; rather, she indicates how they placed her at a disadvantage. She knew this and articulated it clearly. She identified the worsening of her illness with the damage done to her in the unlit makeshift surgery room. She identifies the compounded difficulties she must negotiate just to stay alive: In order to eat, to be well, she must sell in the market for money; to be cured she must have money to get medicine so that she can eat to be well and sell in the market. Only on a subtle level are the state’s failures identified as causing her failure to recover. Instead, her representation of this near-death experience is rendered in rather banal terms: eating and selling were very difficult things to accomplish and it was a complicated situation. There is little emotion expressed in this portion of her account; it seems devoid of emotions and instead focused and determined. The mechanically represented experience—“I was just at home, getting more ill. . . . I was at home like that, dying”—more readily recalls the steady, watchful response she had to her illness. She describes being taken through the motions as her father, the doctor, and her brother all try to get her the help she needs. It is truly engaging, then, that after all of this, she and her brother do not initially question their desire to return home to North Korea. But after arriving in China, they decide against it. I asked Hye-jin why she wanted to return to the North in the first place. This is what she told me:
I received education (kyoyuk) about South Korea that it was a country with many beggars. They were our sworn enemy. That is how we were taught. The ideological education was very severe. So, in North Korea I was a person who thought like that. We were completely shut off from the outside world. So because of that, the thought of going to South Korea hadn’t even occurred to me. Because of my illness we went to China with the intention of getting treatment and heading back to North Korea. Our family was there, but then . . . but then . . . the situation was such that we were unable to go back. Well, if we went back we would die, or get caught and dragged back by your nostrils. They drag you back by a hole they make in your nose. That’s what they do. So we couldn’t go back. So after being in China for a few years, well, we couldn’t go back! After a few years we decided to go to South Korea. (Hyejin Lee, 23)
In identifying her reasons for wanting to return, Hye-jin begins by explaining the education she received about the South and how cut off she was from knowledge of the rest of the world. The concrete factor she mentions that makes her want to return to the North is the presence of her family there. What stands out in this account is the presence of a largely nonnegotiable barrier to departure and return. In the description she turns herself from subject into object, giving the listener a sense that she very much stands outside of that experience now: “In North Korea I was a person who thought like that.” The self-objectification identifies the past and present selves, signaling an internal fracture between her identities then and now. She reflects rather firmly how her present self and past personhood differs. She did not say “I once thought” or “I thought that way” but rather “I was a person who thought like that,” identifying her former self as external and other but also identifying a way of thinking that grouped her as a person among others who thought the same. The act of departing is difficult not only because of the threat to life but because it is a departure from how the self is identified and what the self is bound to for identification.
Her physical survival was driven up against her unchallenged education about the superiority of the North over all else. To consider that another country had the means to save her life was a test to her former beliefs. The two could not survive together; one would have to lose to save the other. It is a terrifying act of completion. Relationship to the homeland is forever transformed by crossing over. In her account, Hye-jin Lee also highlights the role of rumors in her decision to remain in China and try to continue toward the South. Her almost unbelievable description of the way North Korean illegal migrants are rounded up and deported home is something I heard many times in the interviews, described precisely in this manner. The noses of individuals are pierced and the collection of migrants strung together and dragged back in a humiliated, agonized mass. I cannot verify this method of refoulement, but the rumor had such currency as to be a factor in her decision to exit China and continue to South Korea.
The price of defecting and the price of staying were described as equal—if I leave and get killed, it is the same as if I stay and die, so I may as well die trying. This cost assessment was commonly articulated in the oral accounts. However, reaching this conclusion took a considerable period of time during which key elements of the social fabric fell away. Trends in the accounts suggest that, for these interviewees, the difficult decision to defect was made through a series of shattering realizations. These followed a chronology that began with the death of Kim Il-Sung and the floods, which eventually lead to witnessing things deemed incongruous to socialist society. The inflow of rumors from people who had crossed into China for trade, selling, and other resources met with a growing community of citizens who were increasingly anxious about how they could continue to survive on so little. With strictly controlled access to media, telephones, and even open communication among themselves, North Koreans had only the briefest of opportunities to learn from rumors and to corroborate what they heard. Although they could not be verified, rumors provided an alternative explanation for why the country was in economic turmoil with no end of food shortage in sight. This altered interpretations of their suffering. The rumors did not instantly change people’s ways of thinking but brought in the element of doubt.
People who were regular border crossers carried information about China, South Korea, and other countries. They explained that foreign aid donations had been provided since 1995, which came as a shock to many who had never seen such aid. An incongruity emerged between the messages from the government and the rumors of the border crossers. These stories provided alternative messages about the reality they witnessed and experienced in their daily lives. Jae-young Yoon explained:
Around 1999, North Koreans started to learn that the food was coming from the international community. Before that they had no idea that aid was coming from the Republic of Korea or that medicines were coming from England. In 1999, a lot of defectors had gone to China, lived there, listened to South Korean broadcasts and so, “Oh! The international community is giving food relief for the benefit of North Korea.” This kind of talk got around, not through the official media, television, or the central media [chungang] though. Well if you’re embarrassed of something you don’t want to broadcast it, do you?
You see, North Korea as a society cannot be known. They can have the citizens dying of starvation, but they do not say anything about that to the outside world. So it was that crossing into China and back and forth that North Koreans came to know about how the international community [was] helping North Korea, and “Oh! We have been suffering with hunger for a long time, and the international community has been sending us aid for a long time.” They came to know the truth. (Jae-young Yoon, 45)
The formation of an injustice frame was necessary but not sufficient to make the decision to once and for all abandon their country. Leaving North Korea without a legal permit is certainly bona fide defection according to North Korean law, but for many interviewees, leaving North Korea was not an intentionally political or legal gesture; it was not necessarily defection but rather a way of making ends meet. For some interviewees the decision to defect was made largely because they had no other choice in their given circumstances, particularly instances related to health, where the requisite needs could not be met inside North Korea. In some instances, the decision to leave North Korea permanently and continue through China to third countries came only after learning about the difficulties to be had in staying in China or upon trying to reenter the North—as had frequently been their intention. Although some individuals were loyal to North Korea, the military measures taken by the government to ensure the capture and detention of border crossers kept people from returning. But, as greater contradictions began to appear between social groups, people felt a sense of betrayal.
I too never once saw food sent from the international community. North Korea wants to hide this, but [after a while] they could not because the USA trademark was stamped on the bags and you could see it in the black markets being sold. Republic of Korea marked sacks too are secretly taken and sold. Those who were strong and those who were weak were bit by bit more separated, and those who were weak had nothing but to die of hunger. All of this. Not only around the mid-1990s but until the start of 2000 as well. It became a destroyed society, as I see it.
But if the peasantry can’t go out to work, they will just stay indoors and one by one collapse. I was just the same. That’s how I lost my youngest. I lost him! And to live that way was so hard; I made the decision to escape to China. Of course, when I was escaping to China I told myself, “I will go and live a while, and never return to this land.” (Jae-young Yoon, 45)
Stories about life in China provided ideas about alternative solutions to their situation, albeit perplexing and counterintuitive to North Korean ideological education. Jae-young Yoon’s story about the loss of his son identifies that this loss was what created the greatest difficulty in continuing to live in North Korea. Others learned that essential resources such as food and medicine could be found in China. In some instances, defection became a default choice when loyal citizens had gone into China with every intention of returning after they had retrieved the necessary food or medicine. Many of these temporary defectors realized that they were at risk of imprisonment or worse if they were caught trying to return. Many remarked on how the elderly had just gone into their houses, closed the door and died. Such individuals were described as loyal citizens. Ways of dealing with suffering were influenced by locally acceptable ways of understanding problems.9
In a few cases the decision to depart was less individual and more a decision of the head of the family. Ji-young Kim (25) explained that her decision to defect was settled with her family; her account indicates the importance of good timing for the decision to defect. Many people were unable to tell even their closest family members that they were leaving because it would put them in danger. It seems that the idea to defect can sit a long time in the mind before it turns into action, preceded by a period of waiting and watching in order to ensure success.
We were living very badly off. . . . My mother had wanted to defect for a long time; she had made the decision long ago. It was like she had made the decision when I was very young. So there was talk of seeing our relatives in China, and it occurred to me that I would like to go and see China too, that’s what I was thinking. I had heard a lot about China. One of my aunts lived there. Her daughter, once married, had moved to South Korea in 1994. We heard that life was good in China. We had also heard since early school days that South Korea wasn’t doing well. In our school books it was written that the place was swarming with beggars and . . . filled with them. . . . But there is freedom isn’t there, no matter how many stories you hear about how poor it is. . . . Knowing that, we escaped. (Ji-young Kim, 25)
A combination of factors resulted in each person arriving at the breaking point. The famine reached its worst stage in terms of recorded deaths during 1996–1997. Piles of deceased were reported in train stations around the northern cities of Cheongjin and Musan, and the capital city of Pyongyang was not immune either. Prior to the famine, this was a sight unknown in North Korean society, where needless death and suffering were attributed to capitalism. Along with the presence of the deceased, there were other manifestations of famine, such as internal migration, homelessness, orphaned children, and beggars. The motivation to leave North Korea came when all other methods of individual survival were deemed impossible. The country was no longer able to convince people that they could hope for a better day, proper and sufficient food, proper and sufficient medical care, and freedom from persecution for famine crimes.
Interviewees describe being pushed to the limit of their adaptive capacity within the country, which led many to make the ultimate decision to break with former ways of living and all they had known and to cross the border. This meant leaving the country permanently, though some thought they could cross back and forth. Many people acquired a new perspective on political and cultural identity as a consequence of their survival strategies, and out-migration exemplified this. Typically this act of crossing was a decision made much earlier than the physical act itself. The breaking point happened internally, invisibly, and often without direct communication. Instead, when individuals identified this transition stage in their accounts, they often recalled the use of self-talk.
There was a period of self-sacrifice for the good of the country, but interviewees saw others “giving up” on life, which meant giving up on individual survival, closing the door and waiting to die. Interviewees relayed such accounts, but for them over time the survival of the nation gave way in priority to survival of the self. Their hope for a better life in the North turned to hopelessness, and this drove many across the border. Jung-ok Choi’s (21) narrative reveals that her family had a critical understanding of their precarious relationship to the state, given that they were from a less favorable class. As times got worse, her political vulnerability increased, making life more complicated. She told me about the day her mother told her about their hopeless future if they stayed in the North:
Because of the famine there were lots of people who died. They had given up on their lives. Those who had nothing to eat had given up. Even though it was hard for me, no matter how hard it was I didn’t give up. I just had to think about the future. I thought, “In the future, I will not live this way. Right now it is painful, but in the future it will be better. It will get better.” I would say those things to myself, just to myself. I thought like that. In North Korea I thought that if I just worked hard at farming or maybe I would sell in the market. I thought I would really be able to throw off the famine, really throw off the poverty in the future. I had that thought many times. I had no special skill, no method. I was only a student, after all.
But I could not have such hope. My uncle was in a political prison camp and because of that my family was categorized as bad, my mother, my father, my uncle. In North Korean law you are bound together, so in that situation being a songp’ uni nap’ un kajok (family of bad class), from myself to my mother to them, the effect would be on us all. I couldn’t even dream that I would go to university or join the military in the future. What I mean is, in North Korean parlance songp’ uni nap’ un kajok, when you are a bad family, you know. I knew that.
When I was 16 I didn’t have any special thoughts about what I would do. “What shall I study at university?” That kind of thought never crossed my mind. I couldn’t go, so my mother had already made the decision to defect. But at that time, truly I couldn’t have made that decision to defect. I was only 16.
One day my mother told me we had to leave. I didn’t want to leave, but if you waited you would die. I had thought like “Oh, in North Korea so long as you work very hard, you can live well,” but my mother was like, “We’re going to China!”
My mother said, “You, we, have no chance of hope because my brother committed a crime against North Korea. You will end up like your mother, working the ground with a weeding hoe. Farming, that is how you will live,” she said. My mother had gone to school. She had studied. When she was about 15 or 16 her brother was taken to a political prison, he was about 24 or 25 then. The whole family was relocated to a mountainous district. She told me about my uncle and how if we stayed in North Korea, apart from land, apart from farming, we would have to farm, she said, “No matter how hard we try to make it happen, it won’t work,” she said.
When I heard her talking like that, I saw there was no hope in North Korea. “How can I live in this land? I was born like this. How was I born into this world?” Those thoughts went around my head. So I consented to my mother’s decision that we leave for China. (Jung-ok Choi, 21)
Jung-ok Choi and her family made the difficult decision to defect from home after realizing that there was no hope even for the return of their formerly ordinary lives. Her mother had been willing to live within those limits, but as the economic situation worsened, her mother saw that even that way of life was growing more difficult and impossible. There was an awareness of politically constructed class differences and the benefits or limitations these brought to individuals. The price of leaving and the price of going were equal. This calculus of survival helped in the decision to risk defecting.
In the book More Frightening than Hunger Is the Loss of Hope, written by two young North Korean siblings, Sŏnhŭi and Ch’unsik Park, who resettled to Japan, the authors explain that they crossed the Tuman River because there was nothing to eat, there was so much hunger in North Korea.10 The book details much in their lives as hidden refugees in China, but there are moments when the siblings recall life in North Korea and the combination of precipitating factors that led ultimately to the decision to defect. Their father died from illness. After this, Sŏnhŭi and her brother, Ch’unsik, moved to their uncle’s house. Life at their uncle’s house was difficult too. There was only one bowl of cornmeal per day. Soon this became no more than half a bowl. Sŏnhŭi was sent out to collect weeds in a large bowl. She explains:
Instead of regular food, we had to pluck weeds. Different kinds of weeds were gathered, shepherd’s purse, dropwort, mugwort. At the beginning we would gather weeds such as these that were usually edible. But then it wasn’t only us who were going out to collect the weeds, all our neighborhood was as well and because of that the edible weeds were gone very quickly.11
Shortly after this she spotted their aunt at the black market.
One day my friends and I were walking near the market area, I spotted my aunt. My aunt said, “I’m off to sell something,” and then wandered off. Then sometimes she didn’t come back to the house. She took things to the market to sell and bought food with the money. She came home; we welcomed her with a happy heart saying, “Aunty, you’re back!” and she said she was going out again. We could see in each of her hands a piece of rice cake and we could hear the sound of her munching on the rice cake. When I saw that, I thought my aunty looked like an animal.12
The young life of Sŏnhŭi was soon shattered. This all came during what she called the worst stage of the famine for her. In a chapter titled “One Dream Only,” she explains what happened. The entire short chapter is translated here.
I was always hungry. I even lacked the strength required to just stand quietly, I was so hungry. In spite of this, I still intended to attend primary school in any case. There were other students who thought as I did. But they all had to go back home after an hour or two of classes. Of all these students, it seems that I must have had the least to eat of them all. I would stumble and stagger so severely that my close friends collected among themselves some corn and gave it to me. I couldn’t have done anything like begging. I didn’t even have the means to get money. So because I had so little food, I got quite sick. I would lay several days and endure the hunger pains in my stomach. I was aware that “I’m starving to death and there’s nothing I can do, and if that happens then . . .” but I wasn’t scared.
Even though I was in that situation, I continued to attend school because I was dreaming of my future. After entering college, I wanted to become a great doctor. That was my dream. My mother and father had contracted illnesses and at that time there was nothing I could do for them, this grieved me terribly. So because of that, more than any other student, I studied very hard. The result was that in my third year, I was able to skip a year, I became a fourth year student. But then, there was something new about the world that I came to know. Oh no! Study alone will not bring my dream! In that situation, studying to achieve your dreams is a terribly difficult thing.
If I’d had money I could have realized my dream through working hard with great determination and remarkable zeal. Still, I want to become a doctor. No matter what, I will do what is necessary to see that dream before me.13
Writing about the difficulties within their family, the siblings discuss the mixed feelings of receiving from fellow classmates what they could not have been able to provide for them if they had been in the same situation. They also write about tapping into a source of strength for survival in North Korea, which is about finding meaning in life, now and in the future, something that has been mentioned by other survivors of social suffering as a means of strength for the will to live.14 The young authors elaborate their philosophy of survival:
There are no expressions to describe my feelings at that time [1996]. Having nothing to eat was a terribly painful thing. But more than that, the loss of hope was a far more painful thing. In this world, if the thing you wish to do most is taken away from you, life has no meaning whatsoever. Hope can shore up a life. If there is hope, no matter how hungry one is, it can be endured.15
The title “One Dream Only” sums up their experience. However, although the siblings survived, there is regret in the story. At the very end of her account, Sŏnhŭi explains, “We didn’t escape from North Korea because we hated it. That is the country in which we were born and raised. I have so many memories that upon reflection bring tears flowing from my eyes. If I had been able, I would have lived in North Korea. It is regretful, but right now North Korea has no means by which to give us life.”16 This reluctance echoes in many of the stories shared by North Koreans. This same sentiment, the idea that perhaps it is possible to live elsewhere, that there is a hope for a better life, drove many across the border. They escaped the certainty of death in North Korea for the hope of life someplace else.
Defection came at a high cost and great risk. But the hopeless life many North Koreans saw laid out before them inside their country encouraged them to risk losing the little they had. The decision to defect was the final means by which to solve the countless problems brought into their lives by the famine and the strict level of control placed on coping strategies by the government. The North Koreans I interviewed also carried the experience of those Koreans, loyal to the Party, who died waiting for food to be delivered.
The decision to defect was not one taken lightly, and it was not necessarily informed by a desire to resist the regime or stand up against oppression. It was a practical act of survival. None expressed their defection as an arbitrary or incidental decision, or one in which they resisted the government. It was a decision they were compelled to make, one that was made reluctantly. Through a series of shattering realizations, some with overlapping chronology, the decision was finally made. The death of Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il’s rise to power was frequently mentioned as the historical turning point for the downturn in economic and food security. With the death of Kim Il-Sung, whom every North Korean is taught to idolize, an emotional desperation seems to have linked any national failure with the nation’s loss. It is also a demonstration that the collective experience of social suffering was understood to be mapped out on a national scale that incorporated the leadership at its center but not necessarily the center of responsibility.
Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il, their words are like two pieces of the sky, it was like that for me. That was all I knew. So, in that context, the issue of defecting is a very difficult one indeed. That person who defects has reached the point where their very existence is dead by the time they have arrived at that point to put into practice their decision to defect. (Jae-young Yoon, 45)
Jae-young Yoon, whose child died of starvation, describes his state of mind as he crossed the border, dead to the homeland, dead to existence, with a dead world left behind. Jae-young Yoon never expressed a desire to return to North Korea. He was free of it, dead to the North, a life elsewhere in China, in Thailand, in South Korea, anything but the North. There were breaking points with the relationship between the North and the loyalty of the people. When people learned about the aid, they realized they had been betrayed. The relationship between the state and the society lost the element of trust. When people grew ill and unable to remedy their illness in North Korea, their ill health forced a choice that, in pushing them across the border, widened their perspectives on their former lives and opportunities. When people lost family members to starvation, especially children lost to parents, it sometimes propelled defiant acts of border crossing since there was nothing left for them in North Korea anymore.