For North Koreans in South, the journey has just begun

Lee Chan, a North Korean defector, takes a walk at fish market near his residence in Incheon, South Korea, on June 17. (Seokyong Lee/NYT)


For North Koreans in South, the journey has just begun
By Norimitsu Onishi
Friday, June 22, 2007
IHT

INCHEON, South Korea: 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 cocksure 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.
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."