North Korean defectors face tough life in South

Kim Yong, owner of a North Korean cuisine establishment, cooks at his restaurant in Goyang, South Korea. Han Jae-Ho, Reuters


North Korean defectors face tough life in South
Refugees find it hard to adapt to life in a competitive capitalist market
Jon Herskovitz, Reuters
Published: Monday, July 30, 2007

SEOUL -- A tasty bowl of cold noodles knows no political boundaries on the divided Korean peninsula, and that has helped make defector Kim Yong a successful businessman.
Kim, who runs a restaurant in the Seoul suburbs specializing in North Korean cuisine, is one of a handful of defectors making a living in the capitalist South selling goods linked to the communist country of his birth.
Most North Korean defectors have been bystanders to the South's economic boom, overwhelmed by their new environment, facing employers who see them as underqualified for a cut-throat labour market and criminals who target them as easy prey.
"Many North Koreans come here to escape starvation. They do not bring skills or money with them," said Kim, adding few had the business acumen or capital to crack into the market.
"So many defectors try to open their own business, but they disappear within a year. They don't realize how competitive capitalism is in the South."
The first of the more than 10,000 North Koreans who defected to the South came in a trickle, often members of the hermit-state's elite with the skills to find jobs in a land that celebrated their arrival.
Nowadays, they are more likely to be women labourers and farmers from North Hamkyong province, a rocky land bordering China known for its prison camps and as an economic backwater in an already impoverished country.
One of Seoul's greatest fears is that its northern neighbour will collapse, sending millions across the border, creating turmoil in the prosperous South.
South Korea is a fervent advocate of dialogue with the North, including the current international talks to end Pyongyang's atomic arms ambitions in return for aid, which many say will help keep its leaders in power and avoid abrupt political change.
They started arriving en masse in the mid- to late-1990s, fleeing a famine that experts say may have killed about 10 per cent of the 22 million population.
With few skills and speaking Korean with an unmistakable accent, they rarely fit in.
Even though South Korea trains defectors to adjust to their new lives, more than half wind up unemployed and those who do find work often only earn a pittance, according to a survey from Seoul National University.
About one in four defectors has fallen victim to crime in the South, most often defrauded of their welfare stipends by earlier defectors, a government study earlier this year said.
Kim, who fled to the South about 16 years ago and soon became a TV personality, now runs a restaurant called Morangak, in the Seoul suburb of Ilsan, with branches across the country.
Its best-selling dish is Pyongyang cold noodles at 6,000 won ($6.54), served in a clear, vinegar broth garnished with slices of beef. Kim has also pitched his instant noodles on TV home shopping channels.
Kim weathered a year where he did "little more than chase flies" because his North Korean cuisine was not to the taste of customers in the South.
He learned to include more meat, make portions generous and change a way of cooking from the North based on stretching sparse ingredients to that of the South, where food is abundant.
His restaurant now serves about 1,000 people a day on weekdays and 3,000 on weekends.
Technically still at war with the North, South Korea has taught generations of its children that Pyongyang's leaders are devils and has stringent anti-communist laws to throttle any influence from across the border.
Defectors say they often feel like second-class citizens in a country where many see them as a burden on the welfare system.
The North's missile test in July 2006 and its first nuclear test three months later have made South Koreans more suspicious of their communist neighbours, opinion polls show.
While trade between the two Koreas has increased over the past few years and now tops more than $1 billion annually, there are almost no North Korean goods on South Korean store shelves.
The few items from the North are poorly made cigarettes, cheap alcohol and ginseng, often sold near the border. Yet, despite the prejudice, a few defectors say they have found a receptive audience by selling the idea of a shared Korean identity which transcends their heavily armed border.
Defector Lim Yoo-kyung, 20, jumped on that bandwagon with her accordion.
Lim is a member of the Tallae Music Band, a group of young female defectors who play traditional Korean tunes virtually unknown to young South Koreans who are fed a diet of hip-hop.
"I thought people would feel uncomfortable or disapprove of our group because we're from North Korea," said Lim.

© The Vancouver Sun 2007