A glimpse into North Korea

This weekend I heard a North Korean refugee speak. I was expecting a man, and I was surprised when this small woman took the stage. She's about 28 or 29 years old. She spoke Korean, obviously, but it was so weird to hear a language I'm kind of familiar with come out of the mouth of someone I can't relate to at all. Before she talked we watched a video shot with hidden cameras and smuggled out of North Korea. It said the average 8 year old North Korean boy is 8 inches shorter and 20 lbs lighter than the average 8 year old South Korean boy because of malnutrition. It showed public executions, which apparantly still happen regularly. It showed corpses of people who had died of starvation lying in the street, and people walking around them, just going about their business. It has become so common that people are unfazed.

Then the woman got up to speak. She changed her name and we were told several times not to take her picture or video because if the North Korean government sees it on the internet they will kill her family. This was her first time telling her story in public. Her voice was shaky and she was obviously fighting back tears. She had a relatively normal childhood. Her father worked in a factory and her mother was a teacher. She went to school until the famine struck. It lasted 4 years and nobody knows for sure how many people died of starvation, but it was probably at least a million. During that time she spent the day wandering in the mountains looking for anything edible. She hoped for one meal every day. One time she tried to kill herself by eating poisionous berries.

In North Korea there is a system called songbun, which is the measure of your loyalty to the government. It determines your life: what job you can have, who you can marry, your military rank. They said only 28% of North Koreans have good songbun. And if one person in your family messes up one time, it ruins the songbun of your entire extended family for generations. This woman's grandfather's brother had bad songbun, therefore she did too, so there were not a lot of opportunities for her or her family. She said one of the reasons she left was so she could marry anyone she wanted - she would have had to marry someone with the same songbun as her.

Her dad developed some kind of brain tumor. Her mom and sister snuck into China to try to get medicine, and she never heard from them again. She has no idea what happened. She left about a month after her dad died. North Koreans need what is basically a travel visa to go anywhere in their own country, so she got one for a town closer to the border with China. Then she escaped into China. She spent 2 weeks running through the mountains, trying not to be caught by the Chinese because if you are found, you will be sent back to North Korea and put in political prison, which is basically a concentration camp, or you will be killed. She wouldn't talk about where she was or how she got help. I think there's basically an underground railroad for defectors and she wanted to protect it.

At the end there was a Q & A time, and somebody asked her about God. She said she had heard the words Jesus and Bible a few times, but she didn't know anything beyond that until she left. Like a lot of other things in that country, talking about God will get you killed.

She talked about how exciting it was that South Koreans are free to have whatever job they want because in North Korea your career is chosen for you. But she also said that she spent so many years just trying to survive that there are huge gaps in her education and she has a lot to learn before she's qualified to do anything. Right now she's taking computer classes. She said the technology in South Korea is making life a little difficult for her because she doesn't know how to use any of it.

Somebody asked her what North Koreans think about re-unification. In South Korea its assumed that it will happen. She told us most North Koreans want it and are waiting for it to happen. Her grandmother said she didn't want to die before the countries were re-united because she had family down here she hasn't seen since the war. Someone else asked how North Koreans know there's anything better than what they have - the government restricts all access to the outside world. She told us foreign music and tv shows are smuggled in and that's how people know that the rest of the world doesn't live like they do. North Korea spreads propaganda about lots of countries, lying about how terrible and evil they are. But apparantly propaganda is also smuggled in, and North Koreans will sometimes find fliers about how their leaders are really living and what the outside world is really like. People are supposed to turn that stuff in to the government immediately, but most of them hang on to it as a little piece of hope.

She painted a picture of a really desperate, hungry, dark country. People are starving in every single way. They're pretty brainwashed, and most of the people who are aware there's a better life for them in a different country are too scared to leave because of what the government will do to their family if they're caught. It was pretty depressing, but also pretty eye-opening. I'm glad I went.