Defector to South Korea Who Became a Celebrity Resurfaces in the North
2017/7/20 17:11:48 Source：The New York Times
SEOUL, South Korea — Until April, Lim Ji-hyun had been a modest television celebrity in South Korea, talking to the audience about the country she knew best: North Korea. She even had her own online fan club, indicating that she was among the relatively few North Korean defectors who had successfully adjusted to life in the capitalist South.
This week, Lim resurfaced in North Korea, tearfully recalling a terrible life in the South.
“Every single day of my life in the South was a hell,” Lim, 26, said in a videotaped interview uploaded on the North Korean government-run propaganda website Uriminzokkiri. “When I was alone in a dark, cold room, I was heartbroken and I wept every day, missing my fatherland and my parents back home.”
Lim — or Jeon Hye Sung, as she was called in the North — said she returned to “the bosom of the fatherland” last month and was now living with her parents in her hometown.
She did not reveal how she traveled back to the North. The Unification Ministry, the South Korean government agency that handles issues related to defectors, said it was investigating Lim’s case. Since there is no press freedom in the North, what Lim told the propaganda website cannot be independently verified.
“I was lured to the South by a delusion that I would eat well and make a lot of money there,” she said. “It was not the place I had imagined. I had wandered around everywhere there to make money, working in drinking bars, but nothing had worked out.”
Since a famine struck their country in the late 1990s, more than 30,000 North Koreans have defected to the South, a vast majority of them taking a perilous journey through China and the jungles of Southeast Asia to seek new lives.
After an extensive debriefing, they go through a monthslong program intended to help them integrate into South Korean society. But they often find it hard to make the transition from the North’s highly regimented totalitarian system to the South’s fast-paced, hypercompetitive capitalist society. They often cannot catch up with South Korean peers in schools and workplaces. Their strong accents divulge their origin.
Usually toiling in jobs shunned by South Koreans, they save money, which they send to family members left behind in the impoverished North.
North Korea used to call defectors “traitors” or “human scum.”
But since the North’s young leader, Kim Jong Un, took power in 2011, at least 25 defectors have resurfaced, claiming that they returned voluntarily, fed up with life in the South.
South Korean officials agree that some of the North Koreans may have returned out of desperation after failing to adjust to life in the South. But they also suspect that some were abducted back to the North after they were lured to China. North Korean agents have tried to blackmail defectors in the South, using their relatives in the North as hostages, they said.
The returning defectors are a propaganda boon for Kim.
His government has organized news conferences in Pyongyang, where the returnees claimed that human smugglers or South Korean spy agents cheated or kidnapped them to the South. They invariably thanked Kim for giving traitors like them a second chance. The United Nations has long criticized North Korea as one of the world’s worst human rights violators.
Under Kim, the North has tightened control along the border with China, the main escape route for defectors. The number of North Korean refugees arriving in the South dropped to 1,418 last year from 2,706 in 2011, according to the Unification Ministry. It has also intensified the crackdown on South Korean movies and TV dramas smuggled from China through which North Korean defectors said they learned of life in the South.
“In the South, where money ruled, there was only physical and psychological pain waiting for people like me who had betrayed their fatherland and fled,” Lim said in an apparent warning to North Koreans who might be dreaming of leaving for the South.
Lim arrived in South Korea in 2014.
From December, she had been among scores of mostly young female North Korean defectors who have tried to build careers on cable TV talk or reality shows. They often appear in North Korean dresses and sing North Korean songs.
Speaking in their unmistakable North Korean accents, these women share often funny or tearful episodes of life in the famine-struck Stalinist state or their dangerous journeys for freedom. A show called “Love of South and North” matches North Korean women with South Korean men, placing them in a romantic situation.
These entertainment-driven programs, which often advertise “beauties from the North,” are accused of airing sensational yet unconfirmed allegations from the defectors. But they are also credited with helping South Koreans understand the lives of ordinary people in the North, a neighbor that has seldom generated interest among South Koreans despite its growing nuclear and missile threats.
