From North Korea to Seoul National University | Noah’s Story
The house was too small. There was nowhere to hide, and so we had to leave.
I was only 8 years old when my parents divorced. My father was a violent alcoholic, and every day he would beat my mother, sister, and me. North Korea’s laws didn’t protect us from him, so my mother tried to protect us instead. My father stabbed her in the lungs for it.
We were suffocating, but there was no one to save us. The police, the law, and the regime didn’t care. So we left.
First, from our hometown. We moved to a remote city to escape our father’s shadow, but North Korea is a patriarchal society so families like ours are looked down upon. All people saw was a divorced woman and her fatherless children. They didn’t see my mother, who came back from the brink of death to protect her children at all costs. They didn’t see my older sister, who ran her own business and worked away from home to support our family.
All we had was each other, and everything we had, we shared. I remember the snacks we used to buy, the delicious things my sister would bring home and split three ways. We endured 8 years like this, surviving hardships and prejudice with little bits of sweetness.
With no social welfare or food rations to depend on, we had no hope of escaping extreme poverty and hunger. We tried our best, but there were days when I went to school starving. One time, while the other kids were getting ready to eat lunch, I snuck out to forage in a nearby mountain. I found some unripe apricots and ate them to satisfy my hunger. After school that day, I ran home and found some rice porridge leftover in the pot. Without thinking, I ate it all, only to find out later that my mother had sold her clothes in exchange for the rice.
That was worse than the hunger–the helplessness as I watched my mother sell her beloved belongings one by one.
We were still suffocating in a country that told us to be small and silent. To live so invisibly, perhaps they hoped we’d disappear altogether. And so we did. We left North Korea, in search of somewhere with breathing room. Somewhere we wouldn’t have to run from again.
That was eight years ago. My family lives in South Korea now. Today, my mother, who fought hard to protect her two children in a place with no freedom or human rights, works as a school teacher for other refugee children. My sister has since graduated from nursing school and works as a full-time ICU nurse. They’ve never stopped being the strongest, most loving people in my life.
I’m here because they protected me. And now, I can protect them too.
I used to be a terrified, 8 year-old boy, who could only rely on his mother. Now, I’m her proud son, studying politics at Seoul National University – the most prestigious college in South Korea.
As I learn and grow, I’m able to understand my past and leverage it for a better future. The politics and systems that people live under, the environments and experiences that people carry with them – all of these things can be different. But in the end, we are all people. We set the standards for our freedom. We can be the ones who bring change.
When I think about how my family used to live and how we live now, it’s actually easier to remember the bright, happy moments in North Korea, because they were so few and far between. Now, happiness is happenstance – it’s everyday and mundane. And I realize that’s what it must mean to be free. That I know this sweetness will stay, and I can too.
Noah was part of our 2022 class of Advocacy Fellows, a program that supports and develops the next generation of North Korean leaders, storytellers, and advocates. For three months, he traveled across the United States, sharing his story at universities, Fortune 500 companies, embassies, thank-tanks, and The White House. Ultimately, Fellows are working to bring a greater focus to the North Korean people and human rights issues rather than just politics.
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Film Review: Under the Sun
Spoiler alert: The North Korean government suffers from a severe transparency deficit.
How do you reveal the reality of a society where government representatives script each scene you're allowed to shoot?
Simple: leave cameras rolling at all times, and show your audience the scripting and retakes of "real life" in all their glory.
You end up not with a documentary about a family going about their lives, but a behind-the-scenes reveal of a family whose dinner-table conversations, workplace interactions, and even expressed emotions are curated by government propagandists for external consumption.
No North Koreans question this process out loud--except to check their lines.In this system everyone knows the role expected of them, especially with government officials overseeing everything. So before our very eyes, we observe the theatrical production of an ideal 'Kimilsungist socialist society', played out by real citizen-actors. And when citizens know the risks of not playing the part they’re asked to play, they become good actors.
This is of course a very real aspect of life in North Korea, even when no cameras are rolling. The everyday ritualised theatrical production of 'obedient citizens willingly striving as one for the socialist cause' is one of the key means by which the state perpetuates itself. Everyone knows what to say, how to say it, and that you have to say it. Whatever your innermost thoughts may be, it's hard to break role publicly when everyone else is sticking so closely to a ‘script’.
Revealing the nature of this production, warts-and-all, is one of the key contributions of Under the Sun.But as with any behind-the-scenes look, cracks in the facade, tired actors and cock-ups are apparent.'Off stage', strategically placed cameras record poor Pyongyang kids scavenging from a trash can. We see commuters disembarking to push a tram. A government 'set manager' shoos away two women approaching the back door of a milk processing plant with a big jug; we can only guess they were looking for an off-the-books top up, unaware there were foreign filmmakers present that day.
We see a forgetful factory worker reporting they have exceeded production targets by 150%, and in the next take 200%. It doesn't matter to any of her coworkers which fiction is used, and no one bats an eyelid.
And of course, children being less practiced in their roles within the system than adults, the best scenes feature North Korean kids. A small girl struggles to keep her eyes open while an aging war veteran wearing far too many medals bumbles through an anti-American propaganda lecture, punctuating tales of shooting down planes with praise for Kim Il-sung.
Jinmi, the star of the film, breaks down in tears when the pressure of performance becomes too much. Elsewhere, on-screen text tells us that she unwittingly revealed her parents' true occupations of journalist and restaurant worker before the government co-producers scripted them as the more socialist-appropriate textile factory technician and soy milk plant worker.
It's hard to not recall The Truman Show, and it boggles the mind to think there are 25 million people living out their lives in this theater state.
But unlike a Hollywood Movie, the enemy here is not represented by a snarling on-screen character. The propagandists are unnamed and we rarely even see their faces properly. The enemy is in fact the system itself, whose quiet tyranny forces every citizen - including the propagandists - to become complicit in its perpetuation by allowing the expression of only a singular narrative of what it is to be a North Korean.
