“Until I Escaped from North Korea, I Thought the Kim Family were Gods” – Bella’s Story
I was 10 years old when I escaped from North Korea.
Sometimes, when people hear this, they assume I don’t feel close to my North Korean identity because I left at such a young age. But I can clearly remember my childhood, my most impressionable years, shaped by the hands of the regime.
Through songs and schooling, every aspect of my life was warped by indoctrination. In kindergarten, we learned heroic tales about Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. National holidays were celebrated with special snacks distributed by the government. There were portraits of the Kims prominently displayed in our home, that I cleaned every morning to a wake-up song praising the regime.
I was filled with reverence and gratitude toward the Kim family. To me, they were like gods, and North Korea was my entire universe.
The area of Haesan-si, Yanggang-do where I lived was very cold. We frequently ran out of food to eat, and endured harsh winters with thin clothes and shoes that would fall apart as you wore them. But still, I never questioned the regime. It was the only life I had ever known, so I believed that’s all there was to the world.
The thought of leaving was unimaginable.
When my mother suggested I join her in China, where she had escaped three years prior, I called her a traitor. You betrayed the General. You should come back to North Korea right now–these harsh words came from the mouth of a 7-year-old, who had only ever known propaganda and control. I saw what I was taught to see, and said what I was told to say.
Eventually, my mother arranged for a broker to help me cross the border. My heart soared at the thought of seeing her again, but at the same time, it sank with a heavy weight. I felt guilty for betraying our dear leader. I was frightened by the thought of leaving my home.
I was also leaving behind my father. At 9 years old, I couldn’t have imagined that those moments together would be our last. I was wearing a new padded jacket and snow boots that my dad had bought just for the trip. He held me tight and told me I would be with my mom soon. I carry the memory with me now, just as I carried it with me when I crossed the frozen river at the border. In the dead of winter, my new life began in an unfamiliar country.
We lived in China for six months before arriving in South Korea. During that time, I relearned and realized a lot of new things–like what it felt like to be full. Just being able to eat to my heart’s content brought me so much happiness. Being able to sing songs and watch cartoons and movies that weren’t about the Kim regime was fun and eye-opening.
Friendship and romance, heartbreak and hope–through the lenses of other people’s lives, I saw a world that wasn’t defined by loyalty to a regime. This was a world that was free.
This was the world the North Korean government hadn’t wanted me to see, because I would have realized my life there was not normal.
Arriving in South Korea only made this more apparent. While other children had grown up dreaming of becoming presidents, celebrities, or scientists, I had dreamt of becoming a butterfly, so I could fly close to General Kim Jong-il.
Childhood is when we learn how to see the world, but my view had been distorted by my homeland. At the same time, though, denying North Korea felt like denying myself and my family. I still loved where I came from, even if it hurt me. Reconciling the hurt with the hope helped me realize how to move forward.
Today, I’m pursuing a double major in Political Science & Diplomacy and North Korean Studies at Ewha Women’s University. My dream is to attend law school and help North Korean refugees who are facing legal challenges.
I love North Korea enough to want to change it, for current and future generations. For the children in North Korea now, who think the world starts and ends with the Kim regime. For the children like me, who have grown up and realized that there’s so much more to life, and we are the heroes of our own stories.
I share my story today, asking for the support of people like you. Your attention and support are more powerful than any political regime. Share our stories with more people. Support organizations that are rescuing North Korean refugees and finding ways to send information back inside the country. Help us create a future where children born in North Korea can see and experience the world for themselves.
Free from politics and propaganda, free to discover, and free to dream. There is no greater source of hope than the North Korean people themselves.
In freedom, a vast new world opened up to Bella, one that wasn’t defined by the regime. Each new experience helped her slowly unlearn a decade of propaganda, a process that was accelerated by movies and other forms of foreign media.
Inside North Korea, foreign media is just as powerful. LiNK’s Information Access Programs develop news strategies, technology, and content to send back into the country and empower the North Korean people, ultimately eroding the regime’s legitimacy and control. Help ensure this crucial work can continue.
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Love and Dating ... in North Korea
This updated version of Love & Sex in North Korea was originally written by LiNK for Koreaboo.
According to historians who are really good at remembering when things happened in the olden days, sex and love existed before the Internet was even invented. Before 56K dial-up, phones, and even Tinder, humans found ways to interact completely offline and engage in sexual activity. In fact, biologists believe that the human proclivity for sex is universal and plays a major role in producing baby humans, thereby maintaining the human race’s existence. (Go humans!)
So could it be that in North Korea too, people have sex and fall in love and do romantic things with each other?
According to North Korean refugees that I’ve worked with, the answer is: Yes. North Koreans have sex too.
So, how do North Koreans do it?
First of all, the baseline to understand is that overall North Korean dating culture is pretty traditional and conservative. Think South Korea, but 50 years ago. One of the reasons for this is, well, North Korean society is quite conservative and patriarchal in general and North Korean media is super old-fashioned. In North Korean films you don’t see couples kissing or being physically affectionate with each other, so many North Koreans are just not used to PDA and wouldn’t dream of being too affectionate or kissing in public.
Nonetheless North Koreans do meet and date and fall in love like everywhere else. A lot of it starts in school (awww) and people also meet at dances or house parties. That’s right, when the parents are out of town young urban North Koreans will often invite a bunch of friends over and have a party. Once ‘the eyes have met’ the boy often has to do a lot of the pursuing. And guys, spare a thought for our brothers there: Only about 10% of North Koreans have a mobile phone. So for most, it has to be done the old fashioned way.
Either you have to pre-arrange to meet ‘10 trees away from the school gate at 7pm on Wednesday’ or you have to take the risk of going to their house. The danger, of course, is that you knock on the door and their mother answers, causing all that (traditional Asian) embarrassment. So a common trick is to knock and wait for someone to call out “Who is it?” If it’s the mother you say “I’ve come for Eun-kyung” (even though your girlfriend’s name is something else) and pretend you got the wrong house. If your girlfriend answers, then you can say, “It’s me! Come out!” Nicely done.
Finding a place to date isn’t so hard; people hang out in the park, or by the river, or around the market. But it’s when you need a bit more privacy that things get more difficult. The vast majority of young North Koreans live in their parents house until they get married (even more so than South Koreans) so there is no privacy at home. So when the relationship heats up, young couples will often go to the North Korean equivalent of a love motel, which is basically paying a middle-aged women to clear out of their own house for a few hours so the couple can get it on. A more risky space for a frisson might be a storage room with an unlocked door, or even a train toilet.
However, there’s a problem here...well, a few in fact. Sex education is almost non-existent in North Korea. And contraceptive pills and condoms can be hard to come by, too (you can’t just stop by the closest 24-hour convenience store). I have a friend who used to smuggle goods from China to sell in North Korea, and she says she saw a pregnancy test for the first time in 2007. She of course promptly smuggled some in to sell to North Korean women. This combination of factors unfortunately leads to a lot of unplanned pregnancies and risky abortions amongst unmarried women.
Like other aspects of North Korean culture, dating culture is not static. And as with other social changes, one of the major drivers is the influx of foreign media being smuggled in on DVDs and USB drives, and now even Micro-SD cards. In fact, one of the reasons South Korean dramas and films are so popular is because, in contrast to North Korean government-produced films, they show compelling human stories of love and relationships, and have addictive plotlines. If all you had access to was government propaganda your whole life and then suddenly you heard that your friends had access to this amazing new foreign stuff, you might risk watching it too.
In the first few viewings, these simple South Korean soaps can be revelatory: The PDA, the attitudes of the female characters, even the way they talk and dress. The love story in the Korean drama Winter Sonata, which is credited with starting the Korean Wave across Asia, is still remembered fondly by many North Korean refugees.
Similarly when My Sassy Girl was smuggled in many young women who watched it were driven to imitate not just Jeon Ji-hyun’s fashion and hairstyle, but also the confident and cool way in which her character treats her boyfriend. (And of course in the background of these films and dramas, North Korean viewers can’t help but notice that South Korea looks way richer than North Korea). These information changes are confounding economic changes in their effects on gender relations, as bottom-up marketization has raised the status of women as they play a key role in illegal and semi-legal entrepreneurial business activities.
Humans being humans, porn is also being smuggled into North Korea. And without getting too PG-13, it would be fair to assume that this also opens up and accelerates changes in behaviour between the sheets as well.
It’s worth noting that despite a big growth in flows of foreign media over the last 10 years it is still limited, and especially in the countryside and in the interior of the country away from the border with China, people have much less access (if at all). So there is huge regional variation in North Korea and dating culture will still be very traditional and conservative in the countryside, whilst changing rather quickly in Pyongyang and other major cities and border towns. In addition, young Pyongyangites also mostly have mobile phones now, meaning fewer nervous knocks on doors.
Because of the government’s ongoing restrictions on culture and extreme paranoia over foreign media, North Korea was late to the sexual revolution. But it is now happening, and it is no trivial matter. The emulation of dating culture learned through South Korean and other foreign media, particularly among young urban North Koreans, is contributing to increased sensitivity to foreign trends and a liberalization and modernization of culture and society from the bottom up. And in the long run, it’s this kind of social change that will help usher in a wider transformation and opening of North Korean society, to the benefit of the North Korean people and humanity as a whole.
--SOKEEL PARK - director of research and strategy
