Over the last 20 years, for an increasing number of North Koreans, illegal escape into China, Mongolia, or South Korea has transformed from an unthinkable impossibility into an attainable—if highly dangerous—reality. Interviewing five defectors now living in South Korea’s bustling capital of Seoul to put together narratives about ordinary life in North Korea, Barbara Demick highlights the fear, uncertainty, and instability that follow these refugees as they make new lives for themselves in other countries. In her interviews with the defectors, Demick finds one common thread in all five stories: their lives outside of North Korea remain defined by the memories of the horrific things they saw and did while still living in their home country—and the resultant guilt they now feel about having escaped and left their families and their former lives behind. Demick suggests that the traumas of malnourishment, totalitarianism, propaganda, and isolation from the rest of the world—and the guilt of surviving it all—define life for North Korean defectors long after they have left their homeland.
Through Mrs. Song’s story, Demick shows how remorse can impact survivors’ abilities to enjoy their freedom because of the guilt they feel about having left their old lives behind. All defectors from North Korea are brought immediately upon arrival in South Korea to the secluded campus of Hanawon, a kind of trade-school-turned-halfway-house where, for several months following their escapes, North Koreans are taught the truth about the world, modern technology, and the basics of South Korean society. Though the program at Hanawon is meant to help survivors adapt and acclimate to their new lives, the re-education program cannot erase the scars and associations North Koreans bring with them across the border. Demick points out how, while eating at a restaurant with interviewee Mrs. Song, Mrs. Song began nearly crying when waiters brought out bowl after bowl of steaming food—she was reminded of her husband Chang-bo’s final words as he lay dying of starvation: “Let’s go to a good restaurant and order a nice bottle of wine.” Mrs. Song, Demick reports, found herself unable to enjoy the comforts of modern life, such as a nice meal in a restaurant, because of the guilt she felt over her husband’s inability to enjoy them alongside her. Mrs. Song’s survivor’s guilt is palpable and intense in spite of all she has learned about how powerless she was in North Korea to stand up against the injustices she witnessed or to save her family from the ravages of famine.
Next, Demick uses Mi-ran’s story to illustrate how “guilt and shame are […] common denominators among North Korean defectors,” and how guilt is a big part of defectors’ lives. Though Mi-ran married a kind man, gave birth to a healthy son, and pursued a graduate education all within a couple years of arriving in South Korea, Demick writes that Mi-ran remained “shaped” by the indoctrination and betrayal she suffered in North Korea (and the stubborn self-interest she learned in order to survive the famine.) Mi-ran confided in Demick during one of their interviews that her older sisters had been arrested simultaneously in 1999, six months after several other members of their family defected. Mi-ran knew, she told Demick, that her sisters were being punished for her crimes. This, Demick suggests, compounded the guilt that Mi-ran already struggled to excise from her new life in South Korea. Not only did Mi-ran have to contend with the survivor’s guilt that is common in North Korean defectors—she had to learn how to work through the guilt of knowing that her sisters were suffering in order to focus on her own family.
Finally, Demick uses Dr. Kim’s story to show how survivor’s guilt and the ability to resolve old traumas often manifests as denial—in the case of these defectors, as the unlikely belief that one day it will be possible to return home to a reformed, open North Korea. Dr. Kim, who fell victim to a pyramid scheme shortly after she defected and found her medical degree useless in South Korea, clung to North Korean manners of dress for many years and even claimed that if she knew earlier what she had come to learn about life in South Korea, she would not have left the north. Demick later reveals, however, that several years after Dr. Kim defected, they met up for another interview—Dr. Kim had left her “tacky” North Korean style behind, yet she still harbored dreams of bringing South Korean ideas about elder care she’d learned in her new medical school program back across the border once the country was reunified. This illustrates that even as Dr. Kim took steps forward in her new life, she remained tied to a hope for reunification—and some kind of return to the land she once called home—out of guilt over her inability to use her new skills to help serve her own people, as she always hoped she would as a naïve young doctor in North Korea.
In demonstrating the traumas that haunt those who have left North Korea, Demick seeks to underscore that though one may physically leave, one can “never completely escape the terror that is North Korea.” Even after leaving, the survivors Demick interviews remain disturbed by their pasts, unable to fully let go of the pain they endured in their shared homeland.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Escape, Trauma, and Survivor’s Guilt ThemeTracker
Escape, Trauma, and Survivor’s Guilt Quotes in Nothing to Envy
Jun-sang had been […] the person in whom [Mi-ran] confided. […] But she had nonetheless withheld from him the biggest secret of her life. She never told him how disgusted she was with North Korea, how she didn't believe the propaganda she passed on to her pupils. Above all, she never told him that her family was hatching a plan to defect. Not that she didn't trust him, but in North Korea, you could never be too careful. If he told somebody who told somebody . . . well, you never knew—there were spies everywhere. Neighbors denounced neighbors, friends denounced friends. Even lovers denounced each other.
As [Dr. Kim] did her rounds, walking through the pediatric ward, the children would follow her with their eyes. Even when her back was turned, she could feel their eyes staring at her white gown, wondering if she could relieve their pain and soon realizing that she could not.
"They would look at me with accusing eyes. Even four-year-olds knew they were dying and that I wasn't doing anything to help them," Dr. Kim told me years later. “All I was capable of doing was to cry with their mothers over their bodies afterward.”
It is axiomatic that one death is a tragedy, a thousand is a statistic. So it was for Mi-ran. What she didn't realize is that her indifference was an acquired survival skill. In order to get through the 1990s alive, one had to suppress any impulse to share food. To avoid going insane, one had to learn to stop caring. In time, Mi-ran would learn how to walk around a dead body on the street without paying much notice. She could pass a five-year-old on the verge of death without feeling obliged to help. If she wasn't going to share her food with her favorite pupil, she certainly wasn't going to help a perfect stranger.
Even with his weight loss, Nam-oak was too heavy for Mrs. Song to carry to the hospital-there were no ambulances working by now-so she went herself and explained his condition. A doctor wrote her a prescription for penicillin, but when she got to the market she found it cost 50 won—the same price as a kilo of corn.
She chose the corn.
Nam-oak died in March 1998, alone in the shack.
Mi-ran told herself they were going just for a short trip to make the telephone call, but in her heart, she knew she might never come back. […] After they were gone, they would be denounced as traitors. "She received an education through the benevolence of the party and she betrayed the fatherland," she could almost hear the party secretary saying. She didn't want her guilt to rub off on Jun-sang. After she was gone […] he could find himself a suitable wife, join the Workers' Party, and spend the rest of his life in Pyongyang as a scientist.
He'll forgive me, he'll understand, she told herself. It's in his best interest.
What was a bowl of rice doing there, just sitting out on the ground? She figured it out just before she heard the dog's bark.
Up until that moment, a part of her had hoped that China would be just as poor as North Korea. She still wanted to believe that her country was the best place in the world. The beliefs she had cherished for a lifetime would be vindicated. But now she couldn't deny what was staring her plainly in the face: dogs in China ate better than doctors in North Korea.
She thought of Chang-bo especially when she was eating. How that man loved to eat! He would have so enjoyed the sausage. […] Then her thoughts drifted to her son. Her memories were so tinged with guilt and shame that she couldn't even speak about him. So strong, so handsome—such a tragedy to have lost him at twenty-five. How much life he had missed. How much they had all missed, herself too, her daughters, locked away in North Korea, working themselves to death. For what? We will do as the party tells us. We will die for the general. We have nothing to envy. We will go our own way. She had believed it all and wasted her life. Or maybe not.
“When I see a good meal like this, it makes me cry,” Mrs. Song apologized one night as we sat around a steaming pot of shabu-shabu, thinly sliced beef cooked in broth and dipped in a sesame sauce. "I can't help thinking of his last words, 'Let's go to a good restaurant and order a nice bottle of wine.’"
After graduation, [Dr. Kim] planned to resume her medical career, this time specializing in geriatrics. Her mother had died a miserable death from Alzheimer's. Dr. Kim dreamed of opening a nursing home, perhaps even a chain of nursing homes. She hoped that one day, when the North Korean regime had fallen, she might be able to take South Korean ideas of elder care back to Chongiin. Perhaps it was a pipe dream, but it helped her bridge the divide between her past and present selves and ease the guilt about what she'd left behind.
Deep down, however, Mi-ran was the same person who had occupied the lowest rung of North Korean society, the poor, female progeny of tainted blood. She had been shaped by a thorough indoctrination and then suffered the pain of betrayal; she'd spent years in fear of speaking her mind, of harboring illicit thoughts. She had steeled herself to walk by the bodies of the dead without breaking stride. She had learned to eat her lunch, down to the last kernel of corn or grain of rice, without pausing to grieve for the children she taught who would soon die of starvation. She was racked with guilt.
While the persistence of North Korea is a curiosity for the rest of the world, it is a tragedy for North Koreans, even those who have managed to escape. Jun-sang has no chance of seeing his parents, now entering their seventies, unless the regime collapses within their lifetime. If that happens, he would like to return to North Korea to do something to help rebuild his country. Since the birth of her second child, a daughter, in 2007, Mi-ran has been pursuing a graduate degree in education in the hope that she can play a part in reforming the North Korean school system should the country open up.
I have found that, over time, the North Korean defectors I know in South Korea become more reticent. They worry about spies within the defector community who might try to blackmail them. They fear that speaking on the human rights circuit or giving interviews to journalists will result in retaliation. One can leave but never completely escape the terror that is North Korea.
