Kim Yumi was born and raised in North Korea, well situated. How is that possible? North Korea is probably the most oppressive place on earth. Kim Yumi was relatively well situated. She lived in a coastal area, Haeju, close to South Korea. On clear days, she could see commercial airliners taking off from that exotic land.
But there was more: She could receive TV signals from the South. She also came into possession of USB sticks and leaflets. (Activist groups in South Korea sometimes manage to introduce these things into the North.)
It was illegal, mind you, for a North Korean to watch South Korean television. Or to possess USB sticks and leaflets. You could be executed for it.
At first, Kim Yumi doubted that what she was hearing about South Korea—and seeing and reading—was true. This had to be propaganda, a pack of lies. How could there be such a free, prosperous society? And so colorful a one! But the suspicion grew within her that it was, in fact, true.
Today, having defected, and living in Seoul, she knows it’s true.
I have met Kim Yumi at the Oslo Freedom Forum, the annual human rights gathering in Norway’s capital. She was born in the 1990s (a specific year, she does not care to give), and, like everyone else in her country, she was taught to revere the ruling family. There have been three dictators: Kim Il Sung, the founder of the state; his son Kim Jong Il; and his son Kim Jong Un.
North Korean children learn a song that goes, “We have nothing to envy in the world.” The people of North Korea, they are taught, have it made.
But as children become adolescents, Kim Yumi tells me, they begin to wonder: Do we really have nothing to envy? They hear things—about South Korea, not least—and they are troubled. This is especially true of young people in cities, who have more access to information than do their counterparts in rural areas.
North Korea is full of doublethinkers, to borrow Orwell’s useful term: people who accept the official line with one half of their mind but have qualms about it with the other (while keeping silent about this duality).
When Kim Jong Il died in 2011 and Kim Jong Un took over, Kim Yumi actually had hopes for the new ruler. He had studied abroad. And he was promising North Koreans that they would no longer have to tighten their belts—that they would get food in their bellies.
But he turned out to be no better than his predecessors. In Kim Yumi’s telling, he took the labor of peasants—the sweat of their brow—and spent it on weapons, including nukes. Do North Koreans feel pride in the nukes? Again, there is a rural-urban divide, says Kim Yumi. Rural people, being more isolated, are more vulnerable to the propaganda of the regime.
Eventually, Kim Yumi married and had children. She and her husband, Kim Yihyeok, started to think about defection, and to plan for it.
That can be a strange, and confusing, word: “defection.” Why not “escape”? “Escape” is appropriate too. But in the eyes of the North Korean state, everyone who leaves is a traitor, a defector. In my experience, North Korean escapees refer to themselves as “defectors.”
A key moment for Kim Yumi came in November 2022, when Kim Jong Un presented his daughter to the public for the first time. Kim Ju Ae was about ten years old. (Her precise birth date is unknown, a state secret.) Father and daughter appeared together at a missile launch.
Kim Yumi noticed a couple of things. Kim Ju Ae had Western-style clothes and a haircut to match. This was reflective of her immense privilege. Also, military officials—senior men—were bowing to her. Evidently, the dictatorship would continue, unto the fourth generation. There was no end in sight.
Something else was a factor in Kim Yumi’s thinking, and that of Kim Yihyeok, her husband. Their elder child was approaching kindergarten age, when the brainwashing begins in earnest. Did they really want their children to belong to another generation of “political slaves,” as Kim Yumi puts it? Forgetting their own fates, could they give their children a better life?
More than most people, the family was in a position to defect. Kim Yihyeok owned and operated several small vessels. He knew the coastline. He had dealt with the maritime border guards.
Still, defection was daunting. There was a minefield to cross, at night. There were high-voltage electric fences. There were eyes everywhere.
In all, nine family members would try to escape, to defect. They were prepared with, among other things, weapons: knives, axes, Molotov cocktails. The women had put together red-pepper bombs, to be thrown into the faces of attackers, to impair their vision. Kim Yihyeok had even prepared puffer-fish roe, highly toxic, as a means of suicide, should the family be captured.
On May 6, 2023, at about 11 p.m., they made for the shore, through the minefield. They got into their boat and were moving. Soon, however, a patrol boat spotted them and pursued them. This boat was gaining on them, fast. The children were wailing. Kim Yihyeok shouted to his brother-in-law to throw as many things as possible overboard, to make their boat lighter and faster. This included the fishing nets in the back.
When all seemed lost, something “miraculous” happened, Kim Yumi says. The lights of the patrol boat receded. Apparently, its propellers had gotten caught up in the fishing nets, thrown overboard.
The nine defectors made it to South Korea—to “the land of freedom,” as Kim Yumi says.
Sitting in Oslo, we talk about North Korea, South Korea, and the possibility of reunification. Sitting between us is an interpreter, Yoo Jihye, a young South Korean doing graduate work in Berlin. She has studied German since high school. (English, she picked up from British and American television.)
“What interested you in German?” I ask Yoo Jihye. When she gives the answer, it makes perfect sense. After World War II, Germany was divided—then it reunited. This intrigued her as a Korean.
The reuniting of the Koreas is a far more challenging task than the reuniting of the Germanies was. North Korea is in far worse shape than East Germany at its bleakest. North Korea is like a Stone Age society, says Kim Yumi; South Korea is a modern society. The gap between them is huge.
What is crucial for North Koreans, she says, is to get information. To know more about the outside world, so that they realize that their situation is abnormal—practically unique—and that human beings need not live that way.
Her wish for South Koreans? That they simply interest themselves in the North. That they get acquainted with the reality of their fellow Koreans on the other side. When she was in North Korea, she says, she assumed that everyone knew about North Korea. Everyone in the world. But when she got to South Korea, she learned that even many South Koreans were ignorant of the North.
I first met a North Korean in 2010 (the defector Kang Chol-hwan). It was like meeting a messenger from another planet. I have since met many North Koreans. And they all burn with one desire: that we know about North Korea—the fate of the 26 million who are trapped in that country—and care.
