[Eye Read] North Korean refugee shares his life story

This is Paradise!

My North Korean Childhood

By Kang Hyok with

Philippe Grangereau

Translated by Shaun Whiteside

French journalist Philippe Grangereau first met North Korean refugee Kang Hyok back in 2003 in Prague.

Kang, who was 17 at the time, had been invited by the People in Need Foundation to the fourth conference of the South Korean NGO “North Korean Human Rights.” The young boy was asked to share his life story in North Korea with two other refugees in their forties.

The journalist recalls Kang as a shy boy who “did not dare take the microphone” during the event which took place in the Czech Republic.

What fascinated the reporter was Kang’s drawings, all of which captured the vivid details of his childhood in the North, and his escape to South Korea in 2002. After forming a friendship with Kang in Prague, Grangereau visited him again in Seoul, and a book was published in 2004 based on the conversations the two shared.

The duo’s book, which was written by Grangereau in French, was translated into English and published in 2005.

The memoir is written in first person from Kang’s perspective. It starts off with Kang’s childhood in Onsung, North Hamgyeong Province, where he survived the famine by drinking tree-bark soup and hunting rats with his friends. The early chapters also vividly portray the everyday life of ordinary people in North Korea, where propaganda prevailed and where every household was required to hang portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il on their wall. He saw his first public execution ― by rifle ― at the age of nine.

“My friends loved these performances,” he writes. “They used to say ‘the condemned man bowed to us before he died (as their bodies fell forward after being killed),’ … (the bodies) were abandoned somewhere in the mountains without being buried, for the dogs to eat.”

He escaped North Korea in 1998, by crossing the frozen Tumen River in the winter time. He spent four years in Manchuria, China. He finally made it to Seoul after going on a very dangerous journey through Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand in 2002.

Because of the propaganda they were so used to hearing back in the North, Kang and his family were reluctant to flee to South Korea during their time in China.

“Sometimes on North Korean television they showed images of violent demonstrations in South Korea, which reinforced our negative impression of the country,” he writes. “Apart from being even poorer than in the North, we were told, the people lived there lived in constant political turmoil, under the brutal repression of a helmeted police force.”

In the last chapter, “Korean from Nowhere,” Kang’s confusion and disillusionment as he struggles to make South Korea his second home are evident.

In school, he is very often bullied for his North Korean accent and small physique (due to malnutrition in the North), while realizing that everything he learned about South Korea and modern history was false.

In the North, he was taught that the Korean War began after South Korea attacked the North, and was never told about the U.S.’s nuclear bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Instead, he was told to believe that Kim Il-sung’s army defeated the Japanese and eventually brought independence to the Korean Peninsula in 1945.

He also writes about his culture shock, as well as the pain of being alienated. “Lies, in North Korea, are indispensable for survival, and you have to be constantly on your guard,” he writes.

“That is probably why, in South Korea, the people from the North are all considered to be potential criminals, liars, cheats and untrustworthy idlers … It seems to be a common paradox among refugees, this joy at being in a free country, mixed with nostalgia for the nightmare landscape that we have fled.”

The book also includes two sets of Kang’s drawings which portray his childhood and escape to South Korea. Since childhood, Kang’s dream had been to become a painter or a draftsman, Kang, who turns 26 this year, lives in South Korea.

(dyc@heraldcorp.com)