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By Root 1024 0

discussion with a student member of Hanchongnyon, the university’s leftist organization, grew rather heated. I was being bombarded with would-be intellectual arguments about class, domination, and imperialism, featuring references to people such as Pierre Bourdieu. Onlookers had surrounded us. Whose side were they on? Did they agree with my interlocutor when he said that I had a “subjectivist” point of view and that my personal experience was no basis for a global condemnation of North Korean politics? A couple of students later told me that the majority of spectators had been very touched by the story of my imprisonment and flight to China. I was glad to hear that: the original silence had been like a great invisible force. Leftist students would do well to consider the meaning of that silence.

My primary concern, though, had to do with my professional future. Despite the support of my fellow students, I struggled with English. From my end, I gave a lot of students financial help. Ironically, the North Korean renegade had become a well-off student, enjoying a free education, benefiting from handsome government subsidies, and earning fees from articles and speaking engagements. By contrast, many students from the South Korean provinces were surviving hand to mouth, living in tiny rented rooms, working—some as supermarket checkers, others as restaurant workers—and waiting for their parents to send them a little pocket money. I fed them and in several cases even paid their tuition. For me, it was a way of saying thank you.

With so much money on my hands, I slipped into an odd lifestyle in which I almost lost myself. Someone offered to rent me a new apartment in the upscale Changdam-dong neighborhood, a mixed office and live-in studio space, or officitel, as it’s called in Seoul. I decided to take it. Here was an incredible universe in which money flowed like water. Out front one could see parked BMWs belonging to doctors, hostesses, movie stars. I didn’t have a BMW, but I spent money with abandon, fascinated by the power it gave me, swooning in my success. I, a former prisoner, who had been reduced to killing rats for food and swallowing salamanders, was drinking with the people of this neighborhood and eating in their restaurants! I’d come a long way from being embarrassed by a young Chinese woman’s invitation to dance. Now I was the one asking all the pretty girls to join me on the dance floor. At the same time, I was still a student. My night life and my studies were on a collision course. I came very close to being spoiled by all the money I received for opening my mouth! I no longer knew where I stood. I was uncomfortable with myself—and on certain early mornings, a little ashamed.

I made a clean break with that life. The desire to drown my sorrows didn’t run as deep as other longings: to create stability in my life, to tell the world of the situation in North Korea, to help unfortunate refugees, and to find a wife to share the rest of my life. Yet here, too, a renegade encounters difficulties that never appear in government statistics and that no amount of money can solve. I recently fell in love with a girl from Seoul whom I would have been happy to marry, but in Korea, marriage isn’t just a commitment between two individuals; it’s the union of two families. Where was my family? Dead or infinitely removed. No family, no marriage. On top of that, how could her family not be suspicious of a North Korean? That my family and I paid handsomely for not assimilating into the North Korean regime mattered little. Familial prejudices are never easy to dismiss.

The citizens of South Korea should realize they have an important role to play in welcoming refugees. They aren’t just people who have fled something; they are people who have a hard time adapting and a hard time forgetting what they have endured. I continue to have dreams in which I am running across the Yalu or in the mountains, North Korean security agents hot on my trail. They are about to catch me and I wake up covered in sweat. It is not enough for people to say