Your Life as a North Korean Fugitive in Seoul

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]Welcome to your life as a North Korean fugitive. Your eyes open before the alarm. They always do. Your body is already moving, sitting up, swinging your legs to the floor, spine straightening out of habit. Your hands press flat against your thighs. Your chin drops. You are already bowing to the portrait on the wall. You hold the position for three full seconds before you realize there is no portrait. There is nothing on the wall. Just a pale rectangle of light from a window with no curtain. Just plaster, just a faint water stain near the ceiling shaped like nothing at all. You stay in the bow anyway, frozen halfway, your body locked in a command your mind has already cancelled. You straighten slowly. You look at the wall for a long time. This is soul. This is the third floor of a four-story building in a neighborhood you do not know the name of yet. This is the room that Hanowan gave you when your processing ended. A transitional apartment, they called it. A mattress on the floor, a folding table, two chairs, a window overlooking a street that never sleeps. Level one, the arrival. You arrived last night. You and Yuna. You remember carrying her up the stairs because she had fallen asleep on the bus, her head heavy against your shoulder, her fingers curled around the strap of the bag you've been carrying for 8 months. The same bag. The same strap. You remember setting her down on the mattress, covering her with the thin blanket the staff left folded on a chair, and then [music] you sat on the edge of the mattress and did not sleep for a very long time. You look over at her now. She is still sleeping. Her chest rises, falls, her mouth is slightly open. She is 4 years old, and she slept better last night than you have in months. Something about that makes your chest feel tight in a way you cannot name. You stand. Your legs feel uncertain, like the floor might not hold. You move to the window and look out. Soul is already awake. 7 in the morning and the street below is moving. People walking fast. Food cart already steaming on the corner. A man in a suit arguing into a phone. Two women in bright coats laughing about something as they pass. A bus pulls up and swallows a crowd and drives away. A motorcycle cuts between lanes. Neon signs are still lit from the night before, glowing pink and yellow in the morning gray. You watch all of this and feel absolutely nothing. That is not quite right. You feel something, but you cannot locate it. It sits somewhere between your ribs like a stone. You remember the pen drive? The one that came across the border folded inside a soap wrapper. Korean dramas. South Korean streets. Shops so full the shelves bent under their own weight.

[00:03:00]People walking freely. People laughing.

[00:03:03]You told yourself this is real. This exists. This is where I have to go. Now you are here and something still feels wrong. You put on your shoes. You leave a note on the table for Yuna. A habit, though she cannot read yet. You step into the hallway. You step outside. The cold air hits your face. The sound hits next. It is loud. Not the organized loudness of state announcements. Not the sharp directional sound of a loudspeaker mounted on a pole. This is scattered loudness. Conversations overlapping. A cafe playing music through an open door.

[00:03:42]It comes from every direction at once and settles over you like weather. You pull your coat tighter. You walk. The street is full, but nobody looks at you.

[00:03:53]This is the first thing you notice. In Pyongyang, there was always someone looking. A neighbor, a block warden, a man standing at an angle that suggested he was not just standing. Here, people walk past you with their eyes aimed at their phones, at each other, at the middle distance.

[00:04:12]Nobody is tracking you. Nobody is writing anything down. That should feel like relief. It does not feel like anything yet. You pass a food stall and the smell of fried dough reaches you and your stomach responds immediately loudly. You stop walking. You look at the stall. The man behind it is flipping something in oil, not looking up. A small handwritten sign lists prices. The prices make no sense to you. Not because they are high, but because you do not yet know how to compare them to anything you have known. You keep walking. A woman passes you on the left, [music] talking into her phone, laughing, just laughing, open, unguarded, throwing her head back slightly. The sound of it stops you again. You try to smile. You get halfway there and then your face stops cooperating because where you come from, a smile like that, that big, that unearned in a public space meant something was either very wrong with a person or very staged. Spontaneous displays of joy on the street in Pyongyang were not common. They were rehearsed, performed for occasions. A real smile, a private one, belonged inside four walls. You are still inside those four walls. Even out here, even in soul. Level two, trapped. That is when Yuna's hand finds yours. She caught up.

[00:05:38]You did not hear her come down the stairs. She's still wearing her socks from yesterday, her small coat buttoned crooked, her hair flattened on one side from sleeping. She wants to see the woman with the bright orange bag. She wants to see the dog on a leash that is pulling its owner toward a fire hydrant.

[00:05:57]She is not afraid. She has no vocabulary for fear in this context. You follow her because there is nothing else to do. But your eyes keep moving, checking corners, noting exits. The weeks that follow have a shape to them, but the shape keeps shifting. Every morning you wake before the alarm. Every morning your body starts to bow. Every morning the wall is empty. Every morning you have to remind yourself again. This is the part that nobody warned you about clearly enough.

[00:06:30]You have heard about it from other defectors at Hanowan, the government resettlement center where you spent nearly 3 months in orientation, attending classes every day on South Korean society, law, culture, language.

[00:06:45]They told you the South was different.

[00:06:47]They told you adaptation takes time.

[00:06:49]They gave you pamphlets, but the pamphlets did not explain what it feels like to walk down a hallway and instinctively stand to the side when someone official looking passes. They did not explain the way your hand moves toward your pocket to check for your documents every few minutes. Even though nobody here checks documents on the street, they did not explain what happens when a strange man approaches you. He approaches you on a Tuesday. You are standing near the entrance of the subway station trying to read the line map. The station is enormous, more enormous than you expected. Every surface is lit. Advertisements cover the walls. Faces, products, prices, colors that move and flash and demand attention. People flow past in streams organized by some logic you have not learned yet. You are studying the map and then he is beside you. He is maybe 50 years old. Jacket, ordinary face. He says something. Your body responds before your brain does. Your hands go cold. Your pulse doubles. Your jaw locks. He is a man you do not know.

[00:08:01]Speaking at you in a voice with authority behind it and standing slightly too close. He says something again. He is holding a phone. He is showing you something on the screen. A map maybe. He is asking for directions.

[00:08:16]That is what is happening. That is all that is happening. You know this. You can see it. He is a person asking another person a simple question on a subway platform in one of the busiest cities on Earth. And there is absolutely nothing wrong. But your hands are shaking. You stare at his phone. The map on the screen means nothing to you. You do not know this city well enough to answer. You open your mouth. What comes out is barely a sound, a half syllable, a confused vowel. He tilts his head, repeats himself slower this time, which somehow makes it worse because slower means he is adjusting for you and that means he has noticed something. You look at your feet. He says something short and walks away. You stand still for 40 seconds. You count them. You are good at counting. You count things when your body will not cooperate because numbers are the one thing that always behave. 40 seconds. Then you walk into the subway and find a corner of the platform and put your back against the wall and breathe. This is the thing about leaving a system built entirely on fear. The system does not leave you when you cross the border. It does not dissolve when you board the plane or step off the bus.

[00:09:34]It has been building inside you since before you could name it, pressed into your nervous system like text into stone. A man asking directions becomes a threat. An empty wall becomes absence.

[00:09:46]Freedom looks like a trick. There is also the language. South Korean and North Korean are the same language in the same way that two rivers fed by the same source are the same river.

[00:09:57]Technically true, practically complicated. The vocabulary has split over 70 years. South Korean has absorbed words from English, Japanese, other languages. Words that entered Pyongyang only through smuggled media. In the North, foreign words were replaced with Korean constructions. You studied this at Hanowan, but knowing it and [music] living it are different. The first time you are at the market and ask for something using the North Korean word for it, the woman behind the counter pauses. Not unkindly, but there is a pause, a small recalibration in her expression, a fraction of a second where she understands what you are, or at least what you are not. It lasts half a breath, but you feel it for the rest of the day. Level three, apart. The market itself is its own event. The first time you walk in alone, you stop at the entrance. You do not walk inside immediately. You stand at the threshold and look. Produc in towers of orange and red and deep green. Refrigerated cases full of meats cut into portions wrapped in plastic, labeled, priced, arranged.

[00:11:13]An entire wall of instant foods. Chips and flavors described in language you read but cannot fully imagine. Sauces, oils, things pickled in every possible variation. an aisle of cleaning products longer than your entire apartment. You walk to the produce section. You pick up an apple. You put it back. You pick up a different apple. You look at it for a long time. In Pyongyang, the market, the Jang Madang, operated differently.

[00:11:45]Availability was unpredictable. What was there one week might be gone for months.

[00:11:51]You learned to buy what was present regardless of whether you needed it because need was not the point. Presence was the point. If it was there, you took it because it might not be there tomorrow. Here there are 40 kinds of apple. The abundance is not comforting.

[00:12:10]It is paralyzing. You set the apple down and walk to a corner of the store where there is a bench and you sit and look at the shelves from a distance. An elderly man sits down beside you. He has a small basket with three items in it. He sees you looking. It's too much. [music] He says, "You do not know what to say back." He stands up and continues shopping. You sit there for 11 more minutes before you buy anything. You buy the first thing you see when you stand up, a small bottle of soy sauce. You carry it home like it is something precious. The lights are the other thing. You have not slept through a full night since arriving. But it is not only anxiety, it is also the light. The city does not go dark. Your window looks onto a street lined with signs. The first three nights, you keep checking the window, looking for the source of a power cut that never comes. In Pyongyang, outages were routine, scheduled sometimes, but not reliably.

[00:13:11]Evening would fall and the lights in your building would dim to nothing and you would use candles which you kept in a specific drawer. The darkness was complete, absolute, the kind that makes distance feel unreal. Here the darkness never arrives. And that also feels wrong in a way you cannot explain to anyone who has not lived inside a country that rations electricity the way others ration medicine. You attend a second round of orientation sessions that Hannahan arranges. A social worker named Mji visits your apartment on Thursdays.

[00:13:46]She is patient and specific and never says anything that sounds like pity which you are grateful for. She tells you what defectors typically face. She says most of the 60some thousand North Koreans living in the south report ongoing anxiety and depression. She says employment is one of the biggest difficulties. Companies are sometimes reluctant, though it is improving. She says the average defector's income is significantly lower than the South Korean average for years. You listen carefully. You take notes in a small notebook you bought at the convenience store downstairs. She also tells you something you were not expecting. She says that some defectors after years in the south return to China, not to go back to North Korea, but because they cannot fit in either place, they fall through the middle. You write that down, too. Then you close the notebook. Yuna, meanwhile, is becoming someone new. You watch it happening, and you do not know how to feel about it. She started at a small daycare 2 weeks after your arrival. The first morning, she cried.

[00:14:53]Now she walks through the door of the daycare center and does not look back.

[00:14:58]She has learned the names of three other children. She talks about them at dinner using their full names with the easy familiarity of someone who has always lived in a world where other children's full names are something you simply know. She asks questions constantly.

[00:15:13][music] Why does the bus beep when it stops? Why does that building have lights at the top? Can we get the pink yogurt again?

[00:15:21]Why does the man on the television look sad? Why? Why? Why? She asks freely. She asks loudly. She asks of strangers, of you, of the wall. In Pyongyang, a child who asked too many questions learned quickly that the silence after the question was the answer. You taught her this, or you started to in the small, careful ways parents in the north modify their children without calling it modification. She asks a woman at the market why her hair is that color, pointing directly at the woman's bright copper dyed hair. You put a hand on Yuna's shoulder, the light pressure that says, "Careful." Yuna shrugs your hand off and waits for the woman's answer.

[00:16:02]The woman laughs and tells her it's called dye and that she can be any color she wants when she grows up. Yuna considers this seriously and says she would like to be the same color as the orange fruit you bought last week. The woman laughs again. Yuna laughs with her. You stand there holding the shopping bag and feeling like you are watching something through glass. The thing that undoes you the most is not the difficulty. It is the smallalness of what undoes you. It is the television.

[00:16:31]In your apartment, there is a small television that came with the furniture.

[00:16:35]You do not watch it often, but one evening you leave it on after Yuna falls asleep and a news program is running and a man on the screen is criticizing the government. He is specific. He uses the president's name. He lists failures. He speaks with irritation, with certainty, with the comfortable authority of someone who has done this many times and expects [music] to do it many more times. You reach for the remote and then stop. Nothing happens to him. He keeps talking. A second person appears and disagrees with him. They argue. Neither of them lowers their voice. Neither of them glances toward a corner of the room. Nobody is writing anything down.

[00:17:17]You sit with the remote in your hand and watch for a long time. There is a word for what you are feeling, but it is not fear exactly. It is not awe. It is something like vertigo. the sensation of a ground you expected to be there simply not being there. You built your entire understanding of how human beings function inside a system of rules so [music] total that breaking them was unthinkable. The rules were not just law. They were physics, gravity. And here people are floating and they do not even notice they are floating. Mi tells you about the psychological studies. She says researchers who interview North Korean defectors consistently find that the trauma is not only from specific events, the border crossing, the years in hiding, the fear of capture. The trauma is structural. It is what happens when a person has spent their entire life operating inside a system of total surveillance and then steps outside it.

[00:18:19]The brain does not stop looking for the system. It keeps running the code. She says, "Some defectors describe feeling more anxious in soul than they did in Pyongyang because at least in Pyongyang, they knew the rules. You write this down. Then you recognize it as your own thought already there waiting for someone to name it." Yuna's daycare does a show in late November. You sit in a small auditorium with other parents. The children come out in a line wearing paper crowns they made themselves. Each one different, painted in colors that make no particular sense. Yuna's crown has a sun on the front and something that might be a fish on the side. She spots you in the audience. She waves, not a small wave, a full arm, whole body wave, as if you are on opposite sides of a field. You raise your hand. The children sing a song you do not fully understand but recognize as cheerful.

[00:19:18]Yuna does not know all the words yet.

[00:19:21]She moves her mouth for the ones she knows and hums confidently through the rest. The child beside her is doing the same thing. They are not embarrassed.

[00:19:31]Neither is anyone else in the room. You sit with your hands in your lap and try to hold what you are looking at. Your daughter with a crooked paper crown singing a song she does not fully know, waving at you from a stage. Free. The word arrives in your chest like something physical, but the word is for her, not for you. You know the difference now. Level four, endgame. The weeks continue. You find a part-time job at a laundry service not far from your apartment. The work is straightforward and physical, and the owner, a woman in her 60s with careful eyes, does not ask about your past after the first day. She shows you the machines. She shows you the folding method she prefers. She lets you work in quiet and pays you on time.

[00:20:18]It is the best job you have ever had. It is also the first job you have ever had that did not belong to the state. There are other defectors in the neighborhood.

[00:20:28]You find out gradually through Mi through the community center two blocks away that offers Korean language support classes for northerners adjusting to southern vocabulary. You go twice. You sit in a circle of people who all know exactly what a pause at a market counter means. Nobody has to explain the thing with the portraits. Nobody has to explain why the darkness not coming feels wrong. One woman older than you from Ham Hung tells you she has been in soul for 11 years. You ask her when it started to feel normal. She picks up her cup of tea. She drinks it. She sets it down. It doesn't feel normal. She says it feels manageable, which is not the same thing. December comes, the air gets sharper. You buy Yuna a winter coat at a secondhand shop near the subway station.

[00:21:19]It is dark blue with a hood lined in something soft and white. She puts it on over her regular coat and declares it perfect. She insists on wearing it inside the apartment for the rest of the evening. You sit at the folding table eating dinner and watching her eat soup while still wearing the coat. Something that might be happiness moves through you. It is brief. It is real. And you have started to understand that both things can exist at once. That freedom is not a switch. That it is not a line you cross and then everything resets.

[00:21:54]Your mind is still in Pyongyang in ways you cannot map. It is in the bow you almost complete every morning. It is in the way you still lower your voice when you talk about anything that might be political. It is in the way you scan a room when you enter it. It is in the way you have never once in all these weeks made a sound of frustration in a public space. Even when you were lost and scared and your feet hurt and Yuna was tired and you did not know which bus to take. These reflexes were built over 28 years. They will not be gone in 6 months. You know this. One evening in January, you go up to the rooftop of your building. It is not something you planned. You simply kept walking past your floor. The door at the top is unlocked. You step out. Soul spreads around you in every direction. It is overwhelming in the way that things that are genuinely enormous are overwhelming.

[00:22:49]Not terrifying, just beyond the scale of a single person's ability to hold.

[00:22:54]Lights everywhere. The Han River running dark and wide between illuminated bridges. Buildings layered behind buildings in every direction, lit in white and gold and soft orange. Traffic below, always traffic. A plane crossing the sky with red blinking lights. You stand at the edge of the roof with your hands on the railing. You do not cry.

[00:23:17]You are not sad exactly. You try to feel the size of what you did. The border crossing, the broker, the years in China hiding, the traffickers you narrowly escaped, the route through a third country to finally reach the plane that brought you here. 8 months of moving, 8 months of carrying Yuna and the bag. 8 months of not stopping. You made it. You are here. And yet, your hands are still tight on the railing. Your eyes are still moving. Some part of you is still waiting for the door behind you to open and someone to ask where you are going and why you are up here alone. The door does not open. The city does not stop.

[00:24:03]You stay at the railing for a long time and then the door opens. It is Yuna. She woke up and found the note you had left but could not read. This is the new life you both have now. You did everything for