Defectors open up about hopes, concerns at Hanawon

Three female North Korean refugees on Monday opened up about their past and their thoughts about a future in South Korea during a rare media open day at Hanawon, a support center for defectors operated by Seoul's Unification Ministry.

North Korean defectors learn how to make castella cakes from a South Korean pastry chef at Hanawon on Monday. [JOINT PRESS CORPS]

From the outside, Hanawon appears to be a school like any other, with its gable-roof, red-brick buildings perched on a verdant countryside road about an hour's drive south of Seoul.

But instead of featuring chalkboards and standard rows of desks, classrooms inside Hanawon resemble different workplaces — one looks like a hospice ward, lined with beds and intravenous drip stands; another, a pastry kitchen, replete with metal tables stacked with flour and butter.

In many ways, Hanawon — officially known as the Settlement Support Center for North Korean Refugees — is a school, but one for teaching people who have escaped near-constant starvation and hardship in North Korea, and later a life of hiding in China, how to make their own way in South Korea.

The job training institute at Hanawon, which opened in June 2020, marks the center’s slow pivot away from simply helping new defectors adapt to offering practical training in 22 different fields — including hospice care, nursing, sewing, pastry making, and hair and makeup — to defectors who arrived earlier.

Officials at Hanawon also refer to defectors during their three-month stay at the center as “students” or “trainees,” signaling they are moving past the refugee stage of their lives and preparing for a new, unfamiliar phase, one that will almost certainly involve making a livelihood in South Korea’s highly competitive and capitalist society.

During an on-site question-and-answer session hosted on Monday by Hanawon and the Unification Ministry to mark the 24th anniversary of the center’s opening, three female defectors — all of whom had arrived in South Korea earlier this year after varying periods of time hiding in China — drew a desperate portrait of their earlier circumstances.

One female defector in her 20s, whom the ministry identified only as “C” for security reasons, said she felt compelled to flee her hometown in an unspecified North Korean region near China because the crackdown on cross-border smuggling made it almost impossible to eke out a living, or even obtain enough food to survive.

“Times got really hard in 2017 and 2018,” she recalled, adding that the mountainous terrain in her area “makes it hard to grow food, but we weren’t getting any necessities through the state.”

Another defector in her 30s, who went only by “B,” said, “I thought I would die if I didn’t leave North Korea.”

Hardship in the North appears to vary by region, with the Unification Ministry’s data showing around 85 percent of North Koreans who have successfully defected to the South are originally from the North’s Hamgyong and Yanggang provinces, which lie in the rugged, remote northeastern corner of the peninsula and possess far less arable land than found in the south.

The number of successful defections has also fallen steeply since the start of the pandemic, with only 67 North Koreans making it to the South last year, compared to a year average of over 1,000 since 2011, when current North Korean leader Kim Jong-un took over.

A North Korean defector receives dental care at Hanawon on Monday. [JOINT PRESS CORPS]

An official at Hanawon’s medical center told reporters that the proportion of new arrivals requiring intensive treatment is surprisingly low at approximately 5 percent, but most do require dental care after years of poor diet and neglect. The dentist’s office is the most spacious of the six clinics at the medical center, which also employs a pediatrician, a gynecologist and a Korean traditional medicine practitioner.

But those are just the clinics that deal with physical ailments.

According to Hanawon, approximately 30 percent of defectors report feelings of anxiety and other symptoms of mental health issues possibly brought on by extended deprivation and leading an underground existence in neighboring China, whose government classifies them as “economic migrants” and deported defectors back to the North before the pandemic-related border closure.

To address defectors’ underlying psychological issues, Hanawon also operates a mental health center that offers counseling and continues to monitor defectors after they graduate from the settlement program.

Unification Minister Kwon Young-se speaks to reporters during a press conference at Hanawon on Monday. [JOINT PRESS CORPS]

Kwon Young-se, the outgoing unification minister, told reporters that part of the reason for Hanawon’s remote location was to “moderate and gradually increase defectors’ exposure to the outside world” since many “exhibit fear and wariness of meeting strangers.”

Approximately 84 percent of defectors do not arrive in South Korea directly from China, but rather through countries in Southeast Asia where they are able to present themselves at a South Korean consulate to claim asylum.

While the defectors at Monday’s press conference said they were able to find work to get by in China, they said that path came with its own pitfalls.

One defector, a woman in her 30s identified by the ministry as “A,” described herself as “fearless” when she left the North in 2014 but realized the instability of her undocumented status after starting a family in China.

“Once I had children, I realized I couldn’t go back to North Korea, but that I also couldn’t stay where I was. I wanted to be safe and also protect my family, so I decided I had to escape to South Korea,” she said.

Defector C, who arrived in China only months before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, said she paid substantial bribes to Chinese police for a while to make them turn a blind eye to her lack of a legal ID.

“But after being trapped inside during the pandemic, I decided I had to make it to the South, if only to obtain recognition [as a citizen] and live like a human being,” she said.

While at Hanawon, defectors undertake field trips to popular locations for outings, such as markets, malls and history museums, to prepare them for life off-campus.

Although none of the three defectors at Monday’s press conference have yet to live outside Hanawon, they expressed cautious optimism about the lives they might lead in South Korean society.

“I truly believe that with hard work and effort, I can build a better life for myself here than before,” said C, who nonetheless admitted some Hanawon graduates warned her that “the South can be a tough place, and that people often don’t look kindly at defectors” because they speak with different accents.

Seoul’s resettlement program for North Koreans has attracted criticism in recent years, with media reporting stories of defectors who feel ill-prepared for the tribulations of modern life and the fundamental loneliness of living in an unfamiliar land even after completing their studies at Hanawon.

Kwon, who is due to be replaced as unification minister by outspoken political science professor Kim Yung-ho, acknowledged current Hanawon residents had voiced concerns about the South Korean government’s current level of monetary support at lunch with him on Monday.

“They all worry about family and relatives they left behind and seemed to be in agreement that the current amount of aid may not be enough,” he said, referring to the approximately 25 million won ($19,160) that each defector receives in resettlement benefits and housing subsidies.

A North Korean defector practices filing an acrylic nail during a class on beauty and make-up at Hanawon on Monday. [JOINT PRESS CORPS]

While Kwon said it remains to be seen if Hanawon would focus more on defectors already residing in the South given the decline in new arrivals, the center’s officials said over 250 graduates have come back for additional job training since 2020, and that 93 percent of those who sat exams to obtain job licenses had passed.

“Before [leaving the North], we didn’t dare to think about life in South Korea,” said A.

“Now, I have time to think about what I really want to do, and also make choices that I could previously only dream about.”

BY MICHAEL LEE [lee.junhyuk@joongang.co.kr]