My father was born in North Korea and my mother was born in South Korea. But during the 6/25 War [the Korean War], my mother volunteered as a North Korean military officer. I was born in Pyongyang, and I had a very nice life there. The North Korean government rations food to the people, and in Pyongyang all the people get rice, no matter how low their social status is.
When you look at the city of Pyongyang, it is beautiful—it is even better looking than Seoul. The city is very clean and the opera house is beautiful and everything is very good-looking. But when you go inside a building, there’s no electricity, so you can’t use the elevators. You have to use the stairways to go up to the top of a building, however tall. There is no water in the buildings when the electricity is cut off, so most of the time, when you turn the faucet on, the water will not come out. You have to draw the water by hand and then carry it upstairs. There is no heating system in the buildings because there is no electricity, so it is cold and you have to wear warm clothes all the time. It is kind of a comical situation.
When I was 14, the government decided that even though my mother had fought on their side in the war, she was born in the South, so she could not be trusted entirely. Our family was put outside of Pyongyang. For the first year, we lived in On-sung, in a house shared by several families in a similar situation. After the first year, our family got out of the house, and we found a very small house in a rural area.
My parents were doctors in Pyongyang but after the eviction, they had to do physical labor on the housing-construction sites and in the mines. Because working at the mines was punishment, my parents could not find any happiness there. Nevertheless, they felt grateful that they were not in prison. They still had some freedom, so they were thankful. I was the same. I didn’t have hard feelings or bad feelings for Kim Il-sung, because I was young, and they continuously teach the young people that he is the great father of the North Korean people. I thought that he was a very good person and he was feeding me with the rice. The food was given by him, the clothes were given by him. I felt very thankful to him.
In the 1990s, a lot of people died from starvation, and I started to think about defecting. On-sung is part of the border area, very near China’s Northern Province. I saw a lot of people coming from China with rice and money. I thought that if I stayed in On-sung I would starve to death, but I saw that if I got caught in the course of trying to defect, then I would be killed by the guards. I decided that I had to take the chance, because if I stayed in North Korea I would die of starvation.
AS TOLD TO AMIE BARRODALE
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