INCHEON, South Korea — For much of the world, North Korea is a Stalinist nightmare, an isolated enclave of prison camps, poverty and hunger.
But for tens of thousands of people scattered across South Korea and living underground in China, it’s something far more complicated. It’s a memory they wrestle with. It’s home. It’s the place they left behind. And even if there is plenty they hate about it, there is also much that they miss, sometimes achingly.
They miss relatives and friends and the small-town neighborliness that can come, admittedly, in not having many recreation choices. They miss dancing to accordion music in public parks on their days off, and the greasy street food they’d yearn for when they were most hungry. At times, they even miss the three generations of dictators — Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il and now Kim Jong Un — who have controlled the country for nearly 70 years.
“I think all the time about the people I knew there,” said a former coal miner, who works 12 hours a day in a Seoul convenience store, and who has the disheveled look of someone who rarely gets enough sleep. He left North Korea a decade ago with his family. “Whenever we’re together, and we’re eating a good meal, we think about those people.”
More than 27,000 North Korean refugees live in South Korea. Thousands more live underground in China, often working menial jobs for low pay.
A former North Korean policeman has had difficulty adjusting to the South, a common problem among the refugees. He hasn’t been able to hold a job for more than few months and worries that he’s being discriminated against. He sometimes talks about wanting to return to the North. Lost amid Seoul’s dual whirlwinds of consumerism and competitiveness, he yearns for the days when things seemed simpler.
“In South Korea, tradition only decreases as time goes by,” he said. “Now it looks like a Western society.”