Escape From Dear Leader to My Classroom in Seoul

In North Korea, he knew exactly what he wanted to do: become an officer in the North Korean army. He dreamed of killing as many Americans and South Koreans as he could. In his childhood home, a framed photo of his grandfather and Kim was prominently displayed on the living room wall. His family was part of North Korea's small and reclusive elite society, and he would have marched off as an army lieutenant if he hadn't received a black-market Sony Walkman for his 15th birthday and listened to forbidden South Korean radio frequencies.

Late at night, muffling the scratchy signal so as not to get caught, he tuned in to the news, learning that much of what he was taught all day in school was a lie. "We learned that the Americans were constantly trying to invade us. But from the South Korean news, I learned that it was the other way around. But my classmates truly believed in what we were learning. They were like robots."

When he graduated from high school and was ordered to serve 13 years in the military, he decided to defect. His father bribed the North Korean border patrolmen, who took him to China. Because the Chinese government regularly repatriated North Korean refugees, South Korean missionaries took him to Myanmar, where Seoul's consulate prepared the papers for his final journey to South Korea.

Soon after arriving in Seoul, he found School 34 and a community of others like him. Most students were too poor to have bribed their way out. Instead, they had braved often frigid waters to swim across the Tumen River to China.

Another student, a good-humored young woman, lost her parents to starvation before she turned 11. To survive, she said, she crossed the Tumen many times to obtain food and other goods in China that she could sell on North Korea's widespread black market. When she defected, she went as far as Xinyang, in China's southeastern Henan Province. Discovered by Chinese agents, she was repatriated and served six months in prison. She was 13 at the time. After being released, she swam across the river again and this time she stayed in China, begging for food. Eventually, missionaries helped her get to Seoul.

One recent School 34 graduate is now studying at Sungkyunkwan University, one of the nation's top colleges. He grew up a few minutes away from one of North Korea's most notorious political prisons, Prison 22 in Hyeryung, Ham-Kyung Province, at the northern tip of North Korea. Because food and alcohol are scarce in the countryside, the prison guards went to his house for libations. "They always drank heavily," he told me. "And when they got drunk, they would mumble about how sorry they felt for what they did to prisoners."

Despite his rare glimpse of the prison guards and knowledge of what they did, my student says he finds it difficult to raise awareness about the little-known gulags of North Korea among his classmates in Seoul. Most do not care, he says. Or worse, they take a pro-North Korea stance. President Roh Moo Hyun has been passionately calling for the ouster of the 37,000 U.S. troops in South Korea, and a wave of anti-American sentiment is sweeping across college campuses. After eight years of the dubious "sunshine policy," which advocated engagement with rather than containment of the communist north, South Korean public sentiment favors neglecting thousands of North Korean refugees in China and pouring cash and aid into Pyongyang, even with Kim's apparent nuclear ambitions.

"Back in North Korea, we learned to hate and fear America," a 17-year-old student who attended middle school in North Korea told me one recent afternoon over sodas at McDonald's. His father was once responsible for importing and distributing Soviet arms to the North Korean army. But he defected to South Korea two years ago after his father was purged. "Now, I've realized that all I learned was a series of lies," he said, taking a bite of his Big Mac. "I wish my friends back in North Korea could eat this one day."

We left McDonald's shortly and went back to School 34 to study English.

neowriter@hotmail.com

Samuel Songhoon Lee is a teacher at School 34 and a freelance writer in Seoul.