[The journalists] began with typical questions about how we made it to South Korea, life in the camp, and so forth. But then they turned to the agents to inquire when and how we were found, what instructions we had been given prior to this interview, and whether we had been guaranteed freedom of speech. It was a terrible shock. […] Clearly, my address was unfavorable to the North. Clearly, our testimony about the camps and the repressiveness of the Pyongyang regime would bolster the South’s claim that it was the legitimate representative of the Korean nation. But so what?
Did telling the truth necessarily mean giving to oppose the government?
(223)
Kang’s identity as a North Korean traitor makes him an excellent pawn in the battle between Korean nations. His testimony is widely repeated in international newspapers and interviews. He retells it so often that he “occasionally felt [he] was trading [his] experience for a story that was no longer entirely [his] own” (224).
With so many complicated identities, the testimonies of North Korean defectors become more powerful than they have believed. Their testimonies are almost like a
double-edged sword that can be easily manipulated by the both side. For instance, in 2012, a North Korean young couple who have “double-defected” returns to
Pyongyang after living six years in the South. Upon their arriving, Pyongyang regime calls a press conference to accuse South Korean government of luring them away by dint of gimmicks and manipulation; and the re-defected couple give their testimony about leading a miserable life in the South, emphasizing how North Koreans are
“snubbed and disdained everywhere they went” (Herman, “Why Do People Keep
‘Re-Defecting’ To North Korea?”).
Nevertheless, when a North Korean defector’s identity is underscored as a
refugee, the society will sympathetically see him as a victim persecuted by the world’s most abusive dictatorship and is in urgent need of physical and mental health care.
The identity of being a North Korean refugee further embodies the impassable chasm between the two Korean nations: the divergences in cultures and medical conditions.
Every North Korean defector who safely enters the South will be sent to the House of Unity, commonly known as Hanawon; it is a government-run resettlement center solely designed for North Korean defectors, teaching them how to survive in the South’s ultracompetitive capitalist culture since the education in North Korea is utterly useless for life in the South. Hanawon appears to be “a well-funded,
security-obsessed mental hospital”, encircled by a high fence and always watched by video cameras and armed guards (Harden 162). In the facility, defectors’ physical and mental health will be closely monitored and evaluated in order to ensure that when the refugees are released into the South Korean society, they will successfully adapt and will not cause extra troubles. In addition to mental trauma, confusion, paranoid, and technophobia, North Korean defectors also suffer from some preventable diseases that are all but nonexistent in South Korea, such as hepatitis B, tuberculosis, chronic gynecological infections and cysts (Harden 165).
Notably, Hanawon epitomizes the fear from both North Korean defectors and South Korean citizens. North Korean defectors are so much in fear of being rejected by the South and losing their hard-fought freedom, while South Koreans also fear their social order and capital value are tumbled by the defectors. The purpose of Hanawon is to accommodate and assimilate the untrained defectors like a detention for immigrants; it is a special facility that includes the unwanted outsiders by excluding them, limiting them to a remote hillside that is miles away from Seoul.
Hanawon converts North Korean defectors’ identity from helpless refugees to potential immigrants during their three-month stay. When a defector is officially released to be an immigrant, he is expected to stand on his own two feet and lead a sustainable life by receiving “a free apartment, and eight-hundred-dollar-a-month settlement stipend for two years, and as much as eighteen thousand dollars if he stuck with job training or higher education” from the South Korean government (Harden 163). But the training from Hanawon hardly pays up for both North Korean defectors and South Korean government. To South Korea government, these special immigrants cannot create enough financial profits to compensate the spending of Hanawon and other humanitarian rescue programs, since these immigrants “often depend on the South Korean government to solve their problems, and fail to take personal
responsibility for poor work habits or for showing up late on the job” (Harden 167).
To find employers who will accept these North Korean newcomers, the Ministry of Unification even pays up to 1,800 USD per year if the employers risk hiring a defector (Harden 167).
Sadly, to some defectors, leaving Hanawon is the beginning of another nightmare.
Although they officially obtain the identity as a newly converted South Korean citizen, they will never truly fit in the South Korean society due to constant discrimination and misunderstanding. Bearing the incurable homesick and inability to adapt, the
unemployment rate of North Korean defectors in the South is four times the national average; their suicide rate is more than two and a half times for South Koreans (Harden 174).
To the neighboring countries of North Korea like China and Thailand, North Korean defectors are nothing more than illegal immigrants who cause serious domestic financial problems. In China, hiring North Korean defectors equal to provide low wages since they hardly have any rights to make a bargain with the employers. Chinese officials are afraid that these North Korean illegal immigrants will reduce the working opportunities of local laborers. Consequently, whenever a North Korean defector is caught in China, he will be treated as an illegal immigrant and immediately repatriated. In spite of the accusation from international
humanitarian rescue groups, China firmly states that the repatriation does not violate the U.N. Convention on the Status of Refugees because they label the identity of North Korean defectors as illegal immigrants, not refugees (Demick 282).
The multiple identities featured by North Korean defectors foreshadow the complexity of reconstructing North Korean defection testimony. The reconstruction must be carried out in an international context due to both the high mobility of North Korean defectors and the wide broadcasting and circulation of their testimonies across the world. After introducing the common elements of North Korean collective
memories which include the country’s heavy historical revisionism, Kim’s cult of personality, and the famine of the 1990s, this chapter facilitates the upcoming discussion on the representation of North Korean defectors’ traumatic memories by providing an insight into the defectors’ cultural and cognitive background.