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From Across the Sea Student moves from north korea

North Korea. When the average American hears those two words, their first thoughts are of war, lack of freedoms, propaganda, and starvation. While some of these may be accurate depictions, there are also misconceptions surrounding the lives of the people who live there.

Junior Sarah Kim moved from North Korea to the United States last year during the COVID-19 pandemic. She was raised in North Korea as a child and has a first-person view of what life is like there.

“I grew up there my whole life,” Kim said. “We lived in the mountains in a village. It was a 30 minute drive from the city of Rajin.”

The sun sets over the mountain of Rajin, North Korea. "The views were beautiful," Kim said. (Sarah Kim)

Kim was born in California, but moved to North Korea after as a baby. A person can enter or leave North Korea if they have been invited inside or if they have a North Korean green card. The main exception, however, is for South Koreans, who aren’t allowed in at all. The Kim family got in with green cards because of their multiple businesses and American citizenship.

“It’s difficult to specifically pinpoint what I enjoyed about my life there because it was (is) my home,” Kim said. “I do have to say that one of my favorite things to do was going to the public market and meeting the ladies selling their products and enjoying the food that they’ll give you for free.”

The landscape of Rajin, North Korea sits peacefully. This is the view junior Sarah Kim grew up seeing.

Kim’s father had a strong desire to live among the North Korean people as a Christian in order to show them the reality of Christian life. However, he was careful to follow the restrictive laws set by the government and didn’t preach or talk about Christianity to citizens. He did, though, worship in his own home with his family.

“Christianity is the biggest religion in the world,” Kim said. “But it’s also the main religion that turns people away from Communism. It goes against [the North Korean government’s] world view that religion is an opiate for the masses. [The local people] are not allowed to have any religion.”

Despite the country’s atheism, foreigners are allowed to hold congregations and worship on Sundays if they are Christian. North Korean citizens cannot participate in any worship, but Kim’s family chose to simply let them see the truth of Christianity through their daily lives and actions towards others.

“We’re allowed to do things that people do not expect us to be able to do,” Kim said. “We can’t just be like ‘by the way, God loves you’, and stuff like that.”

Citizens partake in North Korean style barbecue. (Sarah Kim)

Since the North Korean government did not allow foreigners to study in local schools, Kim had to be homeschooled.

“My mom wanted us to go to the schools because she had never done homeschooling before,” Kim said. “It was difficult for her, but we couldn’t [go], so we just had to do the homeschooling.”

The North Korean government controls all media and information that is shared with its citizens, and there is no internet in the country. Citizens are uncomfortable talking about politics.

“The city people have more exposure to outside information,” Kim said. “You can tell that they want to visit other countries, but they can’t verbally say ‘oh I want to visit other countries’ because that’s a no. But those who live in rural areas don’t have that exposure; so they usually don’t know any different.”

The ocean sits beautifully in Rajin. Kim often played through the mountains.

A common misconception surrounding North Korea is that their people are still starving. For the most part, the people there are well-fed, despite there being some who have a lack of nutrients. In the 90s, there was a famine that caused the government to ration everything. After that, they ran out of money and were forced to turn to capitalism in order to survive. This is why capitalism is now a major part of the North Korean system, even though the country is Communist. According to Mark E. Manyin, Specialist in Asian Affairs Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Trade Division, after 1995, the United States had provided over $1 billion in foreign assistance to the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea (DPRK). 60% of that assistance was in the form of food.

“For me, almost everything was positive,” Kim said. “The food was extremely healthy, and the water was really clean where we were.”

In North Korea, women are treated as a lower class than men and are often abused by their husbands. Men take the upper class jobs, such as government positions, whereas women take lower class jobs. North Korean women do not share the same advantages as the American women who live there. Kim’s mother hopes to have a coffee shop there someday where married North Korean women can sit down for a few hours, rest, and get free coffee.

“Women have it the worst,” Kim said. “They work the hardest, bring in the money for the family, take care of household needs, and are the main providers of the family. Even if they’re able to sit down for a minute or two, that’s still only a few minutes of rest from their hard life.”

North Korean people are not taxed by the government, unlike those in the US because they are not paid that much. Instead, the government uses the citizens to work on projects and can conscript anyone at any time, and the people can’t say no.

“The people are taxed with their work,” Kim said. “Whether that be cleaning the streets, straightening up the railroads, etcetera.”

Kim is a self-proclaimed third culture kid (TCK). Growing up in North Korea, she was surrounded by her parents’ American influence, as well as the views of the North Korean people. Thus, she gained elements of both cultures as well as an entirely different subset that grew from the combination of the two. Due to her being born in America, she experienced more freedom in North Korea than the actual citizens are able to experience.

“There are times when I can understand both American culture and Korean culture, and these are the good times,” Kim said. “But then there are those lonely moments when you’re a mixture of both cultures and no one can really understand what you want to talk about, and those times aren’t that great.”

For the future, Kim plans to attend a university in the United States and become a forensic pathologist. She intends to continue visiting North Korea since it is her childhood home.

“I’m planning on attending university in the U.S. because my education was all done through an American curriculum, but I’m definitely going to visit North Korea if I can,” Kim said. “My entire childhood was there, and all my amazing memories were there. But just like how people love their hometown but desire to live elsewhere and move onto a different stage of life, so do I.”

Created By
KYLIE HESTER
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