A North Korean’s Improbable Odyssey to Freedom

SEOUL —  Growing up in North Korea, Kim Hyong Deok used to watch his father gesture obscenely at a portrait of national founder Kim Il Sung on the living room wall of their thatched-roof home.

Every household in the totalitarian North must hang a picture of the nation’s former president, who died in 1994. Kim’s father, a truck driver, would have been severely punished if authorities had learned of his irreverence.

Today, Kim lives a world away from his childhood. In July, the 27-year-old became the first North Korean defector to go to work in South Korea’s parliament. He is a secretary to a governing party legislator.

His is a rare success story among the hundreds of defectors who come to South Korea every year from the impoverished North. Many have trouble fitting in or getting a job in the democratic South after years of state supervision. Nearly a third are unemployed, 10 times the national average, according to surveys.

“In the North, the state would have probably made me a coal miner or a farmer,” Kim said during an interview while checking e-mails in a cluttered office at the marble-walled National Assembly.

In August, he graduated with a business degree from Yonsei University, a top school in Seoul, South Korea’s capital.

Kim said he had no hope of career advancement in the North because his late grandfather briefly served in the South Korean army during the 1950-53 Korean War. After that, his family was declared traitorous.

His new boss, Rep. Kim Seong Ho of the Millennium Democratic Party, is a strong supporter of South Korea’s “sunshine” policy of engaging North Korea.

Kim Hyong Deok’s “experience of both South and North Korean societies has been a big help in approaching inter-Korean issues more objectively and practically,” the lawmaker said.

After fleeing the North eight years ago, Kim wandered around China, Vietnam and Hong Kong before reaching South Korea in 1994. He slept on the streets and ate food he stole from store stands. Tens of thousands of North Koreans are living in hiding in China after escaping the North in search of food.

In 1996, Kim tried to sneak off to China by boat because he was lonely and upset that the South Korean government had repeatedly refused to issue him a passport under a policy preventing some overseas travel by defectors, which officials say is out of concern for their safety.

“I wanted the freedom to choose and take responsibility for my actions. Isn’t that what democracy is about?” Kim said. “It’s the one time that I had regretted coming to South Korea.”

But he got on the wrong boat at Incheon on the west coast and ended up in Ulsan, a southeastern port, where he was jailed for 17 months as a stowaway.

When he first came to South Korea, Kim received a small apartment on the outskirts of Seoul and some state money. But there were no formal training programs to help defectors adjust until 1997.

Now, defectors get six months of education about South Korea at a state-run facility and up to $58,000.

In his 1997 autobiography, “I Want to Live With My Father,” Kim said he witnessed public executions in North Korea at a crowded market near his hometown.

He said he saw three security officials shoot a gagged and bound man in the head, stomach and leg. The victim had been convicted of trying to set fire to a factory. In another case, a man convicted of murder was tied to a stake and burned alive, Kim wrote.

Kim’s mother died a year before he left the North, and his four sisters are all married in the North.

After Kim’s escape, his father was banished to a secluded North Korean town. Kim said he exchanges letters with his father through smugglers in China.

He said that as a child he read banned Western books his father brought back from trips to Russia and China. He said he learned about freedom from “The Odyssey,” the Greek epic about a war hero’s journey home.

“My last wish is to bring my father here,” Kim said.