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Rhee Kyeong-mi used to struggle to find enough food. Now she is finding it hard to adjust to abundance and choice in the South The AK Plaza in Suwon is like any other shopping mall in South Korea: a temple to consumer electronics, fashion and fast food. The Tea and Bakery on the top floor is decorated with a quirky selection of English words: passion, sleepiness, refreshment and comfort. On a recent summer day, a young couple at one table were absorbed in their smartphones, occasionally looking up to exchange smiles. At another table, two Buddhist nuns in grey robes were taking tea and chatting. And at a third, a young woman in a red gingham dress was sitting silently looking into her lap. The woman, Rhee Kyeong-mi, looked as though she ought to fit in perfectly with the buzzing, confident culture around her. The slim, fashionably dressed 21-year-old Korean was seemingly just like dozens of others spending a summer’s day shopping. Only her accent would betray her very different origins. Rhee (a pseudonym to protect her and her family) is a freshly arrived North Korean defector who only three months ago was struggling to survive in a labour camp. This was her first time in a shopping mall and she was somewhat overwhelmed. “It’s just too big, too fantastic,” she said in an awed whisper. Until now, she had spent almost every month of her 21 years focused on finding enough food to stay alive, and the abundance and choice around her were dizzying. Like most of the 23,000 North Koreans who have escaped to the South in the past two decades, Rhee spent three months in Hanawon, a resettlement centre about 20 kilometres from Sowun, where counsellors tried to help her adjust to the transition from one of the poorest, most repressive societies in the world to one of the richest, fastest growing countries in Asia. Hanawon teaches new arrivals how to go to the shops, how to run a bank account and how to understand the English words used increasingly in colloquial and commercial South Korean. But it is an also experiment with broader implications. Teams of psychologists and sociologists are watching to see how people such as Rhee get on because if North Korea collapses the South will have to help 24 million people adapt from a life spent in the world’s biggest prison. Rhee was born in 1990 in Musan in North Hamgyong province, near the border with China. Her father died when she was three, but she is not certain why. North Korea was in the grip of a famine which eventually killed 1-3 million people. People survived by circumventing the state farming system by any means possible. “When my mother was still alive, she went up into the mountains and found a piece of land where we could grow food without being seen,” Rhee said. “My mother and sister did the farming and I would walk three hours to the market and help sell what we had: corn, beans, grain, rabbits and chicken.” In 2005, when Rhee was 15, her mother died. “She hurt her foot farming and it got infected and there was no hospital care. So really she was killed by the lack of hospital services.” Rhee and her sister, Sang-mi, then 18, were left to fend for themselves. They kept their little plot of land going for two years, but could not grow as much food. Rhee was depressed and lonely without their mother and Sang-mi pined for her boyfriend, Choi Myung-chul, who had escaped into China in 2005, telling her he would come back for her in three months. Once on the other side, he found it was too dangerous to return. In 2007, the two sisters and two of Sang-mi’s friends decided to escape themselves, wading across the Yalu river that divides the north-eastern corner of North Korea from Manchuria. The Yalu is fast-flowing, treacherous and well-patrolled, but the four girls knew a spot where it was only waist-deep and deserted. They did not have much of a plan, however. Sang-mi hoped to find Choi, not knowing he had already set off on the long trek across the Gobi desert to Mongolia. China does not allow South Korean embassies on its territories to issue passports to North Korean escapees, no doubt to avoid the human flood that would ensue. An estimated 250,000 have simply settled in southern China. Those with more money and ambition head for South Korean missions in Mongolia and Thailand. The Mongolian route is not to be taken lightly. “It took three days to cross the desert, and sometimes we were up to our middles in snow. We ate snow to stay alive,” recalled Choi, now also in Suwon. Newly arrived in China, the four girls headed to relatives of one of Sang-mi’s friends, but they had no room and directed them to a Chinese man in Yanji city in Jilin province who they said would put them up. He did take them in and feed them, but at a price. His wooden house was divided into two. The man lived with his family on one side, and on the other North Korean girls sat at computers in front of webcams, performing for sex chatlines. “We had to pretend to be South Korean women to talk to South Korean men. We were trained to dress like South Korean women and told what to say. But we did it by typing in text. There was no sound, so the customers wouldn’t know we were from the North,” Rhee said. “We received meals, but no pay, and we couldn’t go outside. It was like a prison. There were four of us there for nearly a year. At one point, one of the girls escaped, but she came back on her own a month later. She knew no one there, and didn’t know the language.” After 11 months of incarceration, Sang-mi and one of the other girls ran away when one of their captor’s friends was left in charge. They persuaded him that they were allowed out for a break. Soon after they disappeared, the police knocked on the door. Whether there was a connection between the two events, Rhee does not know, or she is reluctant to speculate. She and the other remaining girl were deported to North Korea and imprisoned in a labour camp outside the city of Hoeryong. Judging from her description, it may have been North Korean’s infamous Camp 22, the biggest concentration camp in the country. “We were in huge wooden cabins in the mountains. There were about 1,000 women in our cabin and we were so squashed together we had to sleep with our legs interlocking,” she said. “Mostly there were people like me who had tried to escape and ordinary criminals. We had rice husks to eat and had to work cutting down trees and dragging the timber back with chains.” “When it got really cold in winter, five or six women would die every day and the other prisoners would have to carry the bodies out. I still dream about that.” Rhee believes she survived because she was excused the heaviest labour, on account of her youth and a congenital heart condition. Instead, she was allow to knit indoors in the winter. After 18 months in Hoeryong, with only a few days left of her sentence, Rhee had her first visitor — a man she had never met before. Sang-mi had reached South Korea and found Choi. He was able to borrow enough money to hire a Chinese “broker” to look for Rhee. The broker’s first move was to visit Hoeryong and bribe the guards to check if she was still alive. On the day of her release, another man was waiting at the gate to take her across the Tumen river, which marks that segment of the border with China. On the other side, a third broker was waiting to take Rhee on the next stage of her journey: a long boat ride westwards along the Tumen and then a three-day mountain trek into Thailand. Together with the air fare to Seoul, the whole package cost Choi $10,000. He still has $4,000 to pay off, but he has good prospects. He is studying management at the local university. Rhee is still living off her resettlement grant and looking for a job. She has no South Korean friends yet and finds their language, heavily studded with foreign words, hard to understand. But at least she has relatives nearby. Many North Korean escapees have to cope alone. “Everything is different here. It is almost impossible to adjust,” said Cho Myung-chul, a former Communist party ideologue who defected in 1994 and now runs an education centre run by the South Korean unification ministry. The centre is supposed to help prepare people for the eventual collapse of the North Korean regime and its absorption by the South – an event Cho views as inevitable, if not imminent. “These people have been made to idealise Kim Jong-il and the North Korean regime, and when they come here they suffer real psychological pain. They can’t get a job. They miss their family and friends and often feel like they drifting alone here. We give them money and education but we have to do more to rescue them from despair.” With its abundance of food, its freedom, and its strong economy South Korea should feel like a real paradise, but after a lifetime living in the cruel hoax of the “workers’ paradise” north of the demarcation line, the change can be traumatic. East Germans found it hard to adjust to the west but the income differential in Korea is up to 10 times greater. No one knows what will happen if and when 24 million have to make the leap. North Korea South Korea Julian Borger guardian.co.uk