By: Haajar Abu Ismail For many, fleeing North Korea is a long and arduous journey. It is unfamiliar and perilous, undertaken with the constant fear that the next checkpoint will be the one to send them home, where torture, imprisonment, or forced labor awaits. Often, South Korea is lauded as the final destination of a dangerous expedition, the place of reprieve and safety. Less recognized perhaps, would be that this arrival is only the beginning of a resettlement process for strangers in a strange land. Indeed, it marks a lifelong struggle of overcoming the difficulties of life in the South as a North Korean.
Firstly, every North Korean spends 3 months at Hanawon, a school that provides training for the resettlement process. In the words of Sokeel Park, South Korea’s country director of Liberty in North Korea, Hanawon is “a three-month school where they learn various things about South Korean society: how to use an ATM machine and South Korea's modern transport infrastructure and how to get a job. They learn various things about South Korean citizenship, democracy, and differences.” Essentially, it is a crash course in the ideological differences between the North and South, as well as how to get by in a technologically advanced society. North and South Koreans may have a shared ethnicity, history, and to a degree language, but they come from vastly different cultural landscapes. That in and of itself makes integration into South Korean society no easy feat. Furthermore, there is a sentiment of negative stereotypes that depict North Koreans as “cold-blooded communists, unfeminine women workers, and as starving and helpless refugees,” wherein 58.4% of young defectors are reluctant to admit their origins. As the South is a relatively homogenous nation, the differences between both cultures stand out all the more. Linguistically, the Korean language has developed differently as well, with South Korean dialects having more anglophone words. Not to mention, the quality of education operates at a completely different standard. According to defector Kim Ji-young, defectors are unfamiliar with part-time jobs and would have never found a job on their own before. Young women will typically serve food in restaurants and as they become older, transition to work as kitchen assistants. Men usually have jobs packing online shopping orders or in the construction industry. Overall, after Hanawon, North Koreans are at the bottom of South Korea’s social hierarchy, where they are subject to racial discrimination and without the educational background to move up. This makes the reality of North Koreans’ resettlement a more difficult undertaking than public sentiment would credit, but there are also policies in place to support their adjustment to the South. North Koreans who settle in South Korea are “assigned a police officer who keeps an eye on them,” much like a “local friendly bobby who checks in every now and then.” In total, South Korea provides 12 weeks of adaptation training, $6000-$32,400 settlement benefits depending on the household size, and a $13,300 - $19,100 housing subsidy. Furthermore, North Korean defectors are given incentives to work and gain skills. For those who want to further their education, defectors don’t have to pay for undergraduate university degrees and those under 35 may go to graduate school for free. With this in mind, South Korea indeed has a support system in place to make the resettlement process easier, but that in no way makes it easy. Adjusting is a lifelong endeavor, and one with its own challenges that need to be addressed. Perhaps then it can become a home that North Koreans may feel they belong to.
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