Voices From the Other Side: What Defectors Really Tell Us About Life Under Kim Jong-un

The Woman Who Crossed the Tumen River Twice

Park Sung-hee doesn't talk about the river anymore. Not the temperature of it — somewhere just above freezing when she crossed in February 2019 — not the sound of the ice cracking near the southern bank, not the two soldiers she saw smoking on the North Korean side who, for reasons she still can't explain, never turned around. She's told that story too many times. She's tired of being somebody's proof of something. What she wants to talk about, what she actually pushes the conversation toward when you sit with her long enough, is her mother. Who is still there. Who she will probably never see again.

North Korea Untold

I've been doing this work for eleven years. I've sat in cramped apartments in Yanji, in resettlement hostels in Seoul's Nowon district, in the back rooms of churches in Shenyang where defectors wait for a phone call that may or may not come. And the thing I keep realizing — keep having to relearn — is that the big political story and the small human story are always the same story. You can't separate them.

The Surveillance State Isn't Abstract — It Lives in Your Neighbor's Eyes

The inminban system. If you've read anything about North Korea, you've seen the word. But I don't think most people outside that country understand what it actually means to live inside it. One defector — a man in his mid-forties who asked not to be named, who worked for a state-run distribution center in South Hamgyong Province until 2021 — described it to me like this: "You don't fear the government the way you fear a soldier with a gun. You fear your neighbor. You fear the woman downstairs who writes the weekly report. You fear your own children, because they've been taught to report what happens at home."

The inminban are neighborhood watch units, roughly twenty to forty households each, overseen by a designated monitor — almost always a woman, usually older, usually someone who has figured out that compliance is the only currency worth holding. They report on food, on visitors, on whether you've been listening to foreign radio, on whether you said something at dinner that sounded like you doubted the leadership. And the monitors are themselves being watched. It goes all the way up and all the way down simultaneously.

Kim Jong-un didn't invent this. His grandfather did. But according to multiple defectors who left after 2012 — after Kim Jong-un consolidated power following his father's death in December 2011 — the system has been tightened in specific, targeted ways. The monitoring of mobile phones, for instance. North Korea has its own domestic cellular network, Koryolink, and while it doesn't connect to the outside internet, it generates data. Calls, locations, patterns. One source who worked in the telecommunications sector in Pyongyang told me the security services cross-reference Koryolink data with inminban reports. If your phone places you somewhere your neighbor didn't see you, that's a conversation you'll be having with someone you don't want to meet.

The Market Economy That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Here's something that gets underreported: North Korea has a functioning market economy. It's illegal. It's tolerated. It's the reason most people in the country don't starve to death. And it exists in this strange, precarious relationship with the state that no one — not analysts in Seoul, not the regime in Pyongyang — seems to know quite how to handle.

The jangmadang — the private markets — exploded during the famine years of the 1990s when the public distribution system collapsed and people had to trade or die. They never went away. By the time Kim Jong-un took power, there were hundreds of them operating across the country, and a whole class of people — called donju, the "masters of money" — had accumulated genuine wealth through trade, bribery, and black market enterprise. A woman I interviewed in Seoul in March 2023, who ran a small clothing stall in Chongjin market before she left, told me she was paying bribes to three separate officials every month just to keep her stall open. "It was like taxes," she said. "Except the tax went directly to the man's pocket."

Kim Jong-un's relationship with the jangmadang has been — there's no cleaner word for it — complicated. There have been crackdowns. There was a catastrophic currency revaluation in 2009, before his time technically but under the regime he inherited, that wiped out savings overnight and sparked what sources describe as the closest thing to public anger the state has seen in decades. And then there was Covid.

The border closures that began in January 2020 — among the earliest and most extreme pandemic responses of any country in the world — devastated the market economy. Trade with China, which underpinned almost everything, stopped almost completely. According to one defector who managed to cross into Jilin Province in late 2022 after hiding in a rural area for months, food prices inside North Korea had increased by something like four or five times in the space of eighteen months. "People were eating corn porridge," she told me. "One meal a day. In the city, not just the countryside."

What Pyongyang Doesn't Tell You About Pyongyang

There's a version of Pyongyang that exists in state media and, honestly, in a lot of Western coverage too — gleaming apartment towers, the Mirae Scientists Street development, the ski resort at Masikryong that journalists were occasionally shown as evidence of a modernizing country. And look, those things are real. The buildings exist. But the people who live in them.

Residence in Pyongyang is a privilege. It's assigned, revoked, and weaponized. You earn the right to live in the capital through loyalty, through family background, through what the regime calls songbun — the inherited political classification system that sorts citizens into categories based on the perceived loyalty of their ancestors going back to the Korean War. A family with a relative who collaborated with the Japanese colonial government, or who had connections to South Korea, or who was simply in the wrong place during the wrong purge — that family's songbun is compromised. Their children can't attend the best schools. They can't join the party. And in many cases, they can't live in Pyongyang at all.

One man — I'll call him Choi, which is not his name — worked as a low-level functionary in a Pyongyang ministry from roughly 2014 to 2018 before his family was expelled to North Hamgyong Province after his uncle was accused of listening to South Korean broadcasts. He eventually made it to China, then to Southeast Asia, then to Seoul. When I met him in 2022 he was working at a convenience store in Mapo district and studying at a vocational school in the evenings. He described Pyongyang as "two cities inside one." The city of the privileged, with its department stores and coffee shops and relative abundance. And the city of the workers, who clean the streets at five in the morning and disappear before the privileged are awake. "You could live your whole life in Pyongyang," he said, "and not understand what the city actually is."

Public Executions and the Theater of Fear

I want to be careful here because I've seen this subject sensationalized in ways that do real damage — that reduce North Korean citizens to victims in a horror story rather than human beings navigating an impossibly constrained life. But I also can't not write about it, because defectors bring it up unprompted, consistently, across years and regions and demographics. The executions are part of the social fabric. They're meant to be.

According to multiple sources — and this is corroborated by the UN Commission of Inquiry report from 2014, which remains one of the most thorough documents ever compiled on North Korean human rights — public executions in North Korea are sometimes staged as events. Work units and school groups are brought to watch. Attendance, in some cases, is mandatory. The charges vary: drug trafficking, watching foreign media, attempted defection, "anti-state" crimes that can mean almost anything.

A woman who lived in Hyesan, a border city in Ryanggang Province, told me she witnessed an execution in 2017. She was seventeen. The man being executed had been caught with USB drives containing South Korean dramas — the kind of content that circulates on small memory sticks called "flower cards" and "kkotjebi drives" throughout the country. She didn't want to describe what she saw in detail. What she wanted to say — what she was very precise about — was the silence of the crowd afterward. "Nobody said anything walking home," she told me. "Not even the adults. Just silence."

Kim Jong-un has, by most accounts, intensified the use of public executions compared to his father's later years. The 2020 anti-reactionary thought law effectively criminalized possession of foreign media at scale, raising penalties to include the death sentence in the most serious cases. Whether those penalties are being consistently applied is harder to verify — the country is not exactly transparent — but the law's existence, and the defectors' accounts of its enforcement, suggest a regime that is doubling down on fear as a management tool even as its economic foundations crack.

The Brokers, the Traffickers, and the People In Between

Getting out is not simple. It's not cheap. And it's not safe.

The route most defectors take goes like this: cross the Tumen or Yalu River into northeastern China, usually with the help of a broker who has been paid anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand dollars — money scraped together over years, borrowed from relatives, extracted from jangmadang profits. Then hide. China classifies North Korean defectors as illegal economic migrants, not refugees, which means they can be — and regularly are — arrested and forcibly repatriated. Repatriation means interrogation, labor camp, and depending on what you're found to have done in China, potentially much worse.

Those who make it through China face another impossible leg: usually south through Southeast Asia — Laos, Thailand, sometimes Myanmar — before reaching a South Korean embassy or consulate and triggering the resettlement process. The journey can take months. Years. I've spoken to people who hid in rural Chinese villages for three or four years waiting for a broker's contact to come through, working in farms or restaurants for cash under conditions that were, in several cases the women described to me, not distinguishable from servitude.

And this is where the trafficking element becomes impossible to ignore. Women make up the majority of North Korean defectors who pass through China, and a significant number of them — estimates vary wildly, from human rights groups, from the South Korean government, the numbers are hard to pin down — are sold to Chinese men in rural areas where the gender imbalance created by decades of sex-selective abortion has left a surplus of unmarried men and a demand for brides. The brokers who take money to get a woman out of North Korea sometimes sell her to a middleman before she's crossed the province. She ends up in a farmhouse in Jilin or Heilongjiang thinking she's on her way to Seoul. She is not on her way to Seoul.

I'm not going to tell you how many women this has happened to because I genuinely don't know, and I don't trust any number I've seen in print, including some I've quoted myself in earlier work. What I know is that I've sat across from three women it happened to. And that's three too many for anyone to keep pretending this is a peripheral issue.

What Stays With You

Last year I was back in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in Jilin Province — my sixth or seventh time working that stretch of the border, I've lost count — and I found myself standing at a spot on the Tumen where the river is narrow enough that you can read the lettering on a sign across the water on the North Korean bank. There were Chinese tourists nearby, taking photos. The sign, in Korean, was some kind of slogan about the fatherland. I don't know exactly what it said.

I kept thinking about Park Sung-hee and her mother. About Choi studying for his vocational exam in a Mapo convenience store at midnight. About the seventeen-year-old walking home in silence after the execution. About the woman who waited in a farmhouse for two years before someone helped her reach Thailand.

Kim Jong-un will give another speech. There will be another missile test. Analysts will debate his intentions and his stability and whether his sister Kim Yo-jong is really running things. And all of that matters, in its way. But the people I keep thinking about are the ones who can't be analyzed — who are just living their lives inside a system designed to make living feel like a concession the state is granting you, moment by moment, on the condition that you never forget who's granting it.

That's the story. That's always been the story. And I don't think we're anywhere close to done telling it.