Voices from the Other Side: What Defectors Actually Tell You About Life Under Kim Jong-un

The Woman Who Memorized Her Story in the Dark

Park Sunhee — not her real name, obviously, because her mother is still in Hyesan — told me something in a cramped apartment in Suwon, South Korea, in February 2019 that I haven't been able to shake since. She said the hardest part of living in North Korea wasn't the hunger, wasn't the surveillance, wasn't even the public executions she witnessed twice as a teenager in Chongjin. The hardest part, she said, was learning to make your face blank. "You practice it like a skill," she told me through an interpreter, pulling at the sleeve of her sweater. "Like learning to ride a bicycle. You practice until lying with your face is automatic."

North Korea Untold

I've done maybe sixty of these interviews now. Over seven years. Defectors in Seoul, in Yanji, in a couple of cases in undisclosed locations I'm not going to specify here. And that detail — the practiced blankness — comes up again and again. It's not a metaphor. It's a survival technique that gets drilled into North Korean children before they're old enough to understand why.

This piece isn't going to give you a tidy overview of the Kim Jong-un regime. There are think-tanks for that. What I want to do is tell you what people who actually lived it say — the specifics, the textures, the things that don't make it into UN reports.

The Marketplace Economy Nobody Is Supposed to Talk About

Here's something the official narrative from Pyongyang doesn't advertise: the North Korean state, in practical terms, stopped feeding most of its citizens sometime in the 1990s. The public distribution system — the mechanism through which the government was supposed to provide food, housing, everything — collapsed during the famine years. An estimated 600,000 to one million people died. And what filled the vacuum wasn't a government solution. It was the jangmadang. The markets.

Lee Hyunjun — again, not his name — was a mid-level party official in South Hamgyong Province before he crossed the Tumen River in the winter of 2017. He described to me, over three separate conversations in a Seoul cafe near Itaewon, how the markets work now. How they've evolved. "By the time I left," he said, "there were women in my city who were richer than any party official I knew. They'd started selling dried fish in the early 2000s. By 2015 they owned trucks."

This is a system the regime technically prohibits, informally tolerates, and actively exploits — simultaneously. Stall fees get paid to local authorities. Bribes flow upward. According to multiple defectors I've spoken with, the local police (the anbowibu as well as the regular polizia) are essentially franchise owners of corruption. You pay your monthly fee, you operate. You don't pay, your stall gets confiscated on some pretext about "anti-socialist behavior."

What's striking — and I wasn't expecting this when I started reporting — is how many defectors describe this system not with resentment but with a kind of weary pragmatism. One woman from Musan, who left in 2020 and asked not to be named, told me: "Everyone knew how it worked. You bribed. They took. You kept some. It was like taxes, but honest." She said that with zero irony.

Kim Jong-un Is Not His Father. That Matters.

The generational shift from Kim Jong-il to Kim Jong-un in December 2011 is something analysts have written about extensively — but the street-level perception of that shift, as described by defectors, is more complicated and in some ways darker than the policy papers suggest.

Kim Jong-il was, by most accounts from people who lived under him, a distant and almost mythological figure. Terrifying in the abstract. Kim Jong-un is something different. He is — and this is how several defectors described him to me independently — terrifyingly present. His face is on screens that didn't exist under his father. His speeches air on state television with greater frequency. His image management is more aggressive, more granular.

"We knew more about him," one defector told me in March 2022, a man in his forties who'd worked as a construction brigade leader in Pyongyang before defecting via the northern route through China. "And somehow that made it worse. His father was like a god. Gods are far away. Jong-un felt like a boss who might walk through the door."

The purges under Kim Jong-un — most famously the 2013 execution of his uncle Jang Song-thaek, carried out with a theatrical brutality that was clearly meant to be witnessed — register in defector testimonies not as isolated political events but as tremors felt at every level of the system. When Jang died, I was told, mid-level officials across the country spent weeks frantically reviewing their own associations. Who had they met with? Whose photograph might be in whose house? The paranoia cascades downward through the hierarchy like water finding cracks.

What School Actually Teaches

I want to spend some time on this because I think it gets underreported. The ideological education system in North Korea isn't background noise — it's the entire architecture of the state's legitimacy, and it starts before children can read.

From defector accounts, children as young as four or five begin attending Socialist Patriotic Education sessions. By primary school, they are studying the "great deeds" of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il daily. Kim Jong-un has been added to this liturgy since roughly 2014, according to defectors who had children in school around that time.

One woman — I'll call her Choi, she's now in her late thirties and living in Incheon — described her own education in Sinuiju in the 1990s and early 2000s. She said there was a class, she doesn't remember what it was officially called, that was essentially dedicated to memorizing the emotional responses you were supposed to have to the Kim family. "We were taught that when we thought of the General, we should feel warmth here," she pressed her hand to her sternum. "We practiced what words to use. We practiced how to cry."

Does that mean North Koreans are all robots? No. That's too simple. Choi herself was privately skeptical by the time she was fifteen — she'd heard enough from traders crossing back from China that cracks had formed in her belief. But she performed the belief anyway. Because the alternative wasn't acceptable. And here's the thing that I keep coming back to: after enough years of performing a belief, where does performance end and something else begin? I honestly don't know. Neither do some of the defectors I've asked.

The Surveillance State, As Actually Experienced

Western coverage tends to describe North Korea's surveillance apparatus in almost sci-fi terms — all-seeing, omnipresent, inescapable. The reality, based on what defectors tell me, is messier and in some ways more insidious.

The inminban system — neighborhood watch units, typically led by an older woman who reports on her block to local party officials — is the ground-level surveillance mechanism most defectors describe encountering personally. These aren't secret police. They're neighbors. Sometimes your aunt. The inminban leader might know which family has an extra radio, who came home late, whose son has been asking questions. She reports. Or she doesn't, if you've been kind to her, if your family has some quiet arrangement.

According to one source who worked as a low-ranking official in the Ministry of State Security in the mid-2010s before his defection in 2018, the actual intelligence apparatus is "drowning in paper." His words. The system generates so much reported information — so many denunciations, many of them motivated by personal grudges or local power struggles — that real threats get lost in the noise. "It was inefficient in ways that saved lives," he said. "Not because they were merciful. Because they were overwhelmed."

That doesn't mean it isn't terrifying. It means the terror operates differently than the outside world tends to imagine. It's not that someone is always watching you. It's that someone might be, and you never know which someone, and that uncertainty is itself the point.

The Specific Geography of Hunger

I want to be careful here because this is one of the areas where defector accounts vary significantly based on where in the country someone is from — and that variance itself is the story.

Pyongyang is not North Korea. Pyongyang residents are selected, monitored, and comparatively privileged. Multiple defectors from the capital describe adequate food, electricity that works more reliably than in the provinces, and a quality of daily life that wouldn't be recognizable to someone from, say, Ryanggang Province near the Chinese border.

The geography of deprivation in North Korea runs roughly north-to-south, with the remote northeastern provinces — North and South Hamgyong, Ryanggang — experiencing conditions that are genuinely dire by any standard. One defector I interviewed at length in Seoul in 2021, a man who grew up in a rural collective farm in North Hamgyong through the 2000s, described eating corn husks and wild plants for months at a time during particularly bad winters. His younger sister, he believes, has a permanent growth condition from childhood malnutrition. She's still there. He doesn't know her exact whereabouts.

When I push defectors on the question of whether things have gotten better or worse under Kim Jong-un specifically, the answers are genuinely mixed. Some say the jangmadang expansion under the current leader has made food access more stable for people who can participate in market activities. Others point to the border lockdowns that began in January 2020 — ostensibly COVID-related — as catastrophic for the informal trading networks that many families depended on to survive. One defector who left via a third country in late 2022 told me the border closure had functionally re-created famine conditions in some rural areas. "People were eating things," she said, and then she stopped and looked at her hands for a while. I didn't push her to finish the sentence.

What They Miss. And Why That's Complicated.

Every defector interview I've ever done has eventually arrived at this moment — usually late in the conversation, often after tea has gone cold — where the person describes something they miss about life in North Korea. And it's always something small. A particular kind of noodle. The sound of a neighborhood in summer. Their mother's way of folding laundry. Family, obviously. But also — and this is the part outsiders find hardest to accept — a sense of community, a kind of social density that some defectors find absent in South Korea's hyper-competitive environment.

This doesn't mean they want to go back. None of the sixty-odd people I've spoken with has expressed that. But it complicates the clean narrative — the one where North Korea is pure darkness and South Korea is pure light, and defection is straightforwardly liberation. The reality is that many defectors arrive in Seoul depressed, isolated, economically struggling, and culturally disoriented in ways that take years to even partially resolve. The suicide rate among North Korean defectors in South Korea is notably higher than the general population — a statistic I find myself thinking about every time I close a notebook at the end of one of these interviews.

Park Sunhee, the woman I mentioned at the beginning — the one who learned to make her face blank — she's doing reasonably well now. She works at a nonprofit that helps other defectors with paperwork and resettlement. She learned the blankness as a survival skill in one system, and it turned out not to serve her in another. She's had to learn, she told me the last time I spoke with her, how to let her face move again. "It sounds small," she said. "It is not small."

Nothing about this is small. That's what seven years of these interviews has taught me. The regime in Pyongyang is not an abstraction — it is an accumulation of small, specific, human moments of fear and adaptation and grief and occasional dark humor. The people who lived it carry it in ways that don't fit neatly into policy briefings or news cycles. My job, as best I understand it, is just to keep asking, and keep writing it down, and try not to look away.