The Guardian: Life Outside the World’s Largest Prison. (Shock! It’s NOT Gaza!)
The AK Plaza in Suwon is like any other shopping mall in South Korea: a temple to consumer electronics, fashion and fast food.
The slim, fashionably dressed 21-year-old woman sipping a juice at the top floor looked as though she ought to fit in perfectly with the buzzing, confident culture around her. Only her accent would give her away.
Rhee Kyeong-mi (a pseudonym used at her request) is a newly 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.
“It’s just too big, too fantastic,” she said in an awed whisper.
She had spent almost every month of her 21 years until now focused on finding enough food to stay alive, and the abundance and choice around her were dizzying.
Rhee had just emerged from three months in Hanawon, a resettlement centre about 12 miles from Sowun, where new arrivals are taught how to go to the shops and how to use a mobile phone. But it is also an experiment with broader implications. Teams of psychologists and sociologists are watching Rhee and her fellow escapees to help plan for the day North Korea finally implodes and the South has to cope with 24 million inmates from 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 to 3 million people. People abandoned the state system and survived 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.”
When Rhee was 15, her mother died, after a small cut on her foot became infected. “Really, she was killed by the lack of hospital services,” she said.