Often born in rural China, the children of North Korean defectors find they are not welcome in South Korea, where they face language barriers and abuse.
SEOUL, South Korea — After Seon-mi’s mother escaped North Korea, hoping to find her way to South Korea, she was sold by traffickers to a man in a northeastern Chinese village.
The man was a violent schizophrenic, but the mother was trapped, according to Seon-mi’s South Korean caretakers. She lacked proper papers in China and was vulnerable to forced repatriation to North Korea, where she could face imprisonment, torture or worse. The two had a child, Seon-mi, who is now 11.
More than 32,000 North Koreans have escaped to South Korea since a famine hit their country in the 1990s, and their harrowing journeys are often made worse by having to spend years in limbo in China, according to defectors, human rights researchers and South Korean officials. Some are trapped there for years, forced to work in the sex industry or live with men in the countryside who could not find Chinese wives before the women enlist the help of human rights activists and smugglers to reach South Korea.
When Seon-mi was about 6, her Chinese father murdered his own parents with a knife and then killed himself. But before he did so, he slashed Seon-mi nine times in the chin, neck and shoulder. Despite repeated plastic surgeries in South Korea, which the mother and daughter finally reached, the girl’s scars are still visible.
“I used to cry in the corner of the room while my father thrashed my mom,” she recalled of her early years in China. “She once attempted suicide with rat poison,” said Seon-mi, who, like other children interviewed for this article, is identified by first name only to protect her privacy.
In recent years, 80 percent of North Korean migrants reaching the South have been women, and almost all of them fled through China.
Human rights activists, Christian missionaries and smugglers help many defectors get from China to countries like Laos and Thailand, where they can request asylum in South Korean embassies and eventually get to the South. Seon-mi’s mother reached South Korea with the help of a smuggler and later sent for Seon-mi, who could go there legally because, having been born in China, she held a Chinese passport.
But many of the women and their Chinese-born children find that their suffering is not over once they finally settle in South Korea. Because the children were born in China, South Korea’s government does not officially consider them defectors from the North. That means they get limited access to the governmental support normally given to defectors, like free health care, free college enrollment and housing subsidies.
About 1,530 Chinese-born children of North Korean defectors have been enrolled in South Korean schools, according to government data.
