Charles Ryu, now living in the United States, spent nine months in a labour camp in his teens after his first attempt to flee the reclusive state
Charles Ryu became an 11-year-old street child in North Korea in 2005 after his mother died of starvation during a famine.
His Chinese father had moved back to China when he was five, abandoning the family, and after an aunt kicked him out when harsher food rations were imposed he was left to scrounge for food on the streets.
Life was especially hard during the winter months and Ryu and his young friends did whatever they could, even illegal trading, to survive. One of the few forms of entertainment was watching foreign movies and to make extra cash to buy food he sold foreign movies to his friends after copying them on to memory sticks.
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Their exposure to foreign media opened their eyes to the outside world and inspired Ryu and some of his friends to escape North Korea.
Now living in the United States, he first made the dangerous border crossing into China in 2008, when he was 14. He credits James Bond movies, those starring Tom Cruise, and Will Smith in the Bad Boys films with inspiring his escape.
“They got me curious about freedom and life outside North Korea,” he said, laughing at the memory. “We’d been brainwashed from a young age. Everything I was taught was a lie… the worst thing was being told North Korean people were richer than South Koreans. That’s what I learned in school.”
Ryu said movies and television shows from South Korea, the United States, China, Indonesia and Russia were popular.
“The younger generation has more access to foreign media through USB sticks and DVD players,” he said. “Those my age know everything going on. If they don’t watch, they have nothing to talk about and they’re not in the cool crowd.”
North Korea’s urban millennials – born in the 1980s and 1990s and now aged between 18 and 35 – are changing its society through their frequent access to foreign media and their reliance on illegal trading and capitalism, rather than the government, for their livelihood. The international NGO Liberty in North Korea (LiNK) estimates they comprise around a quarter of North Korea’s 26 million people.
“This illegal trade on the black market, foreign media exchange and the influence of foreign culture have made the younger generation think differently,” Ryu said. “We were influenced by the freedom and foreign culture (in TV shows and films) and imagined and wanted to experience that freedom. That led many of us to escape North Korea.
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“They do reckless things. We’re not afraid of the government or to do things under the table like illegal trade.”
Sokeel Park from LiNK, which has helped more than 700 North Koreans, including children, defect to South Korea in the past few years, said North Korean refugees, especially millennials, were quietly contributing to seismic social changes within North Korea through word-of-mouth information exchange about the outside world that the government could not control.
“North Korean millennials grew up through North Korea’s famine and marketisation period, meaning many of them have been engaging in survival entrepreneurialism and accessing foreign media from an early age,” Park said. “This marks a significant generational change, puts them at the forefront of social change in North Korea, and puts them more at odds with the government’s traditional propaganda and ideologies.”
LiNK says more than 30,000 North Korean refugees live in South Korea and about half of them smuggle around US$15 million in resources and money to their families in North Korea through brokers and illegal Chinese mobile phones each year.
Ryu’s generation learned not to rely on the government because their parents struggled and starved through a famine in 1994.
“My parents’ generation didn’t trust the government any more,” he said. “We saw our parents depend on the black market and not the government.”
Millennials, more sceptical of the personality cult surrounding North Korea’s ruling Kim dynasty, engaged more in illegal trade than older North Koreans.
