Lim Ji-hyun, in an interview uploaded on a state-run North Korean propaganda website, described her life in the South as “a hell.”
SEOUL, South Korea — Until April, Lim Ji-hyun had been a modest television celebrity in South Korea, talking to the audience about the country she knew best: North Korea. She even had her own online fan club, indicating that she was among the relatively few North Korean defectors who had successfully adjusted to life in the capitalist South.
This week, Ms. Lim resurfaced in North Korea, tearfully recalling a terrible life in the South.
“Every single day of my life in the South was a hell, ” Ms. Lim, 26, said in a videotaped interview uploaded on the North Korean government-run propaganda website Uriminzokkiri. “When I was alone in a dark, cold room, I was heartbroken and I wept every day, missing my fatherland and my parents back home.”
Ms. Lim — or Jeon Hye-sung, as she was called in the North — said she returned to “the bosom of the fatherland” last month and was now living with her parents in her hometown.
She did not reveal how she traveled back to the North. The Unification Ministry, the South Korean government agency that handles issues related to defectors, said it was investigating Ms. Lim’s case. Since there is no press freedom in the North, what Ms. Lim told the propaganda website cannot be independently verified.
“I was lured to the South by a delusion that I would eat well and make a lot of money there, ” she said. “It was not the place I had imagined. I had wandered around everywhere there to make money, working in drinking bars, but nothing had worked out.”
Since a famine struck their country in the late 1990s, more than 30,000 North Koreans have defected to the South, a vast majority of them taking a perilous journey through China and the jungles of Southeast Asia to seek new lives.
After an extensive debriefing, they go through a monthslong program intended to help them integrate into South Korean society. But they often find it hard to make the transition from the North’s highly regimented totalitarian system to the South’s fast-paced, hypercompetitive capitalist society. They often cannot catch up with South Korean peers in schools and workplaces. Their strong accents divulge their origin.
Usually toiling in jobs shunned by South Koreans, they save money, which they send to family members left behind in the impoverished North.
