“Ask a North Korean” is an NK News series featuring interviews with and columns by North Korean defectors, most of whom left the DPRK within the last few years.

Readers may submit their questions for defectors by emailing [email protected] and including their first name and city of residence.

Today’s question is about the kinds of stereotypes defectors face after escaping North Korea.

Sersong Han — who was born and raised in North Korea and lived there until he defected in 2014 — writes about how low expectations and stereotypes impact North Korean defectors, the proactive mindset required for life in South Korea and the root cause of negative perceptions toward defectors. 

Got a question for Sersong? Email it to [email protected] with your name and city. We’ll be publishing the best ones.

My hometown is Pyongyang, North Korea. I was born there and entered the North Korean army when I was 14, where I found success as a boxer. In Aug. 2014, my father and I swam across the inter-Korean maritime border and defected to South Korea. I was 22 years old back then. 

When I first started a part-time job here in South Korea, I remember making my boss feel awkward with my many and frequent questions. My boss was someone who had hired a number of defectors before. Of all the things he said to me, there is one thing that I still can’t forget to this day: “Don’t ask, just figure it out yourself, are you completely brainless? Why are all you defectors like that?” 

His words made me guess that I wasn’t the only defector who had worked under him and acted without the sort of initiative he expected. 

But humans are good at adapting. North Korean defectors who come off the wrong way to South Korean employers, peers or other segments of society typically overcome this and adapt after a year or two. Defectors, who have survived in a hell like North Korea, are very determined people. They quickly absorb the modern capitalist way of life and develop a more proactive mindset required to succeed in the South.

Defectors change like this; South Koreans not so much. Their default thinking toward defectors is negative. Only a minority of people here really evolve their thinking beyond that, thanks in part to seeing some defectors on South Korean television. 

In my opinion, the stereotypes of defectors or the prejudices toward defectors that exist in South Korea are caused by defectors themselves when they first settle in South Korea. In order to get rid of such stereotypes, I think that we defectors have to change the image that people first have of us by showing them how much we’ve changed for the better.

Part of this image revamp includes the way we speak. This year is my eighth in South Korea. Though I’ve got the linguistics of Korean here mostly down pat, my North Korean accent still slips out sometimes. Because of this, my relations with people from South Korea are sometimes awkward. 

Defectors who have just arrived likely don’t know the South Korean words and pronunciation for many things, meaning it’s very likely that their South Korean interlocutors will have a bad impression if they meet defectors who haven’t fully settled yet. 

This sort of negative impression doesn’t just stick to one person but spreads outward to other South Koreans. As a result, people around them who may not even have met a defector before end up thinking poorly of defectors anyway. 

These days I attend a university that’s located in Seoul. I’m enjoying my freedom, which I’m experiencing for the first time in my life, and learning about all sorts of literature — something I couldn’t even have imagined back in the DPRK. 

The South Korea that I experienced at 22 years old when I first arrived had so many differences compared with North Korea. 

It was not only a difference of linguistic expression, but I experienced entirely different habits and ways of life. The patterns of economic life under socialism and capitalism simply cannot be the same. 

Unlike here in South Korea, where you think proactively and do things based on your own judgment, in the DPRK you do the work that the state tells you to do and must think and behave in an entirely passive way.

I think that most other defectors would sympathize with me here. Defectors, who have thought and acted passively since the day they were born, come to South Korea and struggle with their first experiences of such a proactive way of life. 

Translated and arranged by Selena Falcone. Edited by Arius Derr.