A North Korean Defector's Story and Message
Ilhwa Choe escaped North Korea when she was 14 years old. Here is her story and message to the world.
14-year-old Ilhwa Choe lived with her family in Musan until 2006. Musan is a small mining town in North Korea that borders China.
ABOVE: Musan, North Korea shown on a map.
Her dad was a construction worker because the North Korean government assigned him that job. He traveled from city to city for work and was not able to see his family often because they did not have permission to travel outside of their town.
So far, you’ve learned two things:
The North Korean government assigns jobs to citizens, citizens cannot choose what they would like to pursue a career in.
It is illegal for North Koreans to leave the town they live in unless they have special permission from the government.
These are just two of the many limits on freedom that North Koreans have to deal with every single day.
Ilhwa and her family also had limited access to electricity. Additionally, Ilhwa started to participate in child labor daily (after school) when she was around seven years old.
When Ilhwa was a teenager, her mom told her that she didn’t think that they could survive in North Korea in the future and that she was saving up money to escape into China via a smuggling broker.
After hearing this, Ilhwa asked her mom if she could escape to China instead of her (because she thought that her mom would take better care of her baby sister). After a month of asking, Ilhwa finally convinced her mom to let her try to escape into China (and eventually into South Korea) so that she could eventually bring the rest of the family over to South Korea.
On July 4, 2006, Ilhwa was trafficked into China and sold into slavery to a Chinese family. She was 14 at the time.
She cooked and cleaned for the family for nearly two years, feeling isolated as an extremely young undocumented and illegal immigrant in China. She also had a “close call” in China- one day, she fell ill and desperately needed to go to the doctor.
When the doctor found out that she was an illegal immigrant (since she did not have insurance papers), he was supposed to call the police and have her arrested and deported by the Chinese government back to North Korea (where she would be subject to long term imprisonment and torture).
Luckily, the doctor helped her and decided not to report her to the police, saving her chance of escaping North Korea entirely and finding refuge in South Korea.
After nearly two years, Ilhwa escaped North East China and fled to Thailand. In Thailand, she was detained for five months while the government processed her request to be brought and eventually naturalized in South Korea.
After many grueling years of her life, Ilhwa finally got on a plane and flew to South Korea for the first time.
She has lived in South Korea for the past 18 years and was able to bring some of her family over to South Korea before Kim Jong Un took over North Korea in 2012.
Ilhwa now works as a partnership manager for Liberty in North Korea, a nonprofit organization that is currently working on rescuing and resettling North Korean refugees, as well as changing the way the world views North Korea.
ABOVE: A photo of Ilhwa Choe.
She wants you all to understand that North Koreans have potential and seek a better life. Every single North Korean isn’t brainwashed. Every single North Korean isn’t a criminal. Every single North Korean still trapped in North Korea (around 25,000,000) is denied their natural human rights, though.
The world needs to focus more on the fact that around 25,000,000 people are being denied their rights in North Korea, instead of only on that one man named Kim Jong Un (who thrives off attention) who is sending troops to Ukraine and may or may not meet President Trump sometime soon.
When you Google search the word “South Korea” and click “Images”, you get this:
When you Google search the term “North Korea” and click “Images,” you get this:
