A North Korean Defector Is Spurned, for Decades, by South Korea
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Mr. Kim, 52, fled North Korea much earlier — in 1984 —
and even helped other North Koreans trapped in China get safe passage to South Korea, lending them money and helping them find smugglers who could take them.
But Mr. Kim’s case is noteworthy because he has been in legal limbo for decades, ever since fleeing to China at age 19 and adopting fake Chinese citizenship papers
that he said he used, along with bribes, to avoid being deported back to North Korea.
At school, children called Mr. Kim and his brother sons of a "betrayer." In 1981,
Mr. Kim’s mother moved her family to Hoeryong on the northern border with China.
Although he has lived in China for most of the last three decades
and married an ethnic Korean woman there, Mr. Kim says he never felt at home or safe there and has longed to defect to South Korea.
Mr. Kim hangs around on what is known as Multicultural Street in Ansan, an enclave
of ethnic Koreans from Yanbian who came to South Korea on work visas.
By 1997, however, Mr. Kim began hearing that North Koreans were fleeing hunger
and political persecution and that South Korea was accepting them as refugees.