THE KOREAS: Koreans Stand Face to Face to Address Cultural Gap

January 12, 2010

By CHOE SANG-HUN

SEOUL — When Ju Jin-ho arrived here from North Korea in 2006, it was as if he had come to an alien continent, not just the southern end of the peninsula.

Even though the 14-year-old defector was placed in a school with children a year or two younger than he, most of his classmates were a head taller. They teased him as a “red.” They were far ahead of him in subjects like mathematics. As desperate as he was to make friends, he had trouble communicating.

“During class breaks, they talked about nothing but computer games,” said Mr. Ju, now 17. “I started playing them so I could join their conversations. I became addicted. My eyesight deteriorated. My grades got worse.”

Since last summer, however, he’s been enrolled in a new program that seeks to overcome the yawning cultural gap that has developed during the six-decade divide between the Communist North and capitalist South, which have yet to sign a formal peace since the 1950-53 Korean War. It brings together teenage South Koreans and North Korean defectors in a rare experiment here in building affinity — and preparing for possible reunification.

Just how far the two sides have drifted apart, how radically different their frames of reference are, was evident when Park Sung-eun, a 16-year-old South Korean, met Mr. Ju last summer through the program in Seoul’s bustling Sinchon district.

“When I asked him, ‘How do you get here?’ I expected him to say by bus or subway,” Ms. Park said.

Instead, she recalled, “He gave me the whole story of his journey from North Korea through China and Myanmar,” when he fled with his family in 2005.

The “Weekend Program for South and North Korean Teenagers Together” was begun last August by the Rev. Benjamin H. Yoon, 80, head of the Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights.

“Although we share the same genes, South and North Koreans live like completely different peoples, with different accents, different ways of thinking and behaving,” said Mr. Yoon. “We forgot that before Korea was divided, we lived in the same country, marrying each other.”

Under the program, the Citizens’ Alliance, a civic group founded in 1996, has brought together students from Kyunggi Girls’ High School in Seoul with young North Korean defectors for extracurricular activities.

They have attended concerts together. They have cooked and compared North and South Korean dishes. The North Koreans, adept at farm work, have shown the South Koreans how to harvest yams and make scarecrows. The Southerners have given the Northerners tips on how to succeed socially as well as academically. They have made friends.

One October evening, when the students had gone camping and stayed up late, Moon Sung-il, a 14-year-old North Korean, brought tears to the South Koreans’ eyes when he recounted his two-and-a-half-year flight with other defectors that took him through China, Myanmar and a refugee camp in Bangkok. But he stunned them when he said that none of this was as daunting as a South Korean classroom.

“I could hardly understand anything the teacher said,” he said. “My classmates, who were all a year or two younger than I was, taunted me as a ‘poor soup-eater from the North.’ I fought them with my fists.”

More than 17,000 North Koreans, one-tenth of them teenagers, have fled to the South since famine hit their homeland in the mid-1990s. The average journey to the South takes 35 months, mostly through China and Southeast Asia. Not all who start make it; some have been caught and returned to the North, where they often end up in labor camps.

When they are placed in South Korean schools, these Northerners start nearly from scratch. In the North, they had spent as much time learning about the family of their leader, Kim Jong-il, as they did the rest of Korean history. Few learned English, a requirement in South Korean schools. Dropout rates among defectors are five times the South Korean average, according to the Education Ministry.

With the number of North Korean refugees rising about 10 percent annually, how to integrate them has become an early test for possible unification.

“Whenever something bad about North Korea came up during class, everyone turned to look at me,” said Mr. Ju, who now attends an alternative school for defectors after failing to advance to a regular high school. “When teachers and students spoke disparagingly about North Korea, I felt like they were insulting me.”

Ms. Park said she used to look down on North Koreans. “I associated them with something poor, dark and negative,” she said.

Although many successful South Koreans have their roots in the North — the country’s first president, Syngman Rhee; the founder of the Hyundai business empire; the family that built the South’s influential Chosun newspaper; founders of some of the biggest Christian churches — an image has developed of Northerners as second-class Koreans, needy and starving but surly and belligerent. They have taken food aid from the South but threatened it with war, run prison camps and built nuclear weapons. They are friendly toward China but have rejected talks with the South.

The mistrust is mutual. In the North, teachers tell children that South Korea is an American colony, a springboard for a future invasion, defectors say.

“Back in the North, we seldom heard teachers talk about unification. We seldom thought about it,” said Choi Hyok-chol, a 19-year-old defector. “I still don’t think it’s possible. The two economies are much too different.”

In a survey last June of 1,000 South Koreans aged 19 to 59 conducted by the Korea Peace Institute, a Christian research institute, half the respondents said unification was not necessary as long as the two sides lived in peace. In a survey in September of 1,000 people aged 19 to 39, the National Unification Advisory Council for the South Korean president found that 67 percent wanted any unification to be gradual to avoid political and economic chaos.

Although a spirit of unification persists in the South, many people balk at what is expected to be the prohibitive cost of integrating the economies. The North’s per capita income amounts to just 6 percent of the South’s, according to the Bank of Korea.

“I used to oppose unification because I thought we’d lose more than we’d gain,” said Hur Ji-young, a freshman at Kyunggi. Her friend Lim Hyo-jeong, however, said she supported it because she saw an economic advantage in a larger domestic market.

After mingling with the North Korean teenagers for a semester, hearing about their hardships and their concerns for relatives left behind, the South Koreans said they believed more strongly in unification, but now less for economic reasons than something closer to good will.

“Before I joined this program, I considered unification with a calculator, not with my heart for fellow Koreans in the North,” Ms. Hur said.

Copyright 2010