Word: defector
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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After three years living alone in South Korea - paranoid and scared to talk to anyone - North Korean defector Kang Ok Sil decided she'd had enough. She wanted to make a real effort to settle in her newly adopted country. She decided to marry a South Korean...
...Before the North's famine in the 1990s, only a privileged few with money and connections to border guards could make the crossing. ("If you pay enough, you can get anyone out," says Kang.) After decades under the strictest and most repressive totalitarian state in the world, the first defectors that arrived in the South were "always suspicious," she says, and most had left relatives behind who could be sentenced to prison or even death for having a defector in the family. "They did not only complain of difficulties finding jobs, prejudice and adapting to life in the south," says...