Saint-Just
24th April 2003, 20:54
Quote: from sc4r on 6:05 pm on April 24, 2003
q1. To what extent is their any democracy in the DPRK.
q2. What is the average income, what is the distribution curve of income discrepancies like and how does it compare to levels prior to the 'communist' regime.
q3. What free social services are provided to supplement disposable incomes.
q4. What is the truth about treatment of dissenters. What level of actual dissent has to be shown for a prison sentence to follow.
q5. Are the claimed 200,000 political prisoners actually 'political' prisoners or is this in fact the total prison population.
Sorry but I'm fairly new to the site and while I will certainly try to dig up anything you have previously said you'll appreciate that if its hidden inside other long rambling threads I wont be able (or inclined) to do it.
I'm writing up a piece intending that it stirs up a reaction by perhaps highlighting (if this is the case) that NK is being made the subject of the usual anti socialist hyperbole. To do this I need nore than just specific answers I need a feel for the subject, which is why I want links as well as straight answwers; but straight answers to any or all of the above will nevertheless help.
You are not talking to an ignorant U$ cappie here, you dont need to explain basic terms or justify socialism or explain that mucho propaganda is spouted, I know all that. I want to know how socialist NK really is and what form it takes in NK (if it does, the recieved wisdom obviously has it looking Fascist).
Best.
(Edited by sc4r at 6:11 pm on April 24, 2003)
1. I will answer your question of democracy as briefly as possible, but it is a question that requires an extremely lengthy answer to answer it properly. I will ignore local government as it is rather complicated to explain and perhaps irrelevant. The countries national assembly is now as the Supreme People's Assembly. It has between 600-700 delegates each representing and elected by 30,000 of the population. This assembly is the state legislature, like the house of representatives in U.S. and parliament in U.K. The Executive is called the central committee, this is elects a leader of the KWP (Korean Workers' Party), this leader, currently Kim Il Jong is like the president of U.S. or like Prime Minister of the U.K. The Party leader elects a politburo, this politburo is elected from members of the central committee, similarly to the way Tony Blair or George Bush choose ministers to be in his inner-circle.
The Supreme People's Assembly as in U.S. and U.K. system can remove members of the central committee and thus the KWP leadership. SPA elections occur every 4 years. Usually with many new members joining the SPA every election. The SPA is basically the most powerful body since it can depose the central committee. There is a beaurocratic arm of the state that is separated from the KWP, this works on the basis of local councils. In addition there are many other bodies, such as party secretariat that enacts politburo policies once they have passed through the legislature.
I am not going to explain it much more than that, I think that is sufficient, although I will if you request explain it further. As a conclusion the system is very similar to that of standard democracies apart from the fact that it is not a multi-party system. People elect party members to represent them in the national legislature, however they do not choose between parties.
2. Income is only used to buy certain luxuries. Everything else from food to housing is provided by the state. Due to the intensification of the army-first policy since the step up in imperialist manouvres and blocade since 1993 key institutions such as science and technology receive better funding that other sectors of the economy, therefore income is higher there. There are no exceptionally rich persons. There are a large number of poor, information differs massively as to how poor. Some suggest up to 8% of population suffering famine. Other suggest that the entire population has subsisted and only had problems in drought and flood areas. Income discrepancy has increased as the circumstances have become more intense and capital has fallen and the country tries to maintain its key functions. Generally the mass of population subsists on government provision. With those in key economic positions and in administrative positions receiving higher income.
3. Social services provided are everything that would possible be needed; transport, education, housing, food, clothing. In different areas the provision differs particularly due to the economic problems since 1993.
4. I do not know the truth of the treatment of dissenters, I can assume from the army-first policy that they are put to work for the economic good of the nation. Neither do I know what level of dissent has to be shown for a prison sentence to follow.
5. The 200,000 in labour camps is the total prison population, no other substantial prison facilities have been indentified in the DPRK. Generally though crimes such as theft are virtually non-existant. Therefore most crimes punished are economic and political. I would assume that not all 200,000 prisoners are political.
I cannot answer your questions sufficiently because few in the west actually have that knowledge of the DPRK. I have many links to DPRK sites, but mostly i'll just give you links to a few informative ones:
http://www.kdvr.de/english/famine.html
http://www.korea-dpr.com/library/libsung.htm
http://www.kdvr.de/english/dictator.html
http://www.korea-np.co.jp/pk/061st_issue/98091708.htm
www.kcna.co.jp
I can show you DPRK pictures if you like.
Mostly my comments on DPRK have been created from seemingly unrelated topics as someone unexpectedly slanders the DPRK. So I will give you this a small collection of information on the DPRK:
1. They do not violate the human rights of those not in Labour camps. I have no knowledge of the treatment of those in Labour camps. I would think they are made to work in Labour camps because that is the nature of WPK interests of Korea. I would hardly be surprised if camps did have instances of famine and disease since they struggle to feed those who are not imprisoned. I would not expect prisoners to have access to medical care and food when parts of the general population do not. This is a direct result of American policy towards the country as I will explain later.
The DPRK as I will not explain cannot create a socialist paradise in the present circumstances, far from it they struggle to maintain development and the very existence of the nation. All of their policies are orientated to maintain the socialist system of the country and protect the Korean people. If this was not the case the country would no longer be DPRK. Most western liberal democracies can enjoy the luxury of not being under this threat. The WPK tries to maintain a good standard of living for its people, and in many instances does. However it has to make sacrifices to uphold the socialist society so in the long-term they may be free of imperialist and capitalist interventions and develop socialism further.
To your image of the DPRK economic situation; the DPRK is under masses of pressure, economic and political, trying to force it to cave in, this has been the case for over 50 years. At times the pressure increases, as it did in the 60’s and now has again since 1993. Any capitalist country would have been obliterated under this pressure and collapsed irretrievably to imperialist poisoning. The DPRK has created a society that’s absolute focus is to maintain its independence and thus its socialist system. It has done this through creating an indomitable sense of single hearted unity between workers, leader and party. In addition its army-orientated society and army-centred politics have created a nation as powerful to hold off U.S. imperialists aggression.
TWEA (trade with enemies agreement). A program that hinders any country trading with the DPRK without special permission, and also stops any ships leaving with goods for export from the DPRK. In effect the DPRK cannot export anything, and so countries will supply them with any resources if there is nothing in return. In the last 10 years it has become far harder, since the U.S. stepped up blocades and the Koreans amongst the obvious problems with production could not gain the materials to construct dams and necessary countermeasures to the freak weather conditions that gripped the country since 1994 and still continue to. The DPRK's power output is at 10% of what it was in the 1970's due to sanctions (TWEA - Trade with Enemy Acts). The U.S. claims this is not due to the fact they they can't import any fossil fuels except as direct aid from the U.S., they claim that economic mismanagement is intrinsic in socialism – that’s erroneous ideological rhetoric of the Bush cohort.
You suggest that Kim Jong Il has taken the wrong policy for the Korean people. Economically I have explained his policy but also, recently his mastery of foreign policy has kept the U.S. at bay. In 1993 when the U.S. threatened to attack the DPRK he closed down nuclear plants as the U.S. demanded. He then agreed a deal in which the U.S. would provide light water reactors and oil as they were being built so the DPRK could produce energy after the U.S. forced the closure of its nuclear plants. Then after the DPRK-U.S. agreed framework which was signed 8 years ago broke down as the U.S. said that a DPRK diplomat had admitted to DPRK nuclear development. The U.S. had never kept to their side of the deal anyway:
“Often forgotten in accounts of North Korean duplicity is that the Americans have not kept most of these promises.” –Martin Woolacott The Guardian Newspaper.
The U.S. would no longer allow them to acquire oil or any other means of creating enery – this was in a hope to break the regime down economically. To counter this, since the DPRK was now out of the Agreed Framework due to the U.S. having pulled out, it withdrawed from the NPT, and legally restarted its reactors to once again create energy. Then the U.S. said it would have to take affirmative action unless the DPRK stop its nuclear programme that the U.S. could not even substantiate actually existed. The U.S. has torn up the agreements it has with the DPRK so that the DPRK could once again become self-sufficient in energy production, although it still struggles due to blocades. The DPRK, under the army-orientated policy of the 90's onwards had created a force strong enough to keep the U.S. warmongers at bay. Subsequently the U.S. hopes to weaken the DPRK economically so that it can then launch a military campaign to destroy socialism in Korea. As this happens the DPRK is remaining economically stable after years of decline due to blocade and retains an army strong enough to make the U.S. think twice. The DPRK however, really does need nuclear weapons when there are around 1,700 U.S. nuclear warheads in South Korea.
The DPRK has repeatedly offered to sign a no-strike agreement with the U.S. that would agree that neither side would strike first. However, the U.S. has rejected this saying that would be to reward the DPRK for its bad behaviour.
2. In no country does a leader not enjoy things such as cars and luxury housing and so forth. Why does this matter. What matters is the attitude of the leader towards the people and what policies are constructed and how they are carried out amongst the people. Kim Jong Il may live in a nice house with a nice car, however he still goes to visit many working facilities and inspects the very minutia of working life. His greatest interest is that of the entire nation and its people.
Furthermore, you seem to suppose that there is a ruling clique divorced from the masses, specifically that the leader of the revolutionary masses - Kim Jong Il - is divorced from the masses. The theory of the "Revolutionary Outlook on the Leader," says that though the masses are the masters of history and revolution, they must organise themselves in the most effective way to bring about the revolution and socialist construction, this is done by creating a party with a leader and necessary command structure to organise the movement . This is given substance by the theory of the "Immortal Socio-Political Body," which says that the Leader, the Party and the masses form one socio-political body which is immortal, and the center, or brain, of this immortal body is the Leader.
To elucidate:
'the party as a political leadership body is inconceivable; separated from the masses, the party cannot lead the revolution and construction to victory.'
'The Juche idea allows to create an indescribable unity between the people’s masses and the leader, so in this way an independent and sovereign state can be built and the people can use their talent and power for their economic benefit.'
Indeed, Juche was developed with the view that the revolution could not be completed if the leader was divorced from the masses:
'However, the communists and nationalists who were allegedly engaged in the national-liberation movement in our country in the 1920's gave no thought to the need to go among the masses to educate, organize, and arouse them into waging a revolutionary struggle. But divorced from the masses they were only engrossed in the scramble for hegemony and empty talks. They did not unite the masses but divided them by factional stride.
In the first years of his revolutionary struggle, the leader saw through their mistakes and took a road different from theirs, the genuinely revolutionary road which led him to be among the masses and to rely on them in the struggle. He elucidated the truth that the masters of the revolution, are the masses of the people and that when one goes among them to educate and mobilize them one will be able to register in the revolution.’
'Our party exists for the people and regards it as its duty to fight to meet the people's desire for independence and their interests. Taking loving care of the people, serving them and forming a harmonious whole with them -- these are the intrinsic nature and basic characteristics of the party of Comrade Kim Il Sung.'
There is a great respect and love for Kim Jong Il in Korea. This is because of the unity that is necessary in socialist society. Kim Jong Il loves the people as they love him. They have unity in the links between party, leader and people. This unity is an integral part of the socialist system and a homogenous society. The compromise of this unity is the compromising of socialism, revolution and the nation.
3. The reactivation of the nuclear program is reactivation of a program concerned with energy production and is a program the U.S. forced the country in 1994 to shut down. In the long-term energy production can rebuild the economy as to let all people enjoy good standards of living. Currently there is a lack of raw materials for energy production. Nuclear production is the only opportunity they currently have for energy production besides the many hydro-electric plants they have. Fossil fuel energy production is extremely difficult since there is lack of access to fossil fuels because of the U.S. restrictions and its attempts to destroy the economy in the DPRK.
The DPRK has resolutely and successfully defended socialism however at great cost. Yet as of the arduous march of the 90’s and the forced march which aimed to keep the economy alive by increasing production they have kept socialism alive.
Pros of DPRK:
- They have continually waged class struggle and the fight against revisionism for over 50 years.
-They have created a socialist system of society that is moving evermore towards socialism. Class struggle still exists and indeed is quite intense, particularly under imperialist influence. However society is moving towards becoming a homogenous mass of working people with a single ideology and interest and great sense of unity, independence and urge to release all their creative efforts to further build a powerful socialist nation.
-The DPRK people have thwarted imperialist manouvres constantly for over 50 years as they have tried to bring socialism to its knees.
-The DPRK lets its’ people enjoy and independent life enriched by material acquisition and productive labour and un-antagonistic social relations.
-The DPRK workers have constructed massively, building many great edifices of people and socialism around Korea giving its people many wonderful public buildings, housings and work places.
-The DPRK people have created the Korean People’s Army that makes reactionaries forces feel under threat from socialist force for ever its existence.
-The DPRK have created a country that has great pride in what it can do and respect for other nations and progressive people around the world to build socialism further across the globe.
Now I will explain some main concepts of Juche. The Juche philosophy elucidates that main is a highest product of the material world, the most complex organism. However, man is different and rises above every other organism because of three factors; Independence (Chajusong), creativity and consciousness. Independence because man in is the master of his world. Creativity because man he can transform the world. Consciousness is presupposed to create independence and creativity.
Man is different in that he is a social being who can form a social collective in which social relations will arise. He gains Chajusong, creativity and consciousness through living in a social collective, developing through social relations. The most important relation being that of class, and throughout history class struggle let the masses gain chajusong, creativity and consciousness. The masses can only achieve their full potential in this state by the annihilation of those who deny these 3 factors that make man progress; those who deny it are the exploitative ruling class.
At the beginning of time chajusong, creativity and consciousness were low, throughout history they developed correspondent to the development of society as they are the driving force behind progression. The realisation of chajusong, creativity and consciousness are the very essence of social progression.
There are a great many works on Juche, this is the basic philosophy. Juche is developed by examining the application of this theory from national construction to international relations.
Your source is reasonably reliable and likely not particularly bias, however the figures are most likely not correct as I will explain later, although they are a acceptable indication. I was referring to the living standards in urban Korea, as that is the only reasonable measure, since it has progressed in the nations history whilst countryside conditions fluctuate, specifically they have deteriorated in the last 10 years.
This is due to blocades and constant floods and drouts due to the bombing of Korea 50 yeas ago when masses of areas of forest were destroyed and the land became more susceptible to flooding. Due to the blocaded there is not enough energy to produce sufficient quantity of necessary goods, in addition it is becoming very hard to transport any goods that are produced to rural areas or to run factories in rural areas as energy production is not at 10% of what it was in the 70's.
I would suggest that these figures are extremely difficult to assertain, and if the source is the DPRK they may likely be manipulated to please the pestering foreigners as to the success of their food 'aid'. The reason I am cynical of the food aid is that it would not be necessary if the U.S. relaxed or removed its blocades since it stepped them up in 1993 with its TWEA (trade with enemies agreement). A program that hinders any country trading with the DPRK without special permission, and also stops any ships leaving with goods for export from the DPRK. In effect the DPRK cannot export anything, and so countries will supply them with any resources if there is nothing in return. When the DPRK can trade it is limited.
However, housing is of a reasonable standard in the countryside since great construction work has been undertaken in previous decades, however in the last 10 years it has become far harder, since the U.S. stepped up blocades and the Koreans amongst the obvious problems with production could not gain the materials to construct dams and necessary countermeasures to the freak weather conditions that gripped the country since 1994 and still continue to.
In the urban areas however food can be easily obtained and living standards are good. Although electricity generation is still a massive problem, they can no longer produce as much and rather try to sustain the basic infrastructure rather than focus on further economic construction, indeed the economy has shrunk massively in the last 10 years.
A comment from the independant media group Koreascope:
'As the working class is deemed the party of revolutionaries that constitutes the core of party cadres, North Korea has been increasing the portion of working-class officials in its power echelon, requiring them to lead the van of the entire working class to preserve the nature of the Workers¡¯ '
The WPK has 3 million members, 16% of the 22 milion population. The administration of the means of production is controlled exclusively by the workers, with the WPK as their body of governance through which they atriculate and then disseminate ideas. The country is not ruled by a 'elietist ruling clique' but rather by the workers as the 'owners of the revolution and construction'.
Juche is the desire for a homogenous society, with the single ideology of socialism. A society in which the single class can develop and shape society as they will. The society consists of a vanguard working class party, its leader and the masses. The Party and the leader serve their class to bring forth the policies of working class interest. The party seeks to politicise the entirety of society to create a productive and progressive society. The masses create society to serve their interests, socialism is the system that is in the interests of the masses. It creates a society where every man is equal, a nation amongst which every nation is equal.
Valkyrie
27th April 2003, 21:39
April 27, 2003
The Flight of the Fluttering Swallows
By MICHAEL PATERNITI
n September, a North Korean boy named Heo joined a group of seven other refugees in China -- most of whom had left their homeland by crossing the Tumen River -- and boarded a southbound train from Jilin Province to Beijing. The North Koreans carried no luggage. With each passing stop and hour, they remained in their seats, increasingly fidgety and nervous. Once at the station in Beijing, they summoned a taxi and piled in. What lay before them was either freedom or long prison terms, which, they knew, would most likely include torture and extreme privation.
The South Korean Consulate was well protected by Chinese military guards. There were two gates to pass through to reach the consulate's inner sanctum -- to reach South Korea itself -- and at each a number of armed soldiers were milling around. While a great deal was being left to fate with this plot, the consulate itself had been scouted by people working for a South Korean pastor in the business of trying to lead just such refugees out of the dungeon of their lives. The resulting surveillance had determined that the guards at the first gate were older and a bit lackadaisical, making them perhaps easier to dupe with fake ID papers, while the guards at the second gate were younger and more alert and would require a different strategy.
Heo has a brillo of black hair, a few unconvincing whiskers on his chin and a light spray of acne on his cheeks. He's a dreamy kid, an only child, who in 2000 escaped from North Korea along its heavily patrolled northern border, one hemmed by two rivers and impassable mountains. In places, soldiers stand sentinel every 50 yards, while the rivers can run cold and fast. For many refugees this is the most harrowing moment: some drown on the way. Once he crossed, Heo spent two years moving from place to place, trying to avoid the Chinese authorities and North Korean agents who stalk defectors. He also had to watch out for Chinese citizens, who are paid a reward for turning in North Korean refugees and fined for harboring them. Heo was caught once and returned to North Korea, where he spent four months in a labor camp, gathering wood in the forest, fed nothing but watery soup. When he escaped from North Korea again, he vowed he would never go back.
Since the North Korean government threatens anyone caught trying to flee multiple times with death, Heo, who was 17 the day he approached the consulate, clearly understood that he was risking his life. Such plots were regularly foiled. (Earlier this year, dozens of defectors were arrested during a boat-lift operation in China and haven't been heard from since.) But to Heo's mind it was worth it. Starting with the floods and famine in 1995, conditions in North Korea, and particularly in his hometown in the rural north, had deteriorated to the point of desperation. Some refugees reported witnessing executions of people accused of cannibalism. Whatever lay ahead now, could it be worse than starving or living as a parentless child in constant fear?
At the consulate's first gate, the refugees calmly presented fake citizenship papers, which were accepted by the more lackadaisical guards. But once they were through, without hesitation or thoughts of trying to dupe the younger guards, they began surging for the second gate, where three guards blocked their way. One hit a button that sounded a siren, but the eight refugees kept punching and flailing, pushing the guards backward. The standoff seemed to go on for an eternity, with the guards making a stand and punching back. And then the South Korean consul suddenly appeared like the deus ex machina in some Greek drama.
''He said, 'These people belong to South Korea now,''' Heo recalled when he told me his story. ''And the Chinese guards stepped back. I was overcome. I had to sit down because I had no strength left.'' After a month at the consulate -- Heo said that he later regretted having sworn at the guards, as he now had to pass them every day to use the bathroom -- the group was sent to the Philippines, where they were met by South Korean officials, who then escorted them to Seoul, to a democratic society in the proliferating throes of hypercapitalism, a place that couldn't be more different from their home.
But remembering it now, Heo returned to that moment when he collapsed inside the consulate, when he grew lightheaded and his feet gave beneath him knowing that he had made it. When asked what he felt, he beamed, swallowed and with his teenage voice cracking ever so slightly conflated the past with the present, as if at this moment he were again sitting on the ground inside the consulate walls, head in hands, in disbelief.
''Now I'm alive,'' he said.
When I met Heo, he was living in a house on a mountainside on the northeastern edge of Seoul with seven other young defectors. While it is estimated that unaccompanied child refugees from North Korea number nearly 10,000 in China -- broadly known as kotchebi, or ''fluttering swallows'' -- only about 100 of them have made it to the Promised Land, South Korea, in the last five years. Wanting to forget a hard chapter of their lives, they struggle with the kotchebi label, even as humanitarian aid workers use it to identify them.
As lucky as Heo and his housemates said they were to be here, they clearly hadn't yet escaped the specter of the recent past. Living life on the lam in China had been its own discombobulation. They had no schooling or structure to their lives, except maybe fear. They slept in caves, arcades and safe houses, drifting from meal to meal -- sometimes days apart -- hoping at all costs to avoid detection. For they knew how well their homeland doled out its punishment. There had been reports of refugees being returned to North Korea, all of them strung together with a wire through their noses.
Though each swallow eventually found someone -- a pastor, a relative or a sympathetic local -- who helped set him on the way to South Korea, passage often took thousands of terrifying miles, and a considerable psychic toll. For some it took five years. One boy at the house was caught 17 times and beaten, it seemed, to the point of mild brain damage.
Now these eight lived in a four-bedroom ranch-style home with all the modern conveniences in an upscale neighborhood among a maze of quiet streets. And yet they were still dealing with an almost Orwellian terror about being found out by the country they had left behind. They said they believed that agents might still be hunting them. And human rights groups say that the families of defectors are often severely punished. (This is why the refugees didn't want their full names or photographs published and why they wouldn't reveal certain details about their lives and journeys.)
This residence, then, had become their newest safe house. Known as the Evergreen School, it was set up by a South Korean aid group and served as a six-month bridge between the mandatory three-month orientation program that all North Korean refugees must go through and life after as newly minted South Korean citizens. To prepare for their new beginning, all refugees are given money by the South Korean government, starting with a monthly stipend of 500,000 won ($400) for two years. In addition, the state offers free, or highly subsidized, lifetime housing. In all, refugees may receive $25,000 to $30,000 in aid, this for former citizens of a country where the average annual income is perhaps $700.
At the house there were two ''teachers,'' who provided 24-hour coverage in the hope of reinforcing the routines of a normal life: shopping, cooking, sleeping regular hours. More often than not, however, they acted like housekeepers, den parents, confidants, baby sitters, referees and truant officers. For after experiencing so much violence, the swallows were now more prone to it.
One evening I arrived as a scheduled study period was ending. The kids all attended local schools, with South Korean students, then reconvened here in the afternoon. Now they were turning to their usual nightly activities. In a brightly lighted common room, a drying rack stood against a wall, strewn with jeans and socks. There was a naugahyde couch, a bookshelf packed with donated books and two televisions in the corner, one broken. Pinned to a bedroom door was an Eminem poster, though no one knew who he was. On two low tables sat four computers, with a boy in front of each, hands busily moving like spiders over the keys. On a board fixed to the wall were scrawled the words ''Unification of one country,'' the obsessive 50-year mantra of those in the South to re-establish one Korea.
Next to Heo was the Evergreen School's only girl, and its voluble alpha, Se-ok, a 19-year-old with pretty, almost fragile features and a gift for languages. There was also a boy named Yum, an erratic rebel with dyed orange hair who owned a motorcycle and came and went from the house much like a stray cat. Meanwhile, a boy named Han, who rarely talked and had a dark stoicism suggesting some hidden pain, sat quietly before another computer terminal, a flowering scar on his face. And then there were the others: Kum, in love with his trumpet; Kang, in love with his soccer ball; Yong, perhaps the most handsome and well dressed; and Seoung, who was always smiling at the constant banter among housemates.
Collectively they acted like seven brothers and a sister. They joked and wrestled, shared rooms and meals. They wore one another's clothes and slept leaning on one another's shoulders. They complained and screamed and, on occasion, exploded. (The police had been called by neighbors on two occasions -- brawls that started over trifling things like the television or computer and ended with knives being drawn.) In this new land, they lived as an island of sorts, and what friends they had outside the house tended to be those other young North Korean refugees who had preceded them at the Evergreen School or whom they had met during their orientation. At nights and on weekends, they sang in karaoke bars, went to movies, shopped and visited their friends' apartments for a glimpse of their futures. These other refugees were the only ones who could understand the digital speed at which their lives were changing -- and what it meant, too, to feel like aliens on a different planet.
With no real experience of spending freely or, little for that matter, of using money at all, the fluttering swallows tended to spend wildly. At the house, the first item that everyone bought -- the nearly fetishistic rite of passage -- was a cellphone, which cost as much as $700. Sometimes they ran their phone bills up to $300 a month, calling their small group of friends in Seoul or other North Korean refugees who had been relocated outside Seoul. Some called China, where they had family; some simply called from across the room. Some chose elaborate services that included video games and Internet access, and they often sat comparing phones as if they were diamonds.
Despite their new windfalls and training as South Koreans-to-be, they were clearly torn, still loyal, even unconsciously patriotic, to the country they had fled -- at the very least, forever shaped by it. This became apparent when I was first introduced to the group as an American, which inspired a rustle of intrigue and perhaps evoked a cast of unsavory characters from the North Korean propaganda films of their childhood. Kang asked aggressively, ''Do you really think the U.S. Army is better than the North Korean Army?'' Another asked, ''Where's your gun?'' And Yum, the orange-haired rebel, said, ''You don't really look American.''
When I asked what an American looked like, he said, ''I don't know -- more mean.''
The boys were obsessed with violence. They watched gangster movies from Hong Kong. They spent hours each evening playing a graphic computer game called Counter-Strike, in which the object was to hunt and terminate your opponent, leaving behind a satisfactory amount of blood and guts. They boasted that the North Koreans are superior fighters to the Americans, and then they fell into little skirmishes with one another, doing battle. ''North Koreans are really good killers,'' Yum said, smiling.
They talked about violence and the tools of violence the way Americans talk about sports teams -- with a touch of unknowing knowingness. When the subject turned to killing, I asked how many had seen an actual human being killed. More than half of them raised their hands, and those who didn't stared down at the floor. But it was Se-ok who, out of that uncomfortable silence, told the story of watching a public execution in her town when she was 11 -- what would have been 1994. The executions, she said, were regular events, and people came from neighboring villages to see them. In this case, out of jealousy over jewelry, a woman had poisoned her sister-in-law. A story was told to the crowd by the executioner to explain why they were gathered, the woman was bound to a post and a firing squad shot her dead.
''I was so scared at that moment, I could never go again,'' she said, while others nodded their agreement. This was the way I often found it with the fluttering swallows: one minute they would be joking, laughing, roughhousing, and the next they would reveal something startling about themselves -- they ate only roots for a year, they were badly beaten -- something they didn't regard as out of the ordinary but that resembled nothing in the lives of most South Koreans. And it was this divide -- this dislocation really -- that already defined and perhaps doomed them before they had taken their first real steps in South Korean society.
Sometimes it was hard to understand the fluttering swallows' conception of time, as it was hard for them to understand the South Korean fixation with schedules. There were days when they attended classes at their schools, and there were days when they just decided not to. A number had been out of school for so long that they were in classes with South Korean students five or six years younger. Because the North Korean dialect varies just enough from the South Korean -- and because most of the fluttering swallows speak a colorful patois of Chinese and North Korean with a few saucy words of English -- Se-ok often translated for the boys from Seoulite Korean to a version they understood. Without her, they occasionally seemed lost in conversation. And while they had South Korean acquaintances, none said they had any real South Korean friends.
At the house, Se-ok and Kum, the trumpet player, always floated in each other's general vicinity, sometimes sitting with legs entwined in a familiar -- and, they insisted, familial -- way. When I playfully asked them one day when they planned to marry, they immediately moved away from each other, and Se-ok, who was wearing a shirt with the English phrase ''Change From Usual'' on it, said that in North Korea men weren't permitted to date until they were 18, which was usually when they went into the military, often for 12 years. And then it was only when they got out that a matchmaker found them a wife, usually in her mid-20's.
Whatever patina of South Korean domesticity and normality presented itself here was, in some ways, a continuation of what they had learned during their three-month orientation. Upon first arriving in South Korea, North Korean refugees are taken to an intelligence facility for a month of ''interrogation,'' during which the government questions them, in part to determine if they're spies. Afterward, they're bused to a barbed-wire compound among cornfields an hour and a half southeast of downtown Seoul called the Hanawon facility, where all new refugees spend two months learning the concepts of a new society. There are lessons on food, culture and the Anglicized dialect of the South Korean language -- and then the magical things: computers, cellphones, newspapers, bank accounts, credit cards and insurance.
Even as the Hanawon facility is adding more dormitory space, South Korea doesn't quite yet know what to do with its increasing refugee population. In the decades since the Korean War, very few defectors have made it to South Korea -- less than 200 in all until the mid-90's. But then, with the death of Kim Il Sung and the floods and famine of 1995, more and more people have risked their lives to cross the Chinese-Korean border. Last year alone, with the increased activity of South Korean religious and evangelical groups working surreptitiously to establish an underground railroad in China, 1,200 North Koreans made it to South Korea, twice as many as the year before. And with an estimated 200,000 North Koreans living in China now, many of them hoping to immigrate to South Korea, the South Korean government may soon have a crisis on its hands.
In fact, a complaint among some South Koreans today is that their government already does more for the North Korean refugees than for many of its own citizens. As one high-ranking official in the Ministry of Unification told me, with typical South Korean optimism, ''These refugees serve as a litmus test for how the reunification of the two Koreas is going to work one day, so we view their situation not just as a humanitarian matter but as a Korean matter.''
Back in the common room, one boy popped a video into the VCR, and the others fell on the floor to watch. It turned out to be the house favorite, a juvenile South Korean comedy about unrequited love between a male student and a female teacher containing a lot of bathroom humor. The fluttering swallows all admitted that they were embarrassed to watch it -- but then couldn't stop watching, laughing nervously at all the bathroom parts.
I wondered if their embarrassment was complicated by a new fact of life: many of the fluttering swallows had been helped in their escape by evangelical groups -- many of which proselytized a conservative brand of spirituality. While organized religion was a crime in North Korea, a majority of the swallows, including Yum, the rebel, and Heo, the brillo-haired boy, now read the Bible or attended church, and in many cases these churches became the center of social life for refugees after they left the Hanawon facility.
In the kitchen, Kum was preparing to cook dinner. Though each member of the household was supposed to make a meal once a week, Kum had avoided this task for months. He checked the refrigerator, which contained only some ketchup and half a bottle of salad dressing. He washed some dishes and then went back to the refrigerator. A handsome 19-year-old with an easy smile, he shuffled around, rifling through the cupboards without a clear sense of purpose, wearing blue sweat pants and a pair of Se-ok's pink slippers. When he first arrived, the teachers told me, he was morose and wouldn't bow to them or talk to the others. But once they got him a trumpet, Kum earned the nickname Mr. Smiles and became a new person.
Kum's decision to try to make it to South Korea hadn't had quite as much to do with food as with freedom. He said that he and his three sisters had had rice and some vegetables to eat, so had fared better than most. (Se-ok, for instance, told of eating rice only on special holidays, like Kim Il Sung's birthday.) But it was a growing sense of suffocation in the North Korea of Kim Jong Il, where the state determined your career, your worth and even your wife, that inspired him to risk escape. He knew that he would forever be a poor man's son. Though Kum wouldn't say much about his family, human rights groups report that the North Korean government divides its citizens into three main categories -- ''Core,'' ''Wavering'' and ''Hostile.'' Roughly one-third of the population falls into each, and it is believed that food rations and freedoms are determined by loyalty to the party.
When Kum left in October 2001, he was 18 and about to be conscripted into the army, a million-strong force charged with maintaining the country's internal security. Perhaps the vision of 12 or more years in the military was enough for him to risk it all, to sneak onto a train north, randomly bribe a border guard and make the dangerous crossing to China.
Once there, he met a South Korean pastor and joined a group of refugees on an underground railroad, living the next month in a twilight state of paranoia at every new encounter. Making their way through a complicated system that included do-gooders and shady black-marketeers, they used a combination of paid escorts, pastors and safe houses. They rode trains south through China and passed illegally into two Southeast Asian countries, which humanitarian aid groups asked not to be identified. On the second crossing, Kum remembers that they started at 9 one night (as one paid escort said goodbye, he gave Kum a knife for protection), and then at 5 the next morning found themselves on a huge plain at sunrise. Despite intense pressure and protestation from North Korea, several Asian countries, including Thailand, Myanmar and Mongolia, have offered North Korean refugees some haven. Refugees and church groups say they believe that North Korean agents work in all of these countries, looking for and, if given the chance, trying to murder defectors.
The group spent two and a half months in a safe house until they were flown to yet another country and then to South Korea, where they were met by men in dark suits. ''That was the first time I felt afraid, when I saw those men,'' Kum said. ''I thought they were going to send us back.'' He soon found out that they were South Korean intelligence officers. ''Now, I feel like I was scared the whole trip, but at the time I didn't know.''
Back in the common room, I watched the boys play Counter-Strike for a while. They were indeed adept killers, but could have been any South Korean teenagers sitting doing the same thing. The question, of course, was whether they would ever have the same opportunities. Or if their expectations could ever be met. I knew that Kum wanted to play his trumpet professionally and that, once she perfected her Chinese and English, Se-ok had dreams of working as a translator, but that left six others. When I asked what they wanted to do with their lives, most of them shrugged, seemingly unable to conjure a future for themselves. But then Heo spoke up.
''I'm going to be a chicken connoisseur,'' he said proudly. He seemed to be the only one certain about what that meant. ''To be a chicken connoisseur, you have to be able to tell the difference between birds, their sex, when they're chicks. To do this, you need to have a black eye, not a green one, not a blue one. A black one.''
There was a fairy-tale quality to what he said, and at times, the fluttering swallows had a way of talking about things that seemed invented -- or filtered through some strange lens -- but were uttered with such conviction that no one challenged their veracity.
I turned to the others, but only Han, the stoic boy with the flowering scar, made eye contact. He crossed from North Korea into China in 1998, at the age of 15, but on four occasions was arrested by the Chinese police and sent back to North Korea, where he was severely beaten. Eventually he joined a loosely stitched group of 13 other refugees, and with the help of a religious group was able to find his way to another safe house, where he lived with 90 other people for five months. Finally he was given a fake passport, and he flew to Thailand and then to Seoul. In his case, the entire journey -- 5,000 miles, with four illegal border crossings -- took 19 months.
When I delicately inquired about his scar, he said, unconvincingly, that it was a result of ''food poisoning.'' Now I asked again what dreams he had for himself. He considered for a moment, looking more wary than excited by what tomorrow might bring.
''Dreams,'' he said. ''I don't understand that word anymore. I'm just trying to survive.''
One Sunday, a group of us -- including Kum, Se-ok and Heo -- went to an indoor amusement park known as Lotte World, a Disneyesque fantasia of spectacular rides, lights and pageantry. Because it was Lunar New Year, the place was thronged with South Korean families, their children wearing hanboks, a traditional outfit -- and packs of South Korean teenagers. With entry tickets costing $20, and more money spent inside, the clientele was mostly upscale.
As overwhelmed as a Westerner might have been walking into this pleasure dome, it was hard to imagine what the fluttering swallows were experiencing, though several said they had once attended a circus in North Korea. From a balcony, they sized up the scene in about five seconds and decided that they needed to get to the ice rink several floors below and took off in twos and threes without looking back.
When one boy got lost, and some in the group became worried, another boy said, ''Look, he made it here from North Korea -- he'll be fine.'' And sure enough, as the rest laced their skates, he appeared from the masses.
Only one or two of them had skated before, and the rest clung tightly to the boards. From rinkside, I watched wave after wave of South Korean youth dressed with casual hipness and felt a little pang for the fluttering swallows. It wasn't that the North Koreans weren't well dressed, for trying to pass as South Korean teenagers, they had made a study of everything having to do with South Korean teenagers and with their government allowances furnished themselves with leather jackets and turtleneck sweaters, black suits and Fubu jackets. And it wasn't that they came off as insecure or any less fun-loving, because, even if disoriented, they had a certain inbred pride and joy, perhaps another echo from the edict of their homeland. Signs that grace every entrance to kindergartens and child-care centers across North Korea today insist ''We Are Happy.''
I had been told by two founders of the Evergreen School, anthropologists who happened to be brothers-in-law, Byung-ho Chung and Gene-woong Chung, that the biggest hurdle for many young North Korean refugees trying to assimilate was not just that they faced a language barrier but that, quite simply, they also looked different. First, they were shorter. According to Unicef, because of malnutrition, by the age of 7 there's already a 4.7-inch gap in height between North Korean and South Korean children -- and that difference may reach 7.8 inches. Watching the fluttering swallows skate among the others, you could see the difference. Though they were all older, each seemed to stand at about the same height as a 14-year-old South Korean.
And then another sign of malnutrition was evident in almost all of the boys at Evergreen. Most of the young refugees had heads that appeared to be slightly oversize on their frames. It was hard to notice, until they were standing next to a South Korean their age -- or unless you were South Korean.
''We live under the myth of homogeneity, of oneness here in Korea,'' Byung-ho Chung told me, ''but these kinds of distinctive physical markings are a scar. The fear is that the scar will become a social stigma affecting many generations to come, then may take many more to overcome.''
His brother-in-law Gene-woong was more blunt. ''To me, it's like this,'' he said. ''Korea has been a discriminatory culture dating back hundreds of years to the late Lee Dynasty. Your place in this society is determined by money, status and appearance. By comparison, these kids have nothing.''
As complicated as the relationship is between South Koreans and North Korean defectors -- in the early years, the defectors were celebrated as heroes; now they're sometimes looked down upon as well-subsidized freeloaders -- there remain very few points of contact between the two populations besides the low end of the job market. Despite all the talk of brotherhood and eventual reunification, the North Korean refugees often feel isolated, even years after living here. Humanitarian and church organizations maintain that depression, alcoholism, unemployment and suicide run higher among these refugees and that this hopelessness is passed to the children as well. Some defectors say that they struggle against a certain South Korean animosity and snobbishness, which, interpreted correctly or not, can be summed up as follows: kiss my ring; now collect my garbage.
It's part of the defector syndrome that many hold jobs for only a few months, then move on. Arriving with high hopes for self-betterment, they find a harsh reality in which the jobs open to them -- and the jobs for which they suddenly qualify -- belong to the menial world of gas stations or fast food. Their disillusion can overwhelm them. Many spend money extravagantly, or in the case of the swallows, simply misplace it. (In one instance, a boy at the house lost $2,000 in cash.) Coming from a Communist state where individual ambition wasn't rewarded but punished, where extra work resulted in no particular material gain, the refugees have been conditioned to do the bare minimum -- or nothing at all.
''To ask for a job is a shock,'' Se-ok told me. ''And then when you're employed, there are little things that are taken for granted that North Koreans don't know. There are so many moments of intense humiliation.'' And because of it, many of the refugees wanted nothing to do with South Koreans, viewing them with an admixture of fearfulness, inadequacy and wistfulness. ''I'm afraid to meet South Koreans because of the way I speak,'' Han confided.
After skating, the group wanted to go to a shooting gallery -- not a carnival gallery but a real shooting range. Consulting a menu of firearms, they carefully chose their weapons, picking ones they had fired as part of their schooling. Using a 9-millimeter CZ75B, Mr. Smiles, who had avoided military service back in North Korea, landed 10 bullets in the black of his paper bull's-eye, outscoring the others. In almost every photograph taken the rest of that afternoon, he appeared holding his bull's-eye proudly over his head.
At Lotte World, you could witness not just the economic miracle of South Korea but also a culture in rampant transition. Where the youth of South Korea once dressed alike and dutifully studied and obeyed, the recent years have brought both a sartorial and a sexual revolution. Here couples held hands and kissed in public. And it was these public displays of affection, Se-ok said, that shocked her most about South Korea. ''Everything is very rigid in North Korea,'' she said, claiming that it was a taboo for women to smoke or wear their hair longer than shoulder-length, let alone consort with men in public or henna their hair, as she does. ''If my friends in North Korea saw me now, they'd say, 'She's lost her mind,''' she said proudly. ''I would be a bad, bad girl.'' She said that her two best girlfriends were in the military and that she thought it would be impossible for them to understand life here, though, at moments it seemed just as impossible for those who were here to understand. Every once in a while, I'd catch a fluttering swallow standing a little dumbfounded, trying to absorb someone's platform sneakers or newfangled camera, recording each new detail of South Korean manners and materialism.
It was easy to forget that they had been born into one social experiment and were now suddenly part of another. In North Korea, they had been required to take daily ideology classes in which they were versed in the illustrious past of their leaders. Given the mythopoetics of the North Korean government and the propaganda -- Kim Il Sung singlehandedly beat back the Japanese, then the Americans; Kim Jong Il showed such scholarly aptitude that his teachers came to him for lessons -- they were instructed that their lives should be molded in the image of these gods and that strict discipline, order and sacrifice were necessary to achieve a state of juche, or self-reliance based on what was best for the collective.
In cloistered North Korea, little of the outside world penetrates or, if so, often comes as a distortion. Se-ok, the most world-savvy of the group, once asked, ''Is it true that every home in America has a robot?'' One boy said he had heard that there were extremely wealthy Americans who made $35,000 a year, every year. And if the fluttering swallows had heard rumors of places beyond their country where life was better -- China, Japan, America, South Korea -- there was no hard evidence to support the claim.
Money was the great instigator at Lotte World and, in the case of the North Koreans, a great equalizer too. You could skate, shoot and play with South Koreans if you could pay. And if Lotte World was a microcosm of South Korean society in general, a place of infinite choices, each as savory as the next, and if the fluttering swallows stood apart in this landscape, perhaps it was because they were perfect products of the system they had fled. They gave a sense of wanting freedom but not knowing quite how to grasp it. It was ineffable, really, a feeling that they were missing out on something.
Sizing up the swallows, it was hard to tell who stood the best chances of assimilating. They all seemed equally vulnerable -- all except Se-ok. She had grown up in a privileged family, only to have those privileges stripped after the death of her father, which she refused to discuss. She bore no physical sign of malnutrition and could speak Korean with a Seoul inflection. And her actual passage to South Korea, though full of risk, had left her somehow less scarred.
Like the others, Se-ok crossed the river into China, but in her case, she had a contact there who was a kind of guardian angel. After being arrested once, she was released without harm. Through her contacts, she was then able to procure a Chinese tourist visa to go by boat from Dalian, China, to the South Korean port of Inchon last year at the end of May. Once there, she told officials that she was a North Korean refugee. She admitted that with bribes and fees to various agents and black-marketeers she had racked up debts of 14 million won ($11,500), some of which she had been able to pay back with her government stipend.
Se-ok wanted to pay off the balance as quickly as possible, and then, she said, she wanted to help her family. Her mother, who had also escaped to China, had been captured there and then sent back to North Korea, where she spent four months in a labor camp. Se-ok's brother, meanwhile, was interrogated for 15 days when it was determined that his sister and mother had fled North Korea, and then everything, including the family's house, was confiscated. Her hope was to buy their way to South Korea one day.
Among the fantasia of Lotte World, with laser beams firing colored lights at mirrored balls, she told me that when she and her mother were in China, her mother insisted that with what money they had Se-ok should go first to South Korea. When I asked if her mother expressed concerns about sending her only daughter off into an unknown world of strangers, Se-ok recalled her words, ones that she seemed to hold in her mind like a talisman.
''I'll never worry about you,'' her mother told her. ''If everything falls apart, you'll be the one to survive.''
Yum, the rebel, was acting up. He said he was desperate to get out of the house because he wanted ''to sleep under bridges again,'' as he put it. He had lived in China but avoided talking about his past. I knew that he had a sister and that he and Kang, the soccer player, were part of a group of refugees who had stormed a German international school in Beijing, successfully seeking asylum by climbing the wall there. Yum said that in the year before he tried twice and was once chased so closely by Chinese soldiers that he ran into oncoming traffic -- ''I thought I was dead,'' he said -- before miraculously emerging unscathed.
One of Yum's first purchases in South Korea was a used $500 motorcycle on which he raced through Seoul wearing wraparound rainbow sunglasses. He had a new plan for each new day of the week: he was going to get his driver's license; he was going to write poems and act, both of which he did quite well; he was going to become an engineer; he was going to spend his life riding his motorcycle. And the next day he would be on to the next plan. He was the only one who would confirm that he had a girlfriend. His nickname was Psycho, because of his manic, theatrical energy.
At the house one day, I met a pretty, slightly older South Korean woman, Eun Joo Jang, whom Yum addressed as ''elder sister.'' In fact, she was the detective who had been assigned to him since his arrival. It was not unusual for the fluttering swallows to have a caseworker like this; what was unusual, however, was just how genuinely close the two were, more like mother and son. In private, the detective said that of her 11 clients, he was the one about whom she worried most. ''He spends too much money and lives like a nomad,'' she said. ''And when he wants something, he thinks nothing of calling at 3 a.m. to ask for money or a job.''
I didn't want to tell her, but she did indeed sound like a mother, and he very much like a child. Yet Yum was clearly a problem case, increasingly seduced, it seemed, by street life and motorcycles. And recently, there had been a rise in North Korean motorcycle gangs.
Byung-ho Chung told the story of one of his former students, a 19-year-old boy who arrived in Seoul as a refugee last year, passed through the Hanawon facility and bought himself a motorcycle. He was struggling to keep jobs as a delivery boy and gas-station attendant, and one night, after drinking too much -- while South Koreans might drink shots of soju, the fluttering swallows were known to drink it from large glasses and become violent -- he plowed his motorcycle into a telephone pole. ''I just came back from his funeral, and his death is very symbolic,'' Chung told me. ''We gave him everything as a capitalist society, and we made him crazy. He was talented and clever. He survived the harshest conditions -- was nearly beaten to death in North Korea -- but then died here, isolated and lonely. At the funeral, his friends were wailing at his casket: 'Why did you die here? Why didn't you die when they nearly beat you to death?'''
One day, I made plans to tour the DMZ, which separates the North and South and is only 25 miles north of Seoul. When I mentioned that I was going, the group at the Evergreen School broke into spontaneous cheers. They all wanted to go, too, in the hope of looking across the 38th Parallel to see their home again.
The road there was desolate, and even more so because it was winter, with a stiff wind blowing. The highway was edged with razor wire, and looking out the window of our bus, Kang pointed to the barbed wire and said, ''Been there, done that.'' When I asked what he meant, he said that he had spent a lot of time climbing over barbed-wire fences on his journey from North Korea and said no more.
Dotted by military installations, and South Korean billboards flashing news to the North, this wasteland underscored the stark reality of two countries still technically at war. One United States military estimate is that in a new Korean war one million people could die, a fact to which many South Koreans, living their capitalist dream, seem completely oblivious. And as delicate as the geopolitical chess game on the Korean peninsula is on any given day, it was recently further complicated by the reactivation of North Korea's nuclear reactor complex, which is capable of making weapons-grade plutonium.
In response, the United States sent Stealth bombers and fighter jets to bolster the nearly 37,000 American troops stationed in the South. But the most immediate problems for the United States seemed to have less to do with the North Koreans than with the public perception of the United States military among South Koreans. Recently, huge anti-American rallies were held in Seoul to protest the acquittal of two American soldiers charged in the death of two South Korean girls who had been run over and killed by an armored vehicle. Se-ok said that she had attended one rally, chanting ''Yankee, go home!'' with thousands of others. I asked if she had attended as a North Korean or a South Korean, and she said, ''Both.''
As part of our DMZ tour, we visited the Freedom Bridge and then a viewing deck from which we could see North Korea. Despite the sun, it was cold there with the wind howling, but the group stood for as long as they could on the deck, popping coins into viewing glasses through which you could see a North Korean village, people riding their bikes, a man carrying sticks on his back. You could also see American and South Korean troops moving in convoys, or sitting still behind embankments, eyeing North Korean soldiers who sat a mile away, doing the same. Across the way, a huge North Korean flag snapped in the wind -- and all of it, the sights and sounds of their home across this seemingly unbridgeable lacuna, left the fluttering swallows alone with their thoughts, with pangs of what they later told me were deep sadness and homesickness.
During our tour, we also visited one of four known ''infiltration tunnels,'' designed to enable North Korean troops to stream into the South. As part of our excursion, we took a trolley underground to visit this one. As claustrophobic as it suddenly became down there, some of those in the group said it didn't bother them in the least because they had had ''tunnel training'' in North Korea, exercises in order to become familiar with living underground, as part of their school curriculum.
Wearing yellow hard hats, we ducked through a long, chiseled cave until we came to a metal door that was closed. Ostensibly, North Korea was somewhere on the other side, and a few fluttering swallows started shouting epithets, in a funny way, that suddenly grew louder and more serious. Among them, the loudest and most serious was Yum. The louder he became, the more he seemed to be exorcising his own demons. Even as the group turned back down the tunnel to return to the trolley, even as someone grabbed his arm to pull him away, Yum stood near the metal door.
''Hey, man, we're over here now!'' he yelled. ''You want us, you sons of *****es, then come and get us!''
Before leaving South Korea, I went to the Evergreen School one last afternoon, to find the fluttering swallows in the midst of an impressive cleaning hour. They had emptied the garbage and mopped the floors, cleaned the bathroom and scrubbed the counters. Everyone seemed in high spirits.
On the marker board, Yum crossed out the words ''Unification of one country'' and jokingly wrote: ''Loyalty to the party. Erase the American imperialists.'' Then he came over and gave me a hug and said, ''I envy your nose.'' Later he examined my arm closely and said, ''From the neck down, we're the same person.''
Se-ok took me aside and told me that she had found a secret way to reach her mother in North Korea by phone -- an unheard-of feat -- and that her mother had told her that there was a little more food now in her hometown but that the economy was at a complete standstill.
Meanwhile, Kang, the soccer player, and Heo, the chicken connoisseur, were discussing Santa Claus, someone the kids had only just learned about this past Christmas. ''He can't exist,'' Heo said, ''because he needs snow to land, and there are many places in the world without snow.'' When Kang's phone rang, he sat before a computer, calling up a video game. Into the receiver, he said, as if badgered, ''Yeah, yeah, yeah.'' It was his mother, from somewhere in China.
Kum, aka Mr. Smiles, emerged from the bedroom for a goodbye performance, playing a couple of North Korean classics, ''Looking at You'' and then ''Forever My Friend,'' on his trumpet.
It was a tableau worth freezing. Soon, Se-ok would move out and go to university to study Chinese, a great victory. Three of the boys, including Yum, the rebel, would be sent to an alternative boarding school for dropouts in a small town in the South. Han, the quiet boy with the scar, would soon have his own apartment, though no job or plans. And, of course, the others would be next, as soon as their time expired here and the government found them available housing. Still, they had no idea where and when they were going.
One at a time, the fluttering swallows had told me that the best thing about their newfound freedom in South Korea was that they weren't always looking over their shoulders, that their paranoia had transmogrified into a state of cautious well-being. But then everything was provisional in the life of a swallow. Soon news of the murders of three North Korean defectors would send a shock of fear through the young refugee community, the deaths assumed at first to have been wrought by the long arm of Kim Jong Il reaching from the other side. (Later, when more facts were available, the crime became another reminder of troubles in the refugee community. It had been committed by a North Korean refugee in a love triangle who had since fled to Thailand.)
But for this moment, Kum played his trumpet, sounding the plaintive notes of their homeland. It was a Wednesday afternoon in Seoul, South Korea. Outside, the city moved at Mach speed, while in this seemingly timeless bubble the fluttering swallows sat, unmoving, mesmerized, remembering. They would have sat all day, I believe, but cellphones rang and computers beckoned, the future bursting through in electrical pulses. Whether it was moving toward them or away from them, no one knew.
Michael Paterniti is the author of ''Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America With Einstein's Brain'' and a writer at large for GQ magazine.
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