International students grapple with shifting views on North Korea

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International students grapple with shifting views on North Korea

Published: 07 Mar. 2023, 18:19

Children play football in North Korea in an image from Lindsey Miller's book "North Korea: Like Nowhere Else." [LINDSEY MILLER]

“At first, I was only reading books written by defectors and the media outlets in Romania only portrays North Korea in a negative way, so when there was a huge debate about whether North Korea would fire or not in 2017, I was worried,” said Ana Ungureanu, a 25-year-old Romanian student at the Academy of Korean Studies.

At the time, Ungureanu was in Romania and was scared as North Korea conducted a series of missile and nuclear tests that demonstrated its capability to launch ballistic missiles beyond its borders.

The drill proved that the country’s nuclear weapons were developing at a much more advanced rate than the U.S. intelligence community had predicted, triggering concern within the international community and heightening tensions between North Korea and the United States.

“I carefully kept up to date with the news,” Ungureanu said.

North Korea has not slowed down its missile threats, but Ungureanu’s view has changed. After spending two years in South Korea, she soon realized that people here did not seem to share her fear of North Korea.

“Now, I am closer than ever to North Korea, but whenever it plays around with missiles, I have a cup of coffee or read a good book,” she said. “After coming to South Korea and seeing the citizens just go about their lives, my worries went away.”

Sabrine Donohoe, a 26-year-old Irish student at Yonsei University Graduate School of International Studies, shared Ungureanu’s concerns.

“The media in Ireland do not focus on North Korea, but when reports do come out, they tend to focus on breaking news of missile launches or provocative statements by Kim Jong-un,” said Donohoe.

“In general, many media outlets portray North Korea as a powerful country and a force to be reckoned with,” Donohoe added. “On many occasions, reports seem to oscillate between undertones of fear and ridicule.”

The news on a TV at Seoul Station on shows an ICBM missile test by North Korea. [YONHAP]

Donohoe feels that the news coverage she was exposed to incorrectly shaped her view of North Korea.

“I think that the biggest misconception that I had was thinking of North Korea as an irrational actor,” said Donohoe.

Some commentators believe that opinions of North Korea in general and its people have been unfairly shaped by fear of the Kim regime and its missile programs.

Lindsey Miller, a 34-year-old British musician and writer, said that her opinion of North Korea changed after she moved to the country to accompany her husband on a diplomatic posting to the British embassy in Pyongyang.

“My misconceptions were a lot more strongly embedded than I expected them to be and it was only when they were challenged did I realize how strong they were,” said Miller.

“I remember being at the Beijing airport and sitting next to North Korean people, and I knew that they were North Koreans because they had pins of their leaders on their jackets. I couldn’t believe the fact that there were North Koreans on their mobile phones, breathing, with their hearts beating, sitting next to me.

“And you go, ‘Oh my goodness, this is real.’ I remember dropping a receipt on the floor and the man sitting next to me picked it up and gave it to me. He gave me a cheeky wink and a nod of the head and he was so friendly but I couldn’t merge the two images of this friendly man and the idea of who I thought were North Koreans.”

During her two-year stay in Pyongyang, she explored the country and met the people.

She captured a lot of North Korea’s day to day lives through photos and this led her to publish a book entitled “North Korea: Like Nowhere Else” in order to properly portray the realities of the country. More than anything else, Miller wanted to show that North Koreans live normal lives.

“I captured kids playing football on the beach and some people’s automatic reactions would be, that can’t be real or that’s all set up, but I can completely assure you that two hundred people did not get brought in just because I held my camera up,” Miller said.

Zoe Stephens, a tour guide at Koryo Tours and a PhD student at the National Cheun Kung University in Taiwan, has visited North Korea 26 times.

Zoe Stephens has visited North Korea 26 times. [ZOE STEPHENS]

Before she went, her mother was concerned about her safety and urged her not to go.

“When I first decided to go, my dad thought that it was awesome but my mom on the other hand was crying on the phone and was saying, ‘You’ll break my heart if you go,’” she said.

Stephens understood where her mother’s idea of North Korea being a dangerous place to travel was coming from because she felt the same way before stepping foot in the country.

“You go and you’re like, ‘where are all the missiles?’, ‘where are all the politics?’, ‘where are all the crazy people walking around brainwashed?’, and you soon realize that everything is very normal and it’s very strange because you don’t expect it to be that normal,” she said.

Using her experiences from traveling to North Korea, Stephens tried to change the narrative that it is an unsafe place but she states that this isn’t the kind of information people want to take in.

“People don’t want to hear about the normal stuff in North Korea,” she said. “When I title my YouTube videos ‘Crazy thing that happened in North Korea,’ I instantly get tons of views, but with other videos that I try not to make click-baity and show the other side, that’s not what people want to see too much and people like to think of North Korea as this crazy country.”

Park Sokeel, South Korea’s Country Director of Liberty in North Korea, notes that while the portrayal of North Korea changes repeatedly with the political atmosphere, the social perception regarding North Korea has gotten better.

“The portrayal of North Korea was much more simple and narrow before, as North Korea was pretty much just approached as a political and security issue, and people only really cared if there was a chance of conflict or something big happening between the North and South Korean government,” Park notes.

However, Park stated that this outlook has changed because North Korea isn’t only talked about by political scientists and missile experts, but by the North Korean people, who Park deems to be the most important way of consuming information about a certain country.

“Over the last ten years or so, perception has changed a lot because of the input of North Korean defectors and them diversifying and increasing the number of stories, voices, and perspectives that we get to learn from,” he said.

Despite the version of North Korea portrayed by Miller and Stephens, North Korea remains under UN sanctions and is considered one of the most repressive regimes in the world by the Human Rights Watch.

The Kim regime “sharply curtails all basic liberties, including freedom of expression, religion and conscience, assembly, and association, and ban political opposition, independent media, civil society, and trade unions,” according to the Human Rights Watch report on North Korea.

The accuracy of reports on life in North Korea from foreign visitors have also been called into question as all movements of foreign nationals in North Korea are tightly controlled and monitored by the state, suggesting that tourists are shown a sanitized version of the country.

The United States, along with many other countries, advises against all travel to North Korea.

BY STUDENT REPORTER CHOI DO-HWI [kjd.kcampus@joongang.co.kr]