TALE OF TWO NATIONS: North-South Korean couples try to bridge 75-year division

She had fled North Korea a decade ago, something that sometimes made her feel ashamed in a country where North Korean defectors can face discrimination. Her companion, Lee Jeong-sup, jokingly asked if she was a spy but then told her there was nothing wrong with coming from North Korea.

Lee proposed in March and in June they got married at a Seoul hotel. Kim’s family, still in North Korea, obviously couldn’t attend. “In South Korea, my husband is my everything. I have no one else here. He told me that he would play the role of not only my husband but also my parents,” Kim, 33, said. “I feel much more stable now.” It’s an increasingly common scenario. More than 70% of the 33,000 North Koreans who have fled to South Korea are women, a reflection in part of North Korea’s tendency to more closely monitor men.

While there are no official numbers on how many North Korean defectors have married South Korean men, a 2019 government-funded survey of 3,000 North Koreans living in the South suggested that 43% of married women were living with South Korean husbands, up from 19% in 2011. Arriving from a nominally socialist, extremely repressive society, these women often struggle to adjust to fast-paced, capitalistic lives in South Korea. They also face widespread discrimination, bias and loneliness.

Some said they looked to marry South Korean men because they thought they would help them navigate their sometimes bewildering new lives. “I feel like my marriage is letting me acclimate to this society more deeply without too much hard work,” Hwang Yoo-jung, 37, said about her 2018 union with a South Korean man.

The number of matchmaking companies specializing in pairing North Korean women with South Korean men has seen an explosion, with 20 to 30 such agencies now operating, up from two in the mid-2000s. “I get a big sense of achievement from paring these couples because I also came here alone and know (the suffering) of other refugees,” said Kim Hae-rin, who runs a match-making agency in Seoul. “I also think I’m creating small inter-Korean unifications.” Many women who flee North Korea turn to matchmaking agencies, often run by fellow defectors, to find South Korean husbands. The companies typically charge South Korean men 3 million won ($2,520) for several blind dates in a year; most women aren’t charged. No such matchmaking services exclusively cater to male defectors, who often marry other North Koreans or live alone.

Kim Seo-yun runs another one of those companies, called Unikorea, though she met her husband, Lee, at a dinner arranged by a friend. “When I talked with her, I felt we could develop a special relationship,” said Lee, 32, who works for a food company. “Whether she came from North Korea doesn’t matter much. I told her I’d be fine as long as she didn’t have a previous marriage, a secret baby or a criminal record.” There are, however, rough patches for some of the couples, who share a language and ethnicity but can often seem like exotic foreigners to one another. They are, after all, attempting to bridge a 75-year-old division of the Korean Peninsula.

Lee said he tries to use less of the English loan words favoured in the South during conversations with his wife, who sometimes baffles him by using North Korean slang that he doesn’t totally understand. Hwang said that she feels “really, really happy” when her husband Seo Min-seok, 39, takes her to a gathering of his friends and their wives, where she faces many questions about North Korea.

Seo said he doesn’t usually ask Hwang about her past in North Korea.

Associated Press