For most people, an insanely dangerous journey across a 2.5 mile-wide border guarded by barbed-wire fences, land mines, tank traps and several thousand troops at either end would be quite enough. But on New Year’s Day, former gymnast Kim Woo Joo did it for a second time, returning to North Korea barely a year after he’d escaped the world’s most infamous hermit kingdom for a new life in the South.
Such ‘boomerang defections’ are very rare: of the 30,000 people who’ve escaped North Korea and settled in the South, only around 30 are known to have gone back. But what makes 29-year-old Kim’s boomerang even rarer is that he crossed both times via the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) which separates the two countries rather than take the more usual route via China.
A military security camera first picked him up at about 1pm on Saturday January 1 just south of the DMZ in Gangwon province. He was warned by loudspeaker to leave the area and appeared to do so: but six hours later, under cover of darkness, he was using his gymnastic skills to climb a 10-foot barbed wire fence on the DMZ’s southern perimeter. He was spotted on three more cameras, triggered a fence alarm and was later detected on thermal observation devices deep inside the zone, but nonetheless made it through unscathed back to the North – where, unsurprisingly, he has not been heard from since.
He has left behind few traces of his temporary life in the South. At his crossing point military investigators found footprints and feathers, presumably torn from his coat by the barbed wire. Reporters who went to the tiny £85 per month apartment in northern Seoul where he lived alone found it empty save for a blanket, neatly folded, left outside for collection. He worked mainly as a night cleaner in office buildings, made few friends and rarely spoke to his neighbours. He left bills for rent and medical insurance unpaid, and he used as little gas, water and electricity as possible. He stands less than five feet tall and weighs under eight stone. Were it not for the attention around his escape he would seem almost a ghost, one of the millions of subsistence-level Seoulites whose plight was part of the smash Netflix series Squid Game.
There are two main questions surrounding his escape: why go back at all, and why go back via such a dangerous route? The second is perhaps easier to answer: in one word, coronavirus. Controls on North Korea’s border with China, usually reasonably active with traders and workers crossing legally, have been hugely tightened in an effort to keep the virus out of the country, with guards reportedly ordered to shoot to kill. This has drastically reduced the scope for illegal escapes: in 2020, the year Kim defected, only 229 North Koreans came to the South, less than 10 per cent of the usual number.
As for the first question: some return to deliver money to family members, to help a relative in trouble, or even to try and bring others out. But many find that they simply can’t settle in the South, for their original escapes are time travel as much as simple journeys. North Korea is a country stuck several decades behind the modern world: there are few private cars, agricultural equipment is basic and manual, and only the most senior and trusted officials have access to the internet. South Korea, in contrast, is a hyperkinetic futurist maelstrom on the cutting edge of progress: Bloomberg’s 2021 Innovation Index ranks it as the second most technologically advanced country in the world after Germany. To go from one to the other, even via countries such as China and then Vietnam, Cambodia or Thailand, is to experience the most profound and disorientating culture shock imaginable.
