Escape From The Hermit Kingdom

Four women who risked everything to escape the brutality and secrecy of Kim Jong-Un’s North Korea speak exclusively with Paola Totaro in London.

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It is a bleak and blustery Sunday in New Malden, a quiet suburb in London’s south-west. On the high street, members of a local church choir are hunched against the cold, bravely belting out hymns as plastic bags wheel and whirl around them, buffeted by the chilly gusts. Despite being nestled in the heart of one of London’s most ancient boroughs, a stone’s throw from Henry VIII’s opulent Hampton Court Palace, New Malden is a sprawl of modest, 19th-century terraces.

Yet look closer at the flurry of illegible street signs, the “Little Seoul” supermarkets and bulgogi (Korean barbecue) restaurants. Pay attention to the choristers’ accents as they sing Hallelujah and it becomes apparent that New Malden is not just any suburb in London’s Home Counties, but the thriving epicentre of the biggest Korean expatriate community in Europe.

Today, more than 10,000 residents, nearly one-third of the suburb, are Korean, among them an estimated 700 North Korean defectors who live quietly under the radar after risking their lives to flee the brutal regimes of Kim Jong-Il and his son, Kim Jong-Un.

The first wave of South Koreans moved to London in the 1960s, but it was not until North Korea was ravaged by terrible famine in 1998 that New Malden began to see the first escapees from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), recognised still today as one of the most repressive and secretive nations in the world.

Jihyun Park, 51, risked life and limb – literally – to escape the horror of her homeland. It is difficult, she says, to make people in Australia or the UK understand day to day life in North Korea.