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207 points jimhi | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.211s | source
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jimhi ◴[] No.29827641[source]
In 2018, I got connected to 5 refugees who escaped North Korea to the USA. What surprised me was all 5 were able to escape by different variations of saving up enough money to bribe people along the way.

The only way to save up money for their ages (16-23) was to become "entrepreneurial"

EDIT:

If you are interested in North Korea, check out the stories by some friends of mine:

Charles - North Korean refugee turned programmer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ziqq5gUXu8g

North Korean Spy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9rLqYXTaFI

Girl with parents who worked in the government whose whole family escaped https://www.youtube.com/c/Pyonghattan/videos

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FpUser ◴[] No.29828771[source]
Back in the 80s when I was a scientist in the old USSR's Academy of Science we've had few Koreans in our lab. I think they were studying in the Universities and later had somehow managed not to return to Korea.

They were all insanely nice.

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aspenmayer ◴[] No.29828857[source]
Did they prefer USSR to DPRK?
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tigerInATurvy ◴[] No.29830475[source]
I wouldn't be surprised if they did. The post-Stalin Soviet Union would be a much freer place than North Korea. Here's a couple of quotes from Andrei Lankov's* book "Essays on Daily Life in North Korea" on how Soviets viewed North Korea:

"When I arrived in North Korea for the first time on a sunny day in September 1984, I felt perplexed. I came to study at the Kim 11 Sung University, as a participant in an exchange program between the then-USSR and North Korea. It was the first overseas trip of my life, and I was thrilled, but I also had some preconceived ideas - and in the first hours and days it became clear that the situation did not feel like I thought it should.

At that time I was fully aware that I was in what in 1984 was arguably the world's most brutal dictatorship. The Soviet Union was not exactly a democracy itself, but even for us, the people from Moscow and Leningrad, North Korea stood for the embodiment of inefficiency, brutality and, above all, repressive dictatorship. Even the official Soviet media sometimes allowed some subtle hints at what was going on there."

--

"Quite often the inflated tributes to the Great Leader and to the Dear Leader, delivered in a badly edited foreign version, produce the opposite of the intended effect on the audience, making the North into a laughingstock. I still remember how in the 1970s, when I was a teenager in the then Soviet Union in my native Leningrad, many barbershops stocked copies of Korea magazine, a lavishly illustrated North Korean propaganda monthly. What was such a publication doing in the barbershops? The answer, I suspect, would be quite embarrassing for its editors: it was subscribed to in order to amuse the patrons who were waiting for a haircut. The North Korean propaganda appeared very weird to the Russians - not least because it looked like a grossly exaggerated version of their own official propaganda. The grotesquely bad Russian translation of the texts also provided unintended comical effects."

* - Andrei Lankov is a Russian born in the Soviet Union and now lives in Seoul. His books and articles on North Korea are very interesting and worthwhile.

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aspenmayer ◴[] No.29833051[source]
This was exactly the kind of context I was missing. Thanks for this.

I remember some high-profile expats immigrating to China in the 1950s and 60s, and writing about their experiences publicly to acclaim and disdain. Do you know if any of these are critically well-received?

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tigerInATurvy ◴[] No.29834532[source]
I'm not sure which high-profile expats you're referring to. That's not an area I'm familiar with. I do know about the fates of some westerners who went to North Korea. But don't know much about those who went to China.
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1. aspenmayer ◴[] No.29835608[source]
Under the heading Notable People[0], there are a fair number, American McGee and Sidney Rittenberg[1] especially jump out at me, the latter for being the first American citizen to join the CCP and for his work with Bill Gates to break into the Chinese market. Yes, that Bill Gates.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_in_China

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Rittenberg