The North Korean defectors who became YouTube stars

Some channels supply extra political content material, exploring North Korea’s relationships with different international locations; others dive into the wealthy and — for these newly defected, fully novel — worlds of popular culture and leisure.

However for a lot of of those influencers, who’ve fled one of many world’s most remoted and impoverished nations for one among its most technologically superior and digitally related, this profession path is not as unusual as it could appear.

Defectors and consultants say these on-line platforms supply not solely a path to monetary independence — however a way of company and self-representation as they assimilate to a frightening new world.

Path to freedom

Defectors are a comparatively latest phenomena; they started getting into South Korea “in important numbers” previously 20 years, most fleeing over North Korea’s prolonged border with China, stated Sokeel Park, the South Korea nation director for worldwide nonprofit Liberty in North Korea.

Since 1998, greater than 33,000 folks have defected from North to South Korea, in keeping with Seoul’s Unification Ministry, with the numbers peaking at 2,914 in 2009.

Kang fled to the South in 2014 as an adolescent, becoming a member of her mom who had already defected.

As of 2020, 9.4% of defectors have been unemployed — in comparison with 4% of the overall inhabitants, in keeping with the Unification Ministry.

For Kang, a turning level got here when she began receiving counseling and joined a college with different defectors. However it wasn’t till she appeared in a South Korean TV present that life actually “grew to become fascinating,” she stated.

‘Defector TV’

Within the 2010s, rising public fascination with North Koreans gave rise to a brand new style of tv often known as “defector TV,” through which defectors have been invited to share their experiences.

A few of the best-known exhibits embody “Now On My Method To Meet You,” which first aired in 2011, and “Moranbong Membership,” which aired in 2015.

Kang appeared on each — and it was round this time that she first laid eyes on YouTube, the place she was particularly drawn to movies about make-up, magnificence and trend.

By 2017, she had created her personal channel, leveraging her rising fame and “recording my every day life for individuals who appreciated me from TV exhibits.”

Lots of her YouTube movies discover variations between the 2 Koreas in a cheerful, conversational fashion, akin to contrasting magnificence norms. “In North Korea, when you have huge breasts, that is thought of to be not good!” she laughs in a single video, recalling her shock at discovering padded bras and breast implants within the South.

Different movies reply widespread questions on escaping North Korea, akin to what defectors carry with them (salt for luck, a household picture for consolation, and rat poison in case they get caught — for “when you realize that you’re going to die.”)

Ultimately the channel grew so standard that she landed illustration from three administration businesses, employed video producers, and started attracting shoppers for sponsored Instagram content material.

“I’ve a gentle movement of earnings now,” she stated. “I can purchase and eat what I would like, and I can relaxation once I wish to.”

This mannequin of success — echoed by different defector YouTubers, akin to Kang Eun-jung, with greater than 177,000 subscribers; Jun Heo, with greater than 270,000 earlier than he took down his channel this yr; and Park Su-Hyang, with 45,000 — has impressed many others to affix YouTube.

A part of their success, in keeping with Sokeel Park, of Liberty in North Korea, is that defectors “are fairly entrepreneurial.”

“I feel a consider that’s that you simply’re in management, you are not being ordered round by a South Korean boss, and having to emphasize a couple of South Korean work tradition,” he stated.

“It could be a wrestle, however folks have company … You are your individual boss, by yourself schedule.”

Tales on their very own phrases

Defector TV might have helped supercharge the recognition of a few of these influencers — nevertheless it has additionally drawn controversy among the many defector neighborhood.

Some view it as “imperfect” however useful in giving the South Korean public larger publicity to their Northern friends, Park stated. However many others criticize the discuss exhibits as being sensationalist, exaggerated, outdated and inaccurate.

As an example, the exhibits typically use cartoon graphics, elaborate background units and sound results — akin to mournful music that performs whereas defectors recall their previous.

On the finish of the day, these are leisure exhibits, not documentaries, Park stated, including: “(The exhibits are) made by South Korean TV producers and writers … clearly (the defectors) do not have editorial management.”

This frustration with how North Koreans are represented in mainstream media, and their need to inform their tales on their very own phrases, is one main cause why so many defectors have turned to social media.

Many defectors really feel “that South Koreans have solely a really shallow understanding of North Korea, or that they’ve sure stereotypes about North Korean those that ought to be challenged,” Park stated.

YouTube permits “a really totally different stage of management and company, to have the ability to simply arrange a digital camera in your condo or wherever you would possibly movie, and simply converse on to an viewers.”

Constructing bridges between the Koreas

It is a tall activity, particularly lately as relations have deteriorated resulting from disagreements over the North’s weapons testing and the South’s joint navy drills with the US.

However some say these tensions are precisely why it is essential to humanize and join Koreans from both sides.

For her, YouTube is a option to “preserve reminding myself about my identification, who I’m and the place I got here from” — in addition to to show folks about defectors’ experiences.

“If the 2 Koreas get united, I wish to interview many individuals in North Korea,” she added.

Nonetheless, there’s an issue for these hoping to bridge the divide: their audiences are getting older, presumably as a result of their content material appeals most to the technology that lived by way of the Korean Warfare of the Fifties and its aftermath.

“The technology that remembers North and South Korea as one nation is passing away,” Park stated.

That makes constructing bridges among the many youthful technology extra pressing.

Most of Kang Eun-jung’s viewers are of their 50s or older, whereas Kang Na-ra’s are principally of their 30s — comparatively excessive age brackets on the planet of social media.

A part of the issue could also be that younger South Koreans know subsequent to nothing about their friends on the opposite aspect of the demilitarized zone, as a substitute being bombarded with ominous information headlines in regards to the safety scenario, political rhetoric and navy saber-rattling.

In consequence, Park stated, “younger South Koreans know American folks higher than North Korean folks. They know Japanese folks higher than North Korean folks, they know Chinese language folks (higher than North Korean folks).”

“So with the ability to resume some type of people-to-people contact, understanding, and empathy — if that is North Koreans making their very own YouTube channels — then that is nice.”

For Kang Na-ra, who left behind many pals in North Korea and as soon as even thought of returning to the repressive regime, that distance feels private.

“I wish to have extra (subscribers of their) teenagers and other people of their 20s as a result of I would like extra younger folks to care about unification and be inquisitive about North Korea,” she stated.

“Would not it increase the opportunity of me going again to my hometown earlier than I die? If extra younger folks need unification of the Koreas, could not it come true?”