Independent Lens: "Beyond Utopia" (TG17N, Independent Lens, PBS, 2023, aired January 9, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, January 9) I watched a quite compelling presentation on PBS’s Independent Lens program, “Beyond Utopia,” about the long, arduous and dangerous journey refugees from North Korea have to take to get to freedom and safety in South Korea. The film was directed by Madeleine Gavin, and featured some quite remarkable people. One of them was Pastor Sungeun Kim of the Caleb Baptist Church in Seoul, South Korea, a North Korean refugee himself who made contact with the modern-day Underground Railroad when he fell in love with North Korean army officer Esther Park. (So between them they have the two most common Korean family names.) He decided to use the information he’d garnered to get his wife out on behalf of other refugees as well, and he continued to make the arduous journey himself shepherding North Korean refugees on the long journey across the Yalu River that marks the border of North Korea and China, then literally hundreds of miles through China into Viet Nam, Laos and/or Cambodia. Since all four of those countries have reciprocal arrangements with North Korea to return all refugees they apprehend, the fleeing North Koreans aren’t safe until they cross the last border into Thailand, from which they can take a flight to Seoul. Most of the film showed the successful flight of the Roh family in late 2019 and early 2020, before the Chinese government’s anti-COVID-19 restrictions shut down the already slender chances of success. Pastor Kim himself was identified as persona non grata by the Chinese government after one unsuccessful escapee ratted him out under North Korean torture.

The saddest story in the show was that of Soyeon Lee, a young-looking woman who’d successfully escaped North Korea but was trying to get her 17-year-old son out. She’d had to leave him behind when he was 8 and had been anxious about him ever since, but in his last escape attempt he got as far as the banks of the Yalu before North Korean authorities caught him. She was still trying to learn his fate; apparently North Korea has two sets of prison camps, one described as concentration camps and the other like the Soviet Gulag. The concentration camps at least are more like what we think of as prisons – you have a fixed sentence to serve and there’s at least the possibility that you will be released at the end of it, though you’ll be blacklisted, you won’t be able to find a job in the North Korean economy, and your family members and friends will probably be blacklisted as well since repressive regimes like North Korea’s are very big on guilt by association. The Gulag camps are far worse; you are held there as long as the authorities want, and almost no one ever makes it out of them alive. The show cited a United Nations Commission on Human Rights report that alleged that North Korea’s current regime is the most repressive in the world today; the U.N. argued that you’d literally have to go back in history to Nazi Germany to find another country as relentlessly repressive. One of the film’s most chilling anecdotes is Esther Park’s tale of how and why she was attracted to Sungeun Kim in the first place. Sungeun Kim was large and heavy-set, and since North Korea so relentlessly starves its population North Korean men are all really skinny. Esther actually thought her husband-to-be looked like North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il (the late father of the current ruler, Kim Jong Un) because only people high up in the North Korean aristocracy get to eat enough to put on weight.

The second half of the two-hour movie shows the flight of the Roh family – assisted by Pastor Kim, who because he’s no longer welcome in China and subject to immediate arrest there met the Rohs in Hanoi, Viet Nam – and their success in getting to Thailand just before COVID-19 hit and most of the routes they had taken were closed down by the Chinese government. They had to cross the Mekong River (a lot of the place names in this show had quite different associations for me – not only the Mekong, site of some of the bloodiest battles of the Viet Nam war, but also the Chinese city of Wuhan, infamous worldwide as the alleged starting place of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19) between China and Viet Nam in the dead of night in ultra-narrow riverboats. Pastor Kim had to warn them to get out of the boat one at a time because if more than one tried to get out at once, the boat would capsize, they’d fall into the water and risk being drowned. Also the route they were taking is one also used by drug smugglers, and they risked getting shot by law enforcement personnel trying to stop the drug trade. Pastor Kim also told them that once they crossed the final border into Thailand they wanted to get themselves arrested. Apparently there’s an agency that takes in North Korean refugees and gives them a seven-week crash course in what the rest of the world is really like to undo the North Korean propaganda with which they’ve been brainwashed all their lives and led to believe that, however bad North Korea may seem, the rest of the world is far worse. It’s not clear from the film just who runs this agency – the South Korean government? The Thai government? An NGO?

One of the things that shocked me about the movie was the clips of songs North Korean schoolchildren are taught to sing about the rest of the world in general and the United States in particular. One refugee remembered that she never heard the word “American” just on its own until she left – it was always “Americanbastard,” elided into one word – and her elementary math textbooks had problems like, “There are five Americanbastards. Two are killed by our brave, noble soldiers. How many Americanbastards are left?” When the film The Interview came out in 2015 I had faulted the movie for opening with clips of a song supposedly being sung by North Korean children whose lyrics, helpfully supplied in a subtitle, went, “Die America, die. Oh please won’t you die? It would fill my tiny little heart with joy. May your women all be raped by beasts of the jungle while your children are foooorced to watch!” I had no idea that the actual songs taught to North Korean children about the United States are just as bloodthirsty – and just as banal – as the mock one the makers of The Interview came up with!