Cry unification: the word that refuses to die
iStock/recep-bg
Last weekend, while watching news reports about North Korea’s latest policy shift, I was stunned into silence.
Before my escape, I grew up with the word “reunification.” It was everywhere—in schools, at public events, and on state broadcasts. Phrases like “a reunified fatherland” and “liberating the poor people of South Korea” were repeated so often that they became part of the background noise of daily life.
But now I learn from television that, in North Korea, the word itself is being airbrushed out of existence.
There is something deeply disturbing about a state that spent decades proclaiming the sacred task of reunification—and ending the division that supposedly justified so much deprivation—suddenly making an about-face.
Yesterday, we were told we were one people with South Koreans. Today, we are told they are our enemies.
Of course, change is common in North Korea. When it happened, we did not ask why. Curiosity was too dangerous. Not asking questions was safer.
We learned instead that who said something mattered more than what was being said. The same words could become truth when spoken from above and treason when spoken from below. What was right yesterday could be wrong today. What was condemned yesterday could become mandatory tomorrow. People did not accept such contradictions because they understood them. They memorized them because survival required it.
I witnessed many such moments. One day a slogan changed. One day the enemy changed. One day the regime’s priorities shifted overnight. Even when people felt confused, they could not show it. In private, they might have thought, “It has changed again.” In public, they had to say, “That is correct.”
That is why, when I hear North Korea now describe South Korea as an enemy with increasing intensity, my first thought is not of Kim Jong-un, nuclear weapons, missiles, or diplomatic strategy.
I think of ordinary people.
I think of the woman sitting in the market selling whatever goods she can find. I think of the neighbor struggling after the collapse of the public distribution system. I think of young people secretly watching South Korean dramas and mothers trying to give their children one more spoonful of food.
What are those people thinking now?
No matter how loudly the authorities insist that South Koreans are the enemy, can they really erase the curiosity that already exists in people’s minds?
The millions who have listened to South Korean songs, watched South Korean dramas, copied South Korean accents, or used South Korean products know something important. They know that the South Korea described in propaganda is not the same South Korea they have secretly glimpsed.
When I lived in North Korea, stories about South Korea were forbidden. Yet that prohibition only made the country more fascinating. Human curiosity does not disappear because it is suppressed. It finds a safe place and grows stronger.
For many people living difficult and constrained lives, stories about the outside world became a window. Even when that window opened only slightly, people turned toward it.
I remember lying awake at night, listening to the silence of darkened neighborhoods. The streets were quiet. Dogs barked in the distance. Questions lingered in my mind.
“Is this really the only world?”
“Do South Koreans really live like us?”
“Why do we have to live this way?”
Those questions were difficult to speak aloud. In North Korea, a question can be dangerous. If handled carelessly, it can harm not only the person asking it but also their family.
So people swallow their questions.
But swallowed questions do not disappear.
They remain. Sometimes they become fear. Sometimes they become anger. Sometimes they become the spark that inspires someone to escape.
Today, the regime speaks ever more forcefully about nuclear weapons. Officials declare that they will never back down. Yet whenever I hear such statements, I cannot help asking a different question: As the country’s nuclear arsenal grows larger, are its people’s rice bowls becoming smaller?
As missiles fly higher, are ordinary lives sinking lower?
Throughout my childhood, I was told that North Korea was a great nation, a powerful nation, a strong nation. Yet there was often not enough food at home. Electricity regularly failed. Hospitals frequently lacked medicine.
The country was described as strong, but the people were weak.
The country was described as great, but daily life was marked by hardship.
I have never forgotten that contradiction.
Isn’t a truly strong country one where people do not go hungry?
Isn’t a truly great country one where children are not punished for speaking their minds?
Isn’t a truly proud country one where mothers do not spend sleepless nights wondering how to find medicine for their children?
The more North Korea deepens its ties with China, strengthens its partnership with Russia, and presents itself as a nuclear power, the farther ordinary North Koreans seem to be pushed from the world beyond their borders—farther from freedom, farther from opportunity, and farther from the ability to shape their own futures.
State television may broadcast grand ceremonies and handshakes between leaders. But the worries of a mother wondering what she will feed her family that evening never appear on those screens.
I remember the homes where I once lived. In winter, my hands were cold even indoors. Sometimes warm words were harder to find than warm rice.
Yet people endured.
They laughed in markets. They hid their hardships from their children. They shared what little they had.
North Koreans are not weak people. If anything, they have endured more than most.
The tragedy is that the regime exploits that endurance. It packages survival as loyalty. Hunger becomes revolutionary spirit. Silence becomes unity. Fear becomes patriotism.
Perhaps that is one reason North Korea now insists so loudly that South Korea is the enemy.
Because the authorities understand something important.
South Korea’s strength is not merely military.
Its greatest strength is freedom.
People can speak. They can criticize. They can choose. They can leave and return. They can disagree without fearing punishment.
What the North Korean authorities may fear most is not a missile but a USB drive.
A song, a television drama, or a single photograph from the outside world can shake a person’s assumptions in ways no weapon can.
After arriving in South Korea, I discovered what a profound freedom it is to speak openly.
Words I once swallowed can now be written down.
I can say, “That is wrong.”
I can say, “I disagree.”
For many people around the world, those statements seem ordinary. For some North Koreans, they remain dangerous.
That is why I feel uneasy whenever discussions of North Korea become focused solely on military tensions and geopolitical calculations.
The phrase “the situation on the Korean Peninsula” often sounds cold and abstract. Hidden within it are millions of individual lives.
I think about the mothers, children, students, and elderly people who remain in North Korea. Even today, they cannot choose what news they consume. They must listen to the words they are given.
Will the day come when they can choose for themselves?
Will the day come when they no longer have to memorize the slogan that South Korea is the enemy?
Will the day come when they can simply recognize South Koreans as people who speak the same language and share the same history?
Can the idea of reunification one day be reclaimed—not as a slogan imposed from above, but as a human connection between people who have been separated for generations?
I still want to believe so.
North Korea may be able to remove the word “reunification” from its constitution, but it cannot erase memories from people’s hearts.
It cannot erase the memory of a young person secretly laughing while watching a South Korean drama.
It cannot erase the curiosity of a girl staring at the lights across the border.
It cannot erase a line from a South Korean song overheard in a market.
Those things endure.
Governments can redraw maps, rewrite constitutions, and redefine friends and enemies. But once a question takes root in a person’s heart, it is not so easily erased.
Even tonight, somewhere in North Korea, someone may be quietly wondering:
“What is the outside world really like?”
“Do we really have to live only this way?”
“Will I ever be able to speak freely?”
I believe those questions will one day become a road.
And at the end of that road, I hope North Koreans will be able to speak about their lives not through the language of missiles, slogans, and hostility, but through the language of food, freedom, family, and hope.
As I watched the news last weekend, I made a promise to myself.
When we talk about North Korea, let us not focus only on the words of its rulers.
Let us pay attention to the lives of the people living beneath those words.
Let us remember not merely the regime’s declaration that South Korea is an enemy, but the quiet curiosity of ordinary North Koreans who still wonder about the world beyond their borders.
I lived in North Korea. That is why I know this:
Even in the most closed society, the human heart never closes completely.
When even the smallest light enters, people remember that light for a very long time.
Kim Yumi, a North Korean defector, was born and raised in Haeju, South Hwanghae Province, a coastal military area. Growing up near a naval base, she was able to secretly watch South Korean news programs and TV shows, thereby uncovering the vibrant, democratic society of South Korea. Yumi and her husband made the brave decision to escape North Korea and seek a better future. Now in Seoul, she is actively involved in raising awareness about the realities of life in North Korea, especially on her YouTube channel, “@KimYumiTV.”
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