A North Korean Defector Is Spurned, for Decades, by South Korea<br />North left that a certain Ki<br />Mr. Kim, 52, fled North Korea much earlier — in 1984 —<br />and even helped other North Koreans trapped in China get safe passage to South Korea, lending them money and helping them find smugglers who could take them.<br />But Mr. Kim’s case is noteworthy because he has been in legal limbo for decades, ever since fleeing to China at age 19 and adopting fake Chinese citizenship papers<br />that he said he used, along with bribes, to avoid being deported back to North Korea.<br />At school, children called Mr. Kim and his brother sons of a "betrayer." In 1981,<br />Mr. Kim’s mother moved her family to Hoeryong on the northern border with China.<br />Although he has lived in China for most of the last three decades<br />and married an ethnic Korean woman there, Mr. Kim says he never felt at home or safe there and has longed to defect to South Korea.<br />Mr. Kim hangs around on what is known as Multicultural Street in Ansan, an enclave<br />of ethnic Koreans from Yanbian who came to South Korea on work visas.<br />By 1997, however, Mr. Kim began hearing that North Koreans were fleeing hunger<br />and political persecution and that South Korea was accepting them as refugees.
