'People disappear without explanation.' [(Photo by Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images)
In the sleepy south-west London suburb of New Malden, the local Waitrose butts up against Seoul Plaza, a supermarket catering to the neighbourhood’s estimated 20,000 South Koreans.
The high street boasts every Korean business you could dream of: from the Kang Nam barbecue takeaway and Hanatour travel agent, to a fully-fledged hypermarket, with its own section for K-pop merchandise. (In BBC drama Killing Eve, Eve Polastri —played by Sandra Oh, who has Korean parents — quits MI6 to lie low making dim sum in the local Han karaoke restaurant.)
But there is another notable community in this corner of the capital, one whose presence is undetectable from the shop fronts or grocery aisles – what is thought to be the world’s largest population of North Korean refugees outside Asia.
Having escaped one of the most repressive regimes in the world — a country it is illegal to leave without permission — some 700 North Koreans have sought sanctuary in “Little Pyongyang”.
Next month, they may mark a milestone in their assimilation. Ji-Hyun Park, who runs education programmes for defectors in New Malden, is standing to be a Conservative councillor in her home seat of Moorside in Bury, Manchester. If successful, she would be the first person from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to be elected as a politician in the UK.
“When I arrived, many people welcomed us and they gave to us a lot of opportunities and happiness,” the 52-year-old tells UnHerd. “I wanted to pay back to them. I also know that in the UK, there live many voiceless people and also many immigrant women, who have hard times in society. I want to listen to their voice and solve their problems.”
Why Tory? “My life was lived in a socialist dictatorship country,” explains Park, who had to escape twice. She first fled aged 29, by crossing the border into China, while under gunfire from North Korean guards. She was sold for marriage to a Chinese farmer but, after being reported to the police, was separated from her six-year-old son and deported back home.
There, Park worked barefoot in a labour camp, before being released to die after seriously injuring her leg. Within six months, however, she had escaped the country again and was reunited with her child. They arrived in the UK in 2008 as asylum seekers after a Korean-American pastor in Beijing put them in touch with the UN.
“What is really important to me is family, freedom and justice,” she says. “These values are Conservative values. That’s why I follow this party.”
New Malden’s transformation into an East Asian hub is thought to have originated with the location of the South Korean ambassador’s residence in the area. Seoul-based electronics firm Samsung also set up its UK HQ here in 1980.
North Koreans followed, seeking jobs in South Korean shops and eateries. But do not mistake a common language for a familial bond. “South Koreans and North Koreans cannot be friends,” says Yejin Lee, who escaped to the UK in 2008, aged 15.
“Somehow there is this wall between us. Although it was the same country [before being divided up into Soviet-backed North and US-backed South in 1948], what they think is totally different. South Koreans think like free-minded people.” She adds that the stereotype they have of her compatriots, even in Britain, is disparaging: brainwashed, uneducated and poor.
Lee, who was born in 1994 in Chongjin, North Korea’s third largest city, considered herself an orphan after her father died when she was eight and her mother fled to China when she was ten.
A couple of years later, her mum made contact to say she had paid a “broker” to smuggle Lee and her younger brother out. But, says Lee, in her first press interview: “He left my brother there because he wanted more money.” She has not been able to make contact with him since.
Lee spent 15 days in China, before moving to Myanmar and, a month later, South Korea. She had grown up being told that North Korea was the best in the world and that leader Kim Jong-il was akin to a god. At school, when she was not forever studying the central subject – the intricate history of founding father Kim Il-sung and his family – she was taught that South Koreans were starving because of the evil Americans. “And that’s what I imagined – a lot of beggars,” she says in her New Malden kitchen, laughing at the thought.
The scales fell from her eyes within moments of making it into Chinese territory. “When I was crossing, North Korea was completely in blackout, no lights at all. And then just after that river, everywhere was lit up, it was so colourful. I was like, ‘Wow! This is a new world.’ That’s when I realised, maybe not everybody in the world was living like me.” After five months in Seoul, Lee and her mother made their way to England.
Many North Koreans choose the UK over South Korea (where they are, in most cases, automatically eligible for citizenship and generous state support) because they do not want to be the victims of discrimination by their southern neighbours.
As one defector in New Malden told Jiyoung Song, senior lecturer in Korean studies at the University of Melbourne: “I couldn’t bear the second-class citizen treatment by South Koreans, but here in the UK, it’s OK because there are many second-class, third-class citizens like Indian, Pakistani Muslims or other black people. I’m just one of them.”
But that doesn’t always make life any easier. Here, they are destined to work in menial jobs for South Korean bosses. “I don’t even think they are angry,” says Lee. “They just accept it as it is because they have no choice.”
Korean expats from North and South are also divided by their accents and vocabulary. North Koreans, who grew up in a country impervious to foreign influences, cannot understand certain words that make up the “Konglish” spoken by those from the South.
Even their meals are different. “Generally, South Korean food is so sweet and has so much stuff in it, sometimes it’s hard to taste the original ingredients,” says Lee. North Koreans — not catered for by the manifold South Korean shops and restaurants of New Malden – are left to make their cuisine at home (a dish enjoyed by both nations, such as sundae, pig’s intestines stuffed with pig’s blood and rice, still tastes different in each).
Of course, this is paradise compared with home, where half of the population of 25 million is undernourished, according to a UN report. Just last week, dictator Kim Jong-un warned that the nation needed to embark on another “arduous march” against a faltering economy — appearing to draw parallels with the famine in the 1990s that killed up to three million of his countrymen.
It was the grim sight of starvation that led Joong-wha Choi — three of whose brothers had died of hunger — to flee across the Tumen River into China with his wife and baby son in 2004, before he settled in New Malden, where he works in the warehouse of Europe’s leading importer of South Korean food.
“I gave ten years of service to the country in the military and ended up seeing these dead bodies piled up in the street,” says Choi, now 56, via an interpreter. “I would rather be blind than see the dead bodies.” He chose Britain in part because of his memories of history lessons, in which the country — and its Industrial Revolution — were spoken of in glowing terms.
Lee, now a 26-year-old mother of two and working as a director for the charity Connect: North Korea, recalls: “Generally finding food was a problem for every family. Just getting rice wasn’t easy.”
Her family had a fridge and a TV, but most of the time there was no electricity — spelling disaster for her father’s income as an electrician. “The fridge, we would store shoes in it,” she says. “All sorts of different stuff, but not food.”
One rare exception is the Day of the Sun, which takes place today, the celebration of the birth of Kim Il-sung, founder and Eternal President of the republic. As well as the missile-laden parades — at which soldiers chant “We will die for you!” at their leader — it is the only day, apart from Kim Jong-il’s birthday, when the state hands out meat to families and sweets to children. “It’s a sad fact,” says Choi. “Because normal days for us are very hungry and we wouldn’t get enough food to eat.”
And yet many North Koreans in London are too intimidated to speak publicly, fearing the long arm of the DPRK authorities. Lee says she would not be prepared to have her photo taken for this interview, and that despite her fluent English and joy at living in a democracy: “I still find it difficult to say what I want to say, to express myself freely.”
Park, who was most shocked by the sight of newspapers when she arrived in Britain, says she is still surveilled: “We make a lot of events in the UK. Sometimes the embassy come and say you cannot do that, and send angry emails to us.”
Meanwhile Choi, a former chairman of the North Korean Residents’s Society, believes some of his fellow refugees have been recruited as informers under threat of their families being imprisoned back home.
He is unperturbed. He twice thanks me for interviewing him, and laments how there “once was a period where people simply didn’t have any interest in North Koreans”.
“The problem that spies are doing is they divide the community,” he says. “I am the only one I know who didn’t actually have any threats from them, so I am very lucky.”
However serious the threat, the truth is that many of the goings-on at the North Korean embassy — located on a street in Ealing, west London, once home to actor Sid James — often sound more like those of a Carry On film. In 2014, diplomats were reported to be so short of funds that staff were seen buying office equipment at car boot sales, and were unable to pay for their shopping at a New Malden supermarket.
But they should not be underestimated. In 2012, a North Korean was jailed in South Korea for trying to assassinate a fellow escapee with a poison-tipped needle. “Eliminating a defector is apparently the best way of warning its people against fleeing from the country,” said a South Korean official. After he was arrested, the agent said the regime had threatened to kill his family if he did not carry out the assassination.
North Korean diplomats are even forced to spy on each other. Thae Yong-ho, who was deputy ambassador to Britain, defected to the South in 2016. He spoke in February of the constant fear of being spirited to a prison camp: “From time to time some of your colleagues just disappear without explanation.”
And yet many North Koreans in London alter their accents and dress not to avoid undercover agents, but to appear to hail from their richer and more advanced neighbour.
“Even though they try, they cannot be because the way they speak and the way they behave – definitely North Koreans,” insists Lee.
“I actually go out to people and say that I am North Korean, proudly,” she adds, and she tells her children of the culture and history of her birthplace. “Not Kim’s family,” she clarifies, “but the country itself”.
“The landscape is beautiful, though all the trees are cut off because we don’t have electricity and to cook, you need a fire. Every season is distinctive. Spring is very warm and summer is very hot. We would go to the seaside and swim. And autumn is the most beautiful, yeah – all the trees, they have different colours.”
“I think we should be proud,” Lee says with a hopeful smile. “North Korea is going to open soon and it has a lot of potential. It could develop like South Korea. We could go back and do a lot of good things there.”
Choi, too, sees a time when he will be able to return. “But I also have this fear inside me. Getting out of that country is a life and death matter and I worry, would that be the same going back? There might be hatred for people who fled the country. I will definitely go back, even though it’s going to be hard.”
But the prospect of a homecoming still seems as remote as ever. If anything, North Korea has been pulling up the drawbridge, with the number of defections dwindling and the borders closed during the pandemic, as international sanctions continue to bite. Talk to defectors, however, and you will find a relentless optimism that one day soon the regime will fall.
In the meantime, at least they have found a little piece of Pyongyang in this pocket of London suburbia.
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SubscribeThe only obstacle to Britain’s return to paganism is Islam, itself a form of paganism but a very fierce and tenacious one.
We can gauge this to be bulls**t in any meaningful sense, since even the person who ran the Pagan Federation is widely reported as having said that at most, there were only 300-400 active witches etc in the UK.
Paganism was invented here in the 1930s – 40s, but it has NOT had staying power in the country of its birth.
Islam is indeed pagan ; you take it from the horse’s mouth, since Aisha when wanting to distance herself from her husband’s convenient revelations to enable his philandering, invokes not ‘Allah’ or the ‘God of Mahomed’ but rather, the ‘God of Abraham’ – underlining that as far as she is concerned the two are not the same.
Mahomet of course challenged her on this. She appears to back down, but in doing so, swears on ‘Allah’ – the god she has already indicated she does not worship. So she voids her oath.
Mo does not seem to have been smart enough to pick this up.
Aisha is one smart lady, I’d say!!
(This is in the al-Bukhari hadith 5228, so even Islam itself tells you the true situation.)
Fascinating. Thank you.
I learned something about the all-male priesthood from, not a Catholic, but an Orthodox, priest. Women, he said, do not become priests, not because they are inferior to men, but because they are superior to them. Women give life, they do not take it. The slaughter that happens at Mass (or the Liturgy) is beneath the dignity of a woman.
The roles of men and women in the Church and in society should be complementary, not adversarial. A woman does not need to usurp a man’s role to prove her worth and vice versa.
I’m a lapsed Catholic, who has become increasingly disappointed in the Papacy. The Parish in which I am currently situated had a priest for over 20 years, who was quite a moderniser, but who died of a heart attack* in his sleep at 59.
The new chap is a Goan priest, a missionary from the St Francis Xavier movement. He’s a straightforward, trad Catholic, from what I’ve seen (Christmas and Easter services only), and suddenly, our West London church is packed to the brim with what appears to be the entire Goan Community of Southern England. My mother reports being one of 4 or 5 British people in the congregation, and feeling less comfortable, although the priest is very welcoming.
*or whatever causes fit people who run, cycle and play rugby, to die in their sleep these days.
Right, so a Traditional Catholic parish is full to bursting, while the ones offering warmed over liberalism and social justice are empty. Lessons to be learned there.
“Full to bursting” with foreign people, making those few locals who have remained faithful uncomfortable. Import more foreigners if you want a thriving parish is the lesson here. Not the worst lesson in the world but one which comes with its own problems. Does the UK really need more foreign, jesuitical priests?
It is the “Catholic” Church. That is Universal. Why should you care about the color of your priest or fellow parishioners if you believe in what is being taught?
Pretty racist to assume that colour has anything to do with it. I might be wide of the mark but I didn’t imagine the non-Goans in the flock to be all white if they are in West London. The answer to the 5 residents who have issues (as mentioned by the commentator) can’t be “it doesn’t matter”. This is basically a church plant from Goa. I think that is a wonderful thing but do they need to go into an established church community to do it?
Please define the word ” racist”or more correctly ” racialist” ?
Of course “Goans” could well be “Aryans” like hundreds of millions of Indians. Last I heard Goa was part of Portugal also for many centuries. Ignorance reigns.
Of course we have had experience of this in my home town in the north west (largish parish on the verge of closing) was given to the kerelan Catholics. Thing is it does alienate some, but if their children attended mass there wouldn’t be a surplus of churches. Where would a recent immigrant community get the money for a new church (particularly when Catholicism and it’s churches in England are already urban and many half full or emptying)
Because ethnicity and culture are important along with a sense of community that really doesn’t exist with those outside your community.
Despite hapless Palestinian propaganda, Jesus is God, not a Palestinian jihadist.
No they don’t.
That has happened all over the world. We missioned the faith to them, they’re returning the favor. I’m a traditional worshipper myself, so I’m happiest with priests who take it seriously.
The Hug-A-Homo movement is big in a church near to me which I no longer attend except for prayer based on a promise, decades ago to go three times a year to pray in a small side chapel.
That church too, is run by Jesuits, but the Western kind. It’s very awkward since they can tell I’m of that persuasion but have zero interest in being hugged, or in anything to do with their ‘reaching out’.
Do they play the blues on guitars?
Oh yes. More Jesuits. Enough drug dealers.
Well said Arthur. This women priest business is just a fad, run its course thank God.
While if I were a Catholic I would prefer more traditional forms, perhaps even the Latin Mass, this strikes me as a bog standard case of survivorship bias. There are no longer any social benefits to being a devout Catholic, and perhaps even a social cost associated with traditional religion, so of course those who choose this path will be particularly dedicated. Unfortunately, despite the fervor of traditionalists (of all denominations I might add), the hollowing out of Christianity in the West continues apace with many tens of millions of Christians having left the Church over the last few decades.
Selling church soul to Constantine is how the secularization began
Constantine was a conviction politician, Read his Oration to the Holy Assembly, a paschal homily given to Christians at his court, probably in Nicomedia of Bithynia (Izmit) probably in 325.
I’m unconcerned about any social cost to being a Catholic, whatever that means.
I will never desert the one true faith because He will never desert me. My eternity hangs in the balance.
Being in a parish has more to do with who you want to associate with. Or who you want your kids to associate with. The philosophy of the Catholic Church is good. However one bad priest means you have to explain a lot of things to your kids.
“Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. … In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches, and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.”
Gramsci, 1915
Probably not a bad example of the universal church at work, unity in diversity and all that. I’d rather come along to your parish than a washed up suburban parish where the ageing congregation is waiting for the spirit of Vatican 2 to refill the church.
My parish also has a Nigerian priest, from a missionary order. His predecossor was from the same order. It’s ironic really, as when I was a child, at school during Lent, we were encouraged to give up sweets and the pennies saved were collected to help support the (largely Irish) missions to Nigeria.
That was quite a good investment.
I have regular copies of the Catholic Herald and monitor the outpourings from the Papacy, which are of course designed to advise Catholics in the problems of everyday life. Apart from regular features on abortion, the main aim is to stop Catholics slipping into the malaise of today. I might paraphrase it as, “How to respect other people around us.” or, “How not to play on the internet all day, when there are real solid things around us.”
These things I can see and understand. But the main problem with the Papacy seems to be to resist change in its own priests. – No, whatever the pressure, no women. – You must face the altar during mass, and not the congregation around you.
It is like a stand-off. No modern ideas because they would undermine Catholicism. The priests and some of the congregation want modern. The Papacy doesn’t.
I conclude that the whole arrangement must be past its sell-by date.
Modern has been a disaster everywhere it has been tried. As bad as the Catholic Church has it, it’s positively thriving compared to Liberal Protestantism. Catholicism may be moribund, but the CoE, Lutheranism, Methodism etc. are dead and buried, unless they’re evangelicals holding to traditional Christian morality. Meanwhile, Traditionalist Catholic groups are thriving.
There is no place for a Church that conforms to the world. A Church that takes its marching orders from whats popular among the elite and cognoscenti classes will end up empty. People can just stay home and watch the BBC.
Ask yourself when getting to know a parish: “what would St Paul think”?
Well said. People don’t turn to God because they want to hear the opinions section of the NY Times or the Guardian.
What is the modern idea behind facing the alter? Just like the congregation the priest is doing the same thing. As to women priests or deacons, I could care less but if you go into a church you may see a lot of women and one male priest. It might be the case that the Catholic Church is dei before everyone else caught on. So it’s very modern.
The Priest should face the altar when he is leading the congregation in prayer to God. When he is addressing the congregation (e.g. during the sermon) he should face the congregation.
Mass is not a lecture by the priest, it’s a collective act of prayer. You can have a perfectly beautiful Mass with no sermon. When praying to God, everyone should be facing the same way.
Agreed.
The Anglican Communion has reaped the whirlwind when it drank mightily from the cup of Modernism: it’s pews are empty, Anglicanism in the United States has halved over the last 50 years. The number of baptisms halved between 2000 and 2014. The Anglican Church of Canada has seen a significant decline in attendance and baptisms. In 2022, attendance was 40% of what it was in 2001, and baptisms have fallen by 90% since 1961. At his rate, the expression of Henry VIII will be extinction by 2075. Happy-clappy, lukewarm beliefs, women bishops, and a “priestess” at the altar have coincided with this downward trend. Coincidence? Not so much…
Where is Henry and his swords when we need them? OK, he was impatient. But goal focused.
That the CofE was considering making a bishop of that venal creature in charge of the Post Office scandal shows how far their standards have fallen.
How do you know where God is? Do you have a catholic version of the Qibla?
Just a note, Roman Catholicism isn’t just dying in Europe. Protestantism (taken as one denomination) is set to overtake Roman Catholicism before 2050 and that shift is happening in the developing world. Latin America is well on the way to having protestant majorities by about 2040 – Brazil’s last census (2020) had a 48/33 split and that has only gone in one direction since. This is from a very low base at the turn of the millennium. African countries have seen huge, mass conversions from traditional religions over the past few decades but generally to Pentecostal churches.
Catholics don’t, as a rule, proselytize. We accept converts, but are largely born to our faith. Probably for that reason, we are also seen as an ethnicity in the Anglosphere, with centuries of political history, to boot. Much of it less than pleasant, but such is politics.
Pentecostals, Evangelicals, and some others do proselytize, as do all newer religious sects, and tend to offer people the attraction of communities – socializing, education, charitable assistance, mutual aid, etc – so therefore they will of course grow in size, depending on the efforts of their adherents.
This is a good thing. Judeo-Christianity in general has far, far sounder principles than whatever would replace it as the moral bedrock of the West. An absence of our founding principles creates a vacuum to be filled, lately by appalling, repellent beliefs in “liberating” revolutions, composed of the worst bits of Marx and Mohammed.
Our Lutheran, Episcopalian, or Methodist brethren are making mistakes if they adopt “social justice,” or “liberation,” or some other form of “critical consciousness,” and reject the founding principles of western societies. In the US, this tends to result in mannish priestesses preaching to empty pews, while megachurches down the street are expanding their parking lots.
Pope Francis should take note of this, as well.
Catholics must proselytize, it’s our responsibility and privilege to spread the Good News of the Gospel, “go forth and make disciples of all the nations.” Witness the Eucharistic Congress this past July, 60,000 Catholics send forth to reach out to the world!
We need women and married priests… urgently!
God focused or “me” focused?
Or the Church might make a comeback in Europe. Hard to tell.
Absolutely. To which list I would add misguided leadership, especially from Canterbury, and widespread attempts by “intellectual” clergy to provide scientific explanations / justifications instead of allowing individual members of the church to subsist on whatever they take as being “faith”…
Perhaps the Woke Beast will be slain.
It turns out the problem with the “modernizers”, or apostates as you may prefer, is that God said “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.” and that really cheeses off the people that want you worshipping their idols of progressvisim, social justice, and The Science (distinct and separate from the actual scientific process.) instead of the God of Christianity.
Hopefully your different kind of Catholic will simply be a return to the normalcy of the Roman Missal of 1955.
It’s time to call out the attempted Masonic takeover of the Catholic Church and restore orthodoxy and reverent Catholic worship.
Conservative Catholicism is reviving in North America, in part because of this pope’s attempt to crush the Latin Mass out of existence. The mystery at the heart of Christianity is not helped by the sort of trivial chat found in all of the mainstream denominations of the faith, which are losing members at a pace that rivals the collapse of the Anglican church under the dunce Welby and his recent predecessors.