Kim Hyuck Character Analysis

Kim Hyuck is a former kochebi, or “wandering swallow,” who was just a child when the famine of the mid-1990s hit. Abandoned by his father and separated from his brother, Hyuck was forced to fend for himself in an increasingly dangerous and hostile atmosphere. Hyuck quickly realized that the only way to survive was to make money by selling North Korean goods across the border in China. Kim’s repeated crossings along the Tumen River landed him in and out of labor camps for years. After a particularly long and devastating stint in prison, Kim Hyuck decided to defect for good. The horrors he’d witnessed while wandering the North Korean countryside as a child in search of food, and while enduring miserable days and nights in the labor camps as a young man trying to survive, had convinced him that no life worth living would ever be possible in his home country. Hyuck joined a church in China to obtain refuge from the ever-growing immigration police presence there. He then led a group of other refugees on an arduous and ill-fated trip through a stretch of the Gobi Desert along the Mongolian border. By the time Hyuck made it to South Korea, he was worn out, exhausted, and disillusioned. He struggled for many years to adjust to life in South Korea, afraid of forming meaningful connections with others. Eventually, Hyuck became the most outspoken and public-facing of the interviewees Demick spoke with between 2004 and 2009, even producing a short film about his life and his journey to South Korea. Headstrong, determined, tough, and desperate to outrun the traumas of his youth, Hyuck is an iron-willed young man whose story helps shape the landscape of Nothing to Envy’s many perspectives on what life looks like inside of North Korea.