The North, or the Part of the World That Exists Only in Dreams
Abstract
The tragedy of a North Korean refugee in Seoul exposes the gap between an idealised North and the difficult lives awaiting many migrants.
Geopolitics, migration and representations · Full reading edition
Han Sung-ok’s broken promise
Han Sung-ok fled repression and poverty in North Korea and hoped to begin again in the democratic and capitalist South. In Seoul she worked as a waitress, sometimes sent money to her family and endured economic and cultural hardship that led her to consider suicide.
Her route through China had exposed her to traffickers and a violent man to whom she was sold. In South Korea, as a single mother caring for an epileptic son, she faced insecure work, isolation and administrative obstacles. Mother and child were eventually found dead from hunger in Seoul.
Freedom without material security
South Korea provides initial assistance to refugees, yet access to further benefits may be too complex for people with limited education. Precarious jobs trap single mothers in a vicious circle, while an individualistic society contrasts sharply with the omnipresence of the North Korean state.
Political freedom and capitalism do not automatically create belonging or material security. The ‘South Korean dream’ can become an obstacle course for people whose vulnerability does not disappear when they cross a border.
An echo of African migration
Han Sung-ok’s story resembles the hopes of African migrants who imagine a prosperous ‘North’. Promising narratives encourage dangerous journeys through revolutions, trafficking, rape and the Mediterranean, only for many arrivals to discover insecurity far from the abundance they expected.
Whether entry is legal or clandestine, the destination may reproduce poverty, loneliness and exclusion. Migration therefore reveals the distance between the map of desire and the social world that migrants actually inhabit.
The North is not the only dream
The idealisation of elsewhere is not uniquely African. Europe has also dreamed of Africa. In Au soleil, Guy de Maupassant describes leaving the monotony of Paris because he felt drawn towards the unknown desert, the sun, sand and the promise of a new and changing life.
His journey reminds us that movement begins with an imagined geography. Every traveller may project fulfilment onto a distant place and overlook the realities that structure it.
Placing the dream back in the world
The ‘North’ is less a homogeneous territory than a representation made from distance, inequality and hope. Its promises can mobilise courage, but they can also conceal exploitation and abandonment.
The lesson is not that people should cease to travel or hope. It is that migration policies and public narratives must recognise actual lives, so that crossing a border does not replace one tragedy with another.
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