A North Korean refugee has stolen hearts in the South with her boxing exploits, writes David McNeill
IT SOUNDS like the tear-stained final reel of a boxing B-movie. In the winning corner, our pulped and bloodied hero clasps a world championship trophy between gloved mitts while her weeping parents look on. As cameras flash, their eyes meet, recalling years of fear, poverty and discrimination.
Such was the real-life scene last month in a packed South Korean gymnasium when Choi Hyun-mi won the World Boxing Association's women's featherweight title, after a bruising bout with her Chinese opponent. Poor, female and North Korean, 17-year-old Hyun-mi's hardboiled story has caught the South's imagination and thrown an unwelcome spotlight on the sorry plight of defectors from behind the bamboo curtain.
Dubbed Korea's "Million Dollar Baby", Hyun-mi arrived in Seoul four years ago with the largest group of northern refugees ever to land in the South's capital.
A former amateur boxing champ, she had been plucked as an 11-year old from a Pyongyang school by government scouts who later began training her for the Beijing Olympics. Life was to take a different course.
In 2004 Hyun-mi's businessman father opted for a fresh start in the richer south, a decision that took his family on a dangerous trek through China and Vietnam before they arrived in Seoul four months later.
But the family has found life in their new home hard. Dad is on the dole, mother cries a lot and thoughts often turn to what they left behind.
"We miss our family, especially during holidays," says Hyun-mi. "But we know we can't go back."
Hyun-mi's story is not unusual, say observers. Although given some government help to resettle, the South's roughly 10,000 defectors struggle with cultural differences, poverty and alienation. In a 2006 survey of 300 defectors, 60 per cent said they were unemployed and two-thirds wanted to emigrate abroad. Some have even been known to return home.
South Koreans mostly show little interest in their difficulties, explains former reunification minister Lee Hong-Koo.
"On the one hand they have defected, so in some sense they are welcome as people who stand on the side of democracy and open society and against the North Korean system. But on the other, they are strangers to us, and there are some security concerns as well. They are looked on with some suspicion."
Those suspicions, on a peninsula still steeped in cold war-era paranoia, have deepened since a South Korean court sentenced Won Jeong Hwa to five years last month for spying for the North - the second spy jailed in a decade. Won, who reportedly set honey traps for military and intelligence officers, had also come to Seoul in 2001, falsely claiming asylum from the time-warped Stalinist state.
Such tales add to the stereotypes of North Koreans, says Hyun-mi. "Because of a few bad people, the whole image of the country is so bad."
Tall, strong and resilient after training in Pyongyang most days from six in the morning till eight at night, Hyun-mi has helped rally her depressed family with her boxing feats. She won five domestic competitions and lost just once in 17 fights before turning professional last year, helping to resurrect a declining sport in the process.
Since winning the world championship, she commands about €5,510 a fight, but the victory has been a mixed blessing. "There is so much interest from the press that I can't train anymore," she laments.
Journalists inevitably ask about her Pyongyang background, and her loyalties, a question that visibly irritates her.
"I want people to know who I am," she says. "Being from North Korea helps them remember me, but I'm not representing North Korea. I came to the South to fight for myself and my dreams, and for my family."
She is not the first celebrity defector. Ju Sun Young, who played Kim Jong-il's mother in North Korean propaganda movies, became one of the few refugee success stories four years ago when her small Seoul restaurant took off after being featured on a networked TV show. But the story ended badly: unfamiliar with how to run a business and overwhelmed by requests of work from fellow defectors, she went into debt and sold the business.
As the North's economic problems worsen, Lee and others believe the flow of refugees will grow, bringing many more similar tales of hardship.
Hyun-mi, who is in secondary school and is preparing for the defence of her title against what may be a Japanese opponent, says she doesn't think about the politics of her situation at all. "I just focus on my body and my skills."
Endless media references to Million Dollar Baby finally sent her to the video store to rent the movie. She hated it.
"The film was very dark and I didn't like the ending. It should have been more glorious."