Mick Hartley

Interesting. It seems that women defectors from North Korea do better at adapting to life in Seoul than their male counterparts, at least in part because of the "strong patriarchal tendencies" of men from the socialist North, for whom the woman's place is still in the kitchen:

It has only been four months since the opening of a 24-hour call centre aimed at helping North Korean defectors settle in South Korea, but already it has a number of clients who call on a daily basis. One of them is already a celebrity among the call centre’s counselors. He is prone, after a drink or two, to call up and vent his frustrations on the counselors.

“I got so stressed at work today, so I had a drink. If I go out I know I’ll probably start an argument with someone, so that’s why I’m calling you guys up to get all my frustration out,” the man explains. “Obviously if I pick an argument with someone outside and end up in a police station somewhere I’ll be in big trouble, so it’s better to call you guys to say what I want to say, isn’t it?”

Interestingly, the majority of the defectors who seek out the telephone counseling service at night are male, counselor Ma Soon Hee says, explaining, “There aren’t too many women calling up because they’re lonely, so I get the feeling that males find it relatively harder to adapt.”

“It’s natural that male North Korean defectors are less skilled than their South Korean counterparts. For men with a strong sense of pride, the settlement process can easily be quite upsetting,” she adds.

Bae Dae Shik, another counselor, agrees, saying that men display a more rigid attitude than women to adjusting to their new lives. “Men can get a real shock when they realize that things they took for granted back home might not be understood in South Korea. On the other hand, women seem to cope better with this than men,” Bae says.

The majority of other refugee counselors agree that men are generally slower than women to adjust to cultural differences in South Korea. Predominantly, they point to strong patriarchal tendencies and weak contact networks of men as multiplying factors.

According to Ma, “In North Korea men are the head of the household, it is their role to work and get wages. They regard it as shameful to have to step foot in a kitchen. If a neighbor knocked on the door, it would not be unusual for a man who might have been helping his wife to run for the living room and pretend as if nothing had happened.”

“On the other hand, South Korean men have less attachment to their preconceived ideas about being the head of the household, and what they do have is more flexible. For this reason, when North Korean women make it to South Korea they sometimes can’t help but compare North Korean men to what they see in the South…

More tales from the call centre here.