SEOUL, October 19 (AJP) - High school senior Kim Min-jeong is like many other university applicants in South Korea — hopeful about what comes next and anxious about getting there. For relief, she turns to her favorite K-pop group, ATEEZ.
Her face lights up as she talks about the band and shows off its dance moves to their latest hit "BAD."
Her family history is something she has been taught to share less freely.
“My mother always tells me, ‘Never tell other people that you have family in North Korea. Just live as a Korean,’” Kim said.
Born in 2006 and raised in Yanji, a city in northeastern China’s ethnic Korean region, Kim is an ethnic Korean from China, known in Korean as Joseonjok. Her mother fled North Korea.
“I think she says that because she was hurt by the prejudice she experienced as a North Korean defector. She’s very afraid that people will look down on me because of that background.”
At Yeomyung School in western Seoul, Kim has found a community where that background needs no apology. The accredited alternative middle and high school serves young people who fled North Korea or whose parents did.
But the school that gives them a place to belong is still struggling to secure a home of its own.
More than two decades after opening, Yeomyung faces another neighborhood dispute over its search for a permanent campus. For students who have already endured separation, displacement or rejection, the opposition reaches beyond arguments over land and buildings.
“Even when they leave the school gates, many of our students feel intimidated,” Vice Principal Hwang Heui-gun told AJP. “Many still think of themselves as outsiders.”
At a public briefing on Sept. 17, Principal Cho Myeong-sook knelt before residents and appealed for support for the new campus. Some responded angrily and demanded that the school leave.
Counseling teacher Choi Yeon-jeong said students began worrying about their teachers’ safety.
“Some even told me, ‘Teacher, if anything like that happens, you have to call the police immediately,’” she said.
Others had a quieter question.
“Some ask me, ‘Will I be able to graduate from the new school?’”
For now, a permanent campus remains years away.
The Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education announced on Oct. 15 that construction would begin in 2028, with the new school scheduled to open in March 2029. Yeomyung’s authorization to occupy its current building — a former elementary school in Seoul’s Gangseo district — expires in February 2027. Officials are discussing temporary classrooms to cover the intervening period.
The school has moved among temporary facilities since its founding in 2004. A planned relocation to Seoul’s Eunpyeong district collapsed in 2019 after residents objected.
The latest proposal would allow it to put down roots at its current site, where it moved in March 2023. Under a July agreement involving the Unification Ministry, the Seoul education office, Hyundai Motor Group and the school foundation, Hyundai pledged 6 billion won ($4.5 million). The foundation committed about 10 billion won raised through donations.
Opponents have cited insufficient consultation, traffic, safety and the use of public land previously designated for early-childhood education.
Their objections do not speak for the entire neighborhood. Hwang said some residents have welcomed the school and offered encouragement. On Oct. 7, a coalition of 261 civic, educational and religious organizations urged authorities to proceed.
Still, the renewed uncertainty has stirred an old feeling among students: that their place here remains conditional.
Yeomyung’s classrooms reflect how the lives of North Korean families can stretch far beyond the divided peninsula.
As of July, only seven of its 95 students had been born in North Korea. The other 88 were born in third countries, often to North Korean mothers who had fled their homeland.
Birthplace alone says little about the upheaval that brought them to the school.
“These are children who were born in North Korea, children whose mothers or fathers are defectors, and children born in China or Russia after their parents fled North Korea,” Hwang said.
Many have experienced poverty, separation from parents or interrupted schooling. Some have endured detention, human trafficking or the deaths of family members.
Arrival in South Korea can bring another difficult adjustment. Children reunited with mothers they have not seen for years may discover that those mothers have remarried or established new families.
“They have to adjust to the mother they haven’t seen for years, but also to this entirely new family,” Choi said.
Even a shared language can conceal how much there is to learn. A student who chats comfortably in Korean may struggle with the vocabulary of a textbook or the demands of a written assignment.
Accredited in 2010, Yeomyung offers recognized middle and high school qualifications, opening a route to university. It supplements the national curriculum with Korean-language instruction, counseling and support for settling into South Korean life.
Some students arrive after being hurt in mainstream schools. Choi recalled teachers disclosing their North Korean backgrounds without permission, exposing them to classmates’ questions about hunger, accents and life in North Korea.
“Students would come up to them and bombard them with these questions in an unfamiliar environment. Many told me it was terrifying,” she said.
Hwang believes schools must make room for what students have lived through, rather than demand that they immediately fit in.
“It is an act of violence for South Korean society to build a fence and then force these children to enter it,” he said.
He learned early in his time at Yeomyung how easily distress could hide behind an apparently carefree face.
Around 2009, while studying sports marketing in graduate school, Hwang joined the school as a part-time instructor. At a school camp, his energy quickly won students over.
They spent the day playing and laughing together.
That night, he heard children calling out in their sleep.
“Mom, run.”
“Mom, hide.”
“Mom, don’t die.”
He believed the nightmares echoed traumatic experiences some had endured while fleeing North Korea.
By morning, they were laughing and playing again.
“I felt so sorry for them,” he recalled. “I thought, these children really have no one to talk to about their pain.”
He decided to become someone they could turn to without formality. Other teachers already filled the roles of parents or uncles. He would be an older brother.
“A badass bro,” he said with a laugh.
That attachment helps explain his frustration when people assume students born in China or speaking Chinese will eventually leave South Korea.
“These children are our children. They are children of the Republic of Korea,” he said.
“Some people think, ‘Aren’t they all going to leave for China eventually?’ But that’s simply not true.”
Their citizenship circumstances vary, but Hwang said many intend to build their lives in South Korea. He hopes the permanent campus will become a source of pride for the neighborhood.
For Choi, who has worked at Yeomyung since its founding, those lives should not be defined only by what the students have suffered. She sees in them an attentiveness to loneliness that others might miss.
“Since our children have spent so much time feeling lonely, they can immediately recognize someone else who is lonely. Since they’ve been hurt so much themselves, they have a kind of radar that other people don’t have. They can immediately sense when someone else is hurting,” she said.
“I think that radar is an extraordinary asset. It’s an incredibly valuable ability.”
Kim is beginning to imagine what she might do with that understanding.
“After coming to Yeomyung School, I realized how much fun it was to be around other people,” she said. “Now, being alone actually feels boring. I’ve become much brighter and more positive.”
She lives in a dormitory while her parents run a small business in Seosan, southwest of Seoul. Awaiting university admission results, she hopes to study creative writing and help readers understand the importance of Korean unification.
Her mother’s instinct has been to protect her by urging silence about the past. Kim hopes to find a future in telling stories.
“I don’t want people to remember me simply as someone who needed healing and recovery,” she said.
“I want them to remember me as someone who experienced healing and recovery, and then helped other people heal, recover and become happy.”
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