so they put it away unopened. Then they went outside to play around their house, where no one would see them. The sisters also bought bootlegged movies and TV shows, which are seen as such an effective catalyst for defection that they’re often floated across the DMZ attached to balloons or bobbed across the sea in bottles. It was when 49-year-old Kang Mi Jin watched Promise, a South Korean action-romance, that she realized her government had lied to her all her life. She’d always been taught the South was impoverished, filled with beggars holding out tin cans. But not only was the country depicted as wealthy, the filmmakers could afford to destroy entire sets during fight scenes. She watched Promise eight times, enamored by the amount of moneyglint of jewelry, the sparkle of makeup. If they someday made it to South Korea, they thought, they’d have all those things.

After the Great Famine, people started fleeing to South Korea in greater numbers. The language used to describe those roughly 31,500 who have resettled in the South is politically complicated. In China, they are “economic migrants.” In the Republic of Korea, among most Koreans, both North and South, they’re talbukcha, or “person who escaped the North.” In the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, no word exists.

A vast majority of talbukcha — Ministry of Unification figures say 71 percent overall and 83 percent in 2017 — are women. They often escape across the border into China and then make their way to Southeast Asia, where they can officially