Evelyn Jeong went from North Korea to Chicago when she was 15
Evelyn traveled for a month through three different countries to get to the USA. It is one of the few stories of North Korean refugees in North America.
The young woman Evelyn Jeongnow in the USA, was Jeong So-yeon until 2014. She was born in North Korea and belonged to a relatively privileged family in the context of the country controlled by the Kim Jong-un regime.
“I didn’t know anything” before the drastic change, “I had no information”, to the travel influencer Drew Binskywho has also visited North Korea more than once.
Evelyn’s escape began in 2013, when she was 15 years. Like many other North Korean refugees, she clandestinely crossed the border into China, accompanied by her mother. The route is extremely dangerous, due to persecution by Chinese authorities and the risk of being caught by human trafficking networks.
“The river was frozen, we took the opportunity to cross it”, he recalls. How did you manage to escape? Bribe after bribe.
“My mother was a businesswoman (…) we paid soldiers about two hundred dollars. My mother knew them. And we lied. We said we would return, but of course we didn’t,” said the North Korean.
From there, passed through three different countries until arriving in the United States as a refugee.
“My mother already had an apartment prepared in China. Then we fled to the border with Laos”, he recalls. He went without a passport: he bribed someone else and fled, at night, through the mountains. The border with Thailand followed. He took a small boat to leave Laos. The trip, in total, lasted a month.
In Thailand, he took a flight to South Korea. Then, he went to Los Angeles, USA. Reaching North American territory is particularly rare among North Korean fugitives, who usually end up in South Korea. Based in Chicago, after also passing through Denver, Evelyn tells how she never allowed herself to be completely influenced by the regime’s manipulation.
“In North Korea I secretly watched many American and South Korean films. At school, soldiers kill in front of us [alunos]. It’s an example of how they will treat us if we protest”, he adds.
Currently, free and independent, he doesn’t forget home. “I lived with my grandmother. I can no longer see or contact her”, says Evelyn. “I wanted to talk to my friends, but it’s not safe and it’s very expensive”.
In her texts and videos, Evelyn describes the process of adapting to secondary school, the effort to learn English and the feeling of, for the first time, being able express an opinion without fear.
A few years after arriving in the USA, obtained US citizenshipsomething he talks about as the ultimate symbol of the freedom he was looking for when he fled.
He maintains a YouTube channel, “”, where he publishes vlogs about travel, gastronomy and, above all, videos about daily life in North Korea and the journey of refugees.
He also participates in events organized by the organization Freedom Speakers International, which brings together North Korean defectors to share testimonies in public.
