North Korean refugees garner fame, profit and understanding with their YouTube stories


By AGENCY
Seok Hyeon Ju (in striped top) reapplying her lipstick before filming a YouTube video with Sim Ha Yoon, a fellow North Korean refugee YouTuber. Seok is one of a burgeoning niche of YouTubers comprising North Korean refugees telling their own stories of escape, survival and resettling in a capitalist land.

Her hair pulled back in a careless ponytail and a GoPro camera trailing her every step, Seok Hyeon Ju wanders with a kitchen knife across an empty cornfield strewn with fallen stalks.

She’s on the hunt for naengi – a spring green known as shepherd’s purse – that grows in the toughest soil, which years ago she foraged as a starving child in the mountains of North Korea. She picks some and then lets out a delighted squeal when she spots a shrivelled ear of corn left over from last year’s harvest.

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