In fact, $120 is quite huge amount of money in North Korea, because in North Korea, a worker’s monthly salary less than $2. So everyone was touched and decided to do as the authorities told us.

Around 12P.M. on November 6, 1996, I took an airplane in SunanInternational Airport, which departed from Pyongyang to Beijing. After an hour of flight, I arrived in Beijing Airport. There, I waited a staff from the North Korean Embassy for 5 hours, and around 6P.M. I went to the North Korean Embassy with a staff, slept in the Embassy, and took an airplane the next day to go to Kuwait.

I arrived in Kuwait Airport at night and went to the housing construction site in Umm al Hayman, which took an hour from the airport by bus. At the site, there was 2-meter-high wire fence which surrounds the work site. So I asked the interpreter about it, and he answered, "Based on the labor law of Kuwait, the wire fence should surround every work site."

Since that day, I worked hard to the end at the housing construction site but earned nothing. I worked like that for 5 months but the North Korean officials never paid me. At first, the North Korean officials said that the situation of the company in Kuwait is bad. Later, the officials said that the Workers’ Party of North Korea commanded them not to pay us.

I realized that there would be no future in North Korea. How can there be a future in the country where the authorities do not pay me for what I worked? I was in despair. So, even though my family in North Korea would be punished, I defected to South Korea through the South Korean Embassy in Kuwait by getting help from UNHCR in March 1997 to live like a human being.

In 2002, I got married, and now I have two children and live a happy life with my family in South Korea. Now, my job is a writer not a North Korean overseas worker anymore.

- IL LIM