New Malden in London had a lively North Korean community, but times are changing. A confluence of factors means that days might be numbered for one of the most vibrant North Korean communities anywhere in the world
, plastic surgery and bleeding-edge technology; in the Stalinist North, it’s mass games, bullock carts and bloody purges. Nowhere are two states so close yet so far apart.It was a dissonance that Surl found difficult to reconcile. He fled North Korea in 1998, though he was a reluctant escapee. As a young man, his dream was to follow his grandfather by becoming a famous artist. “When I was a baby, I would play with his paint brushes,” says Surl.
In 1997, Surl was arrested for his trips to China and sentenced to a year in prison. At just 17, he was the youngest of 1,500 inmates. It was a brutal experience. Thousands starved outside the fetid prison’s barbed wire fence, and conditions were incalculably worse inside. “The guards all had long wooden batons and would beat us,” he says. “I saw people die every day.”
Surl’s mother, meanwhile, was captivated by the freedom of the West and decided to move to the U.K., eventually settling in 2003 among the Korean community in New Malden. Surl followed in 2006 and tried to make a living as an artist. But over the years, his visions of packed gallery openings faded, and he settled into a lifestyle that’s both comfortable and unfulfilling. “New Malden is not the U.K.; it’s just New Malden,” he says, with a chuckle and a tinge of regret.
Yejin was born in North Korea but fled with her mother to South Korea when she was just 11, before making the journey to the U.K. a year later. She says many North Koreans come to the West to escape being pigeonholed and stigmatized. They still suffer discrimination in the U.K., of course, though many find that’s less painful than being slighted by their own estranged countrymen. Plus there’s welcome anonymity in London’s diversity. “People in the U.K.
A display commemorating the death of Queen Elizabeth II at the Korean Culture & Art Centre, in calligraphy.Students having coffee with the instructor after a janggu lesson at the Korean Culture & Art Centre in New Malden. A geomungo hangs above them on the wall.Sun Hwa Griffiths has been working hard to smooth these tensions.
These struggles to make a stable home have contributed to North Koreans’ exodus from New Malden. And despite sincere efforts by Connect: North Korea and others to keep the community alive, U.K immigration policy means those leaving aren’t being replaced.
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