Hyuk, who started working at the age of nine in North Korea, said he was sometimes forced into desperate measures to get food, eating spoiled rice or worse, and resorting to theft. “After I was caught stealing, I was beaten hard until I was bleeding. I was really hungry and instinctively, I was thinking about survival,” he said.
He escaped the country as a child, fleeing to China and then across other international borders with the help of a broker arranged by his mother, who was already in South Korea.
While he is happy with his new life, he recalls that it was a wrench to leave his home. “I was hungry and tired, but I was happy surrounded by the people I like, which made it tougher for me to want to come here at first,” he said.
Meanwhile, Kim Seok, the second defector from North Korea, also 25, used to live in a border town near China. He was exposed to K-pop by a friend who shared music videos on a portable media player, including Psy’s 2012 smash ‘Gangnam Style’, and later escaped the country with his father and grandmother when he was 20.
Despite their diverse backgrounds, the bandmates had plenty in common. “I mean, isn’t it fun? Like our group is just a unique type of global,” said Kenny, a Chinese American.
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