90 When I watched TV, because it’s a soap opera it is certainly filmed a little bit with a projection of the future, but the cultural standard was high and right and considerate, when I saw that [I thought], really, these South Koreans, when we looked at South Koreans [before] we disliked them, [thought of] hitting and kicking them because it’s an enemy country, [thought] that they carried pistols and fought like us, I was thinking only this kind of thing, I thought that they did not have the smell of human beings [i.e. that they were not human beings], that they wouldn’t be considerate of others, well, stuff like this I thought, but when I saw their life through the soap operas, it was all human stories, and the love stories, too, were full of emotions and tears, [and I thought], ‘They are human beings just like us’, and when someone was crying in the soap opera, it also made me cry. ‘South Koreans and us, we belong to the same people’, [I thought], when I watched South Korean soap operas, they also made me cry, and so little by little my perceptions started to change. (Kim Jinsun, 2009, 1-4) When I watched that movie they showed some department store and the appearance of that department store, there were also these escalators and, first of all, the floor of that department store was made from marble. … What is more, the goods were laid out and people would chose whatever they liked without anyone cracking down on them, they would choose whatever they liked, [and I thought], ‘Oh, what’s gonna come of it when one just take these things as one pleases?’, because we didn’t have this kind of thing [I thought], ‘How can they do this?’, at these points my mind started to change. … Anyway, in the course of watching South Korean soap operas I could see things like, ‘This is how much South Korean society has developed now’, and through all this I came to make my decision. (Kim Myeonghui, 2009, 3-3) Through TV soap operas, these North Korean refugee women began to think of South Korea as a ‘country full of emotions and tears where people like us live’, and it was this kind of magnetism that eventually changed Kim Jinsun (2009, 1-4) and produced her determination to ‘go there and have a look even if I die’. A part of the North Korean refugee women in China drew closer to South Korea through South Korean soap operas or movies before they actually entered South Korea. Just as South Koreans’ longing for the USA in the 1950s was produced and channelled through American movies, the South Korea that was shown in the movies was presented in a positive light as an advanced country and was transformed into a place where one would want to be. However, the decision to move to South Korea was not reached on the basis of the illusionary South Korea presented in the soap operas alone. When Yun Huijeong (2009, 2-5) narrated that ‘I entrusted my life to heaven, and if [my journey to South Korea] doesn’t work out, then I’ll die here, so I [made up my mind] about suicide and even took a knife with me when I departed’, she also expressed that coming to South Korea ‘really was a road that puts your life on a line’; moving to South Korea means taking a