97 The remark ‘You people, being nothing but North Korean defectors’ constitutes an insult and a contemptuous comment entailing various meanings. A person speaking in this way expresses that ‘since you came over because of poverty’, North Korean refugees have to show submissive obedience and, simultaneously, implies his or her contempt for ‘traitors’. Kim Yeonghui (2009, 1-5) refers to such a situation by talking about a friend’s case. I have a friend who lives quite close to me. Her husband, he beats up his woman all the time. And he does that although he’s Chinese, whenever I go he beats her [saying], ‘Since you came from &orth Korea because there was no food, since you came through China, you have to live in complete obedience. Why do you argue with me? (Kim Yeonghui, 2009, 1-5) In these places, the food rations were small and thus needed to be supplemented by other nourishment which could, once again, only be obtained with money and was thus available only to those who possessed money. “With money you could buy something like bread or dried cuttlefish, but we couldn’t leave [the camp], you know. There was this man, this Gyopo man. He would get money from us and get us these kind of things but he would demand a price around five times more expensive [than the usual price].“ Whenever a fight broke out in the reception camps, forms of physical punishment were applied, for example, women were not allowed to exercise in the yard or the ventilators were switched off. The interviewees emphasized that not being treated as human beings in these refugee centres did not differ from but equalled their experiences in China. The contemptuous remark ‘You people, being nothing but North Korean defectors’ was something they still had to endure in a place they had arrived at in their pursuit of a better life, i.e. on their journey to South Korea. These kind of demeaning comments, which North Korean refugee women can respond to only by negating both their own experiences and their existence, are likely to trigger a sense of humiliation and to send North Korean refugee women into a selfcontradictory psychological state.