한국의 성형수술, 탈북자에게는 큰 도움.

South Korean Plastic Surgeons Help Northern Defectors Erase Their Scars

Nearly 20 years ago, Lee Geung-ja was working the night shift at a factory in North Korea when an accident with melting plastic left her face scarred and discolored. Most of her left eyebrow and eyelid were destroyed. In her own words, she looked like “a monster.”

In 2010, she defected to South Korea, where she lived like a creature of the night, working alone cleaning buildings and bathhouses in the wee hours to avoid being stared at. Her self-consciousness wasn’t helped by the fact that South Korean society places a huge importance on appearance, particularly for women: Plastic surgery is a common gift for daughters after high school or for college graduates hunting for jobs.

“When I walk on the street or have to meet another person, I instinctively lower my face and turn to the left not to show its left side,” Ms. Lee, 40, said in an interview. “In South Korea, where even good-looking people go under the knife, I find it harder to compete with this face.”

Now Ms. Lee is getting help she never dreamed of: A plastic surgeon has volunteered to help her regain some of her old looks — and self-esteem.

It is part of a program started this year by the police and volunteers from the Korean Association of Plastic Surgeons to help defectors from North Korea who are literally scarred by their past.

Since news of the free surgery program spread, dozens of defectors have signed up, including a man who cannot breathe through his nose after it was smashed in a logging camp accident. One woman who had lost a breast to cancer hoped reconstructive surgery would make her more comfortable using a public bathhouse and dating again.

Many of the 28,000 defectors living in the South carry burdens that make it harder for them to resettle in a capitalist society. They are often paid less and are treated as untrained and emotionally unstable workers.

They are also haunted by memories of relatives who starved to death or were banished to prison camps, and by fears for those they left behind in the North. Those same fears compel many, including those interviewed for this article, to adopt pseudonyms in the South to protect their North Korean relatives.

Kim Kyeong-suk, a superintendent at the Yongsan police station in Seoul who helps link defectors to plastic surgeons, came up with the idea for the program after hearing many people from the North say they could not find work because of their scars.

“Surprisingly often, you find defectors carrying big ugly scars, like crude stitches crawling like giant centipedes on their stomach, patches of hair missing from their scalp and other signs of torture, or they wear ideological slogans tattooed on their skin,” she said.

For Lee Cheon-seong, a tattoo was all it took to seal his transformation from patriot to pariah.

In 1986, he and several comrades in their North Korean military unit tattooed themselves with vows of loyalty to Kim Il-sung, the North’s founding president and grandfather of its current leader, Kim Jong-un.

The North Korean authorities permitted soldiers to have tattoos as long as they contained political pledges to defend the fatherland, included vows to be “guns and bombs” for the leader, or swore hatred of the United States.

It was not until Mr. Lee fled a political purge and defected to South Korea last year that he learned that many South Koreans associated tattoos with organized crime.

“The tattoo always became an issue during job interviews and blocked me from getting hired,” Mr. Lee, 45, said. “Besides, it is such a constant reminder of how I was betrayed by the regime I had once worshiped that I feel like cutting it out with a razor blade.”

Dr. Hong Jeong-geun, a board director at the Korean Association of Plastic Surgeons who is removing Mr. Lee’s tattoos on his left arm, said plastic surgeons volunteered to help defectors in part to help their own public image. Through the program, a dozen doctors have met with defectors so far.

Kim Kyeong-suk, a police superintendent in Seoul, poses with a defector from North Korea after a free treatment for burns. 

Seoul is a magnet for those seeking plastic surgery. There are hundreds of clinics offering cosmetic surgery counselors to suggest procedures and advise patients as well as translators for Chinese women who travel for their services. Before and after posters of patients adorn the subways.

Detractors say the practice has gone too far, helping perpetuate the idea that a narrow standard of beauty yields good jobs and successful spouses.

“When our children ask what our profession is, many of us will no longer feel proud to tell them,” Dr. Hong, who runs Metro Plastic Surgery in Seoul, said. He has helped three defectors.

For South Korean officials, helping defectors adjust to life here could be an experiment in managing possible societal problems if the two Koreas were to reunite. As part of those efforts, the government provides free apartments to defectors and subsidizes their education and job training.

According to a government survey taken last year, defectors believe their economic status in the capitalist South is lower than it was in the North’s supposedly classless society.

Defectors earned 66 percent of an average South Korean’s wages, the survey showed. Their unemployment rate was four times the national average, and suicide was three times as common among defectors.

“I often thought of killing myself and my 5-year-old son to end my misery,” said Kim Seon-ah, 37, who wants to erase cigarette burn marks on her head and chest that were inflicted by a Chinese man, the father of her son. She said he had bought her from human traffickers after she fled the North for China in 2003.

“I still have a phobia for men,” she said.

Ms. Lee, the factory worker, said that after her accident she had no access to medicine other than to use saline solution on her wounds.

She fled North Korea in 1998 at the height of a catastrophic famine, entering China as an illegal migrant. She was sent home three times, but each time she fled back to China, where she met a man and gave birth to a boy.

After finally making it to South Korea, Ms. Lee was fascinated by a reality television show that featured drastic makeovers through plastic surgery.

“Just watching it gave me comfort,” said Ms. Lee, who lives in Gimpo, west of Seoul.

Recently, Ms. Lee made her first visit to Dr. Park Sang-hyeon at Semi Beauty and Plastic Surgery in Seoul. The doctor told her she will need multiple surgeries over many months to regain some of her looks. Despite the arduous path ahead, she has developed a modest dream: attending a parents’ meeting at her third-grade son’s school for the first time.

“My biggest fear has been that my son would be ashamed of me when his classmates see my face,” she said.