Role reversal

Former top North Korean actress builds new life as South Korean bar maid

By Sang-Hun Choe ~ The Associated Press

SEOUL, South Korea -- Before she defected, Joo Sun Young was one of North Korea's rare "Class-One" actresses, handpicked to play the coveted role of the regime leader's wife and "mother" of all North Koreans.

Today, she sells beer and sings songs for drunken South Korean businessmen at a low-rent Seoul bar. The crowd knows she once performed for North Korea's inner circle, which is in part why they like hollering for her to fill their glasses.

"I sometimes feel humiliated at how my life has been downgraded. But I thank my customers for coming to my place. This is my life. I have come a long way," she says.

Joo's journey from the spotlights of Pyongyang to the dim lights of backstreet Seoul mirrors both the dreams and fears of many who flee totalitarian North Korea.

Joo was a 16-year-old violin student in 1981 when communist party talent scouts came to her high school in the northeastern town of Kyongsong and took her away. She was handed a baggy military uniform and told she was joining the military.

Reminiscent of the screenings of maidens for the kings of ancient Korea, party officials inspected "every inch" of her body for imperfections. She didn't mind. "I was proud and excited that the party chose me," Joo says.

Couldn't take other roles

Joo got a powerful boost when Kim Jong Il, son and heir of then President Kim Il Sung, handed her the "Class-One" title, reserved for the few actors portraying members of the Kim family. The job was so sacred she was barred from taking other roles.

Joo's best known film was the 1983 epic "Far and Away from the Command Post," in which she played Kim Jong Suk, Kim Il Sung's wife, as a young guerrilla fighting Japanese colonialists.

"The movie was what you in South Korea call a blockbuster."

Joo's exalted life changed after Kim Il Sung died in 1994, famine struck North Korea and actresses scattered to find new jobs.

By then she was married with a son and daughter. To earn extra cash she overstayed a travel visa to China in 2000 to run a border town coffee shop.

Twice she was deported, but bribed North Korean guards to let her back into China. Finally a South Korean government agent in China realized who she was and arranged her flight to Seoul in January 2003.

In August she borrowed $60,000 from a bank to open her bar, Taedongkang Hof, named after the river that runs through Pyongyang. She hired two North Korean women, who, like her, left children behind.

Her background is her attraction, and she entertains customers with nonpolitical South and North Korean ditties, including the popular "Women Are Flowers."

"I am doing very well," she says, "but some customers insult me when they don't like our food and say, 'Is this what you give your men in the North?' I wonder whether they know people are starving in the North."

She's 39 now, and dreams of running a hotel and living to see the reunification of the Koreas and of her family.