I've decided to put up all the chapters of this story here- 5 all in all. I hope you like them. :)

The events that has transpired in this story were inspired by the accounts of the North Korean defectors I have gathered during a two-week research frenzy on the country. I felt a bit depressed by the constant stream of information that I decided to write it all out in a story. 

A little disclaimer: I can't say that anything here is accurate to the dot because from the most of the stories I have read and watched, most of the defectors travel north towards China. But there was this one incident that stayed with me, it was about how a North Korean Colonel's struggle to escape by boat to cross the border to South Korea. From what I understand, this is infinitely more dangerous that crossing the border to China because it's more heavily guarded than land. They managed to go through alive and he found himself sobbing like a child the moment he stepped foot in the South. 

Also, the famine referenced here happened in 1994-1995. A series of natural disasters left the country so devastated that they had to ask for outside aid, but the government distributed them so unevenly that people left and right were dying from hunger and malnutrition (accounts of people eating grass and mud were common).