His confidence ran deep, to the core.

"His confidence ran deep, to the core.
He was never self-pitying and never expressed regrets about defecting, although he worried about not seeing his parents again.
He took enormous satisfaction in the tiniest freedoms in his new life."

""We can't release that unless you're immediate family. Sorry."
"She was my fiancee, my first love," Jun-sang pleaded.
The agent was sentimental, and offered to make inquiries.
The next day he came in and told Jun-sang he would give him her phone number, but he felt Jun-sang ought to know that she was married.
He was astounded. In retrospect, Jun-sang conceded that it was ridiculous for him to assume she was single and the height of arrogance to think she might be waiting for him.
Mi-ran was by this time thirty-one years old.
They'd had no contact for more that six years.
......He tried to comfort himself.
He remembered a poem by the nineteenth-century Hungarian poet Sandor Petofi that he'd recited as he crossed the Tumen River:

Liberty and love,
These two I must have.
For my love I'll sacrifice
My life.
For liberty I'll sacrifice
My love.

The poem had moved him long ago when he'd read it in Pyongyang, and he'd memorized the words.
He had sacrificed his love for Mi-ran to remain in Pyongyang.
He'd never put her first in his life.
He'd come to South Korea for freedom and that alone."

"In North Korea, Jan-sang had the better class background, the money , the fancy Japanese sweaters, and the Pyongyang education.
Now he was fresh off the boat with no money and no connections. His North Korean education was useless in South Korea.
Everything he'd learned about science and technology was obsolete.
He had no immediate propspects of a good career and was stuck doing odd jobs such as delivering food on a motorbike.......Jan-sang shrrgged it off. He didn't let little jabs from South Koreans bug him."

"He dressed in denim precisely because he'd been unable to in North Korea.
He grew his hair down to his shoulders......He read voraciously.
In North Korea, he'd managed to get something of a liberal arts education, but therer were gaps.
I often gave him books to read.
His favorite was a translation of 1984. He marveled that George Orwell could have so understood the North Korean brand of totalitarianism."

"Jun-sang told me he had gone back to school to get a pharmacist's license, a resonably quick way to establish himself in a new profession.
During school vacations, he installed ventilation systems on a construction site in the suburbs.
These seemed like odd choices for somebody of his background, and he admitted as much.
I suspected he would be doing something different by the next time we met."

Barbara Demick, Nothing to envy: Ordinary lives in North Korea