@ranuganteng -
LONDON — The defectors who now call "Little Pyongyang" home paid a heavy price to get there.
"My big brother is currently in prison in North Korea and he's not getting released any time soon," Kim Kwang Myong told NBC News. "The reason he is in prison is because of us fleeing the country."
“It was a life-or-death decision”
Around 5,300 miles from North Korea's brutal dictatorship, the bland commuter suburb of New Malden has become an improbable home to hundreds of escapees.
With its sleepy town center and large, semi-detached houses, it is a world away from the human-rights abuses, poverty and isolation of their homeland.
Kim's story is a common one. Like many people here, he fled North Korea but left family members behind. The regime often exercises a merciless policy of collective punishment against remaining relatives, sending them to labor camps, or worse.
Kim, a 46-year-old carpenter, knew this. But he said inhumane conditions in the country gave him no choice.
"When I left North Korea it was a life-or-death decision," he said, speaking while colleagues around him noisily renovated a new Korean butchery in New Malden.
Image: Kim Kwang Myong
Kim Kwang Myong Carolina Reid / NBC News
Picking his moment, Kim bribed some border guards to vacate a stretch of North Korea's river border with China, allowing him to cross with his wife and two children. That was 20 years ago.
He has since lived illegally in China and then in South Korea before coming to the U.K. four years ago.
Kim has tried to help his relatives who stayed behind by sending them money. It was this that led to them being punished after authorities discovered the transactions.
"My younger brother was sent to prison and stayed there for one year but got released. But my big brother has not been so lucky," he said.
His family has suffered, and that knowledge weighs heavily on Kim.
"We are talking about two different worlds, really," he said of the difference between his new and old homes. "The reason why we fled from there is because life over there is really hard. It is simply impossible to live."
Nazi-style camps
Totalitarian North Korea restricts every aspect of public life, throwing people into Nazi-style camps for crimes as petty as "gossiping" about the state. Ordinary citizens are not allowed to access the internet or the international press, instead having to rely on the propaganda of North Korea's state-run media.
The pariah state has come into sharp focus internationally as North Korea's escalating missile and nuclear tests have collided with President Donald Trump's uncompromising rhetoric.
Trump has refused to rule out military action — an option experts warn would likely result in deadly retaliation against American allies and a war that could kill up to 1 million people.
Nonetheless, Kim Jong Un's regime continues to promise to build a nuclear weapon capable of hitting to the U.S. mainland.
So North Koreans wanting to flee is understandable. But their choice of a new life in a nondescript suburb on the other side of the planet needs more explaining.
New Malden sits on the edge of the British capital and the rural county of Surrey. It's the type of place that, despite its ZIP code, most city-dwellers might dismiss as not-really-London.
“We were at a crossroads whether to be sent to prison or fleeing from the country”
It boasts a huge Korean population, officially around 3,500 but with some estimates putting it closer to 20,000 in the wider borough.
Most of these are South Koreans who flocked here, so the theory goes, because it used to be the site of Britain's old Samsung headquarters and the residence of the South Korean ambassador.
Of this community, several hundred are North Korean — making it the largest such community in Europe and one of the biggest outside the Korean Peninsula.
North Korea sees the United States, South Korea and Japan as its arch enemies, so many defectors feel they cannot resettle there. This is either because of lingering misgivings about countries they've been taught to hate, or because they fear their left-behind family members will be treated more harshly if they go there.