How James Bond, Tom Cruise and Will Smith helped street child escape North Korea via China

Charles Ryu became an 11-year-old street child in North Korea in 2005 after his mother died of starvation during a famine.

His Chinese father had moved back to China when he was five, abandoning the family, and after an aunt kicked him out when harsher food rations were imposed he was left to scrounge for food on the streets.

Life was especially hard during the winter months and Ryu and his young friends did whatever they could, even illegal trading, to survive. One of the few forms of entertainment was watching foreign movies and to make extra cash to buy food he sold foreign movies to his friends after copying them on to memory sticks.

Their exposure to foreign media opened their eyes to the outside world and inspired Ryu and some of his friends to escape North Korea.

Now living in the United States, he first made the dangerous border crossing into China in 2008, when he was 14. He credits James Bond movies, those starring Tom Cruise, and Will Smith in the Bad Boys films with inspiring his escape.

“They got me curious about freedom and life outside North Korea,” he said, laughing at the memory. “We’d been brainwashed from a young age. Everything I was taught was a lie … the worst thing was being told North Korean people were richer than South Koreans. That’s what I learned in school.”