A North Korean woman who defected to the South in 2017 now says she wishes she could return to the North and “die there.”

“I am so lonely. I want to go back and die there — South Korea is as suffocating as the North,” she told Bloomberg’s Sangmi Cha and Jon Herskovitz.

The woman, identified only by her last name due to safety concerns, said she could only bring one of her sons with her to South Korea. When her family realized they didn’t have enough funds for all of them to flee, her eldest son volunteered to stay behind, she told Bloomberg.

He was beaten to death when the North Korean authorities learned Lee had escaped, she said.

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Her account of life in the South is an indicator that escaping Kim Jong Un’s regime doesn’t guarantee a smooth-sailing life post-defection. But in contrast, North Korea has one of the world’s worst human rights records, and its people struggle with famine and intense food insecurity.

Read more: yahoo