Like it or not, Christians play an especially large role in the lives of North Korean defectors.

North Korea holds a special place in the hearts of both South Korean and Korean-American Christian missionaries who look to North Korea as a place with a common past and, possibly, a shared future. And Professor Ju Hui Judy Han, a Korean-American scholar who earned her Ph.D at the University of California at Berkeley and is currently an assistant professor in geography at the University of Toronto, has done much of the groundbreaking research on their efforts, and their effects on defectors’ new lives outside the North.