A friend once told Joseph Kim: "If you ever go to China the churches will give you money."
His response was: "What's a church?"
Today he is preparing to begin an undergraduate degree in political science at Bard College, New York, and calls himself a Christian - albeit "not the most ideal" one.
The line that joins the two dots is a remarkable one.
After that conversation, famine in North Korea forced Joseph Kim into a life of petty crime.
A member of a network of homeless thieves called the 'gangster brothers', he ate wild plants, raspberry leaves and insects to survive.
Then he began to move: from his town of Hoeryong in the north of the country, across the river Tumen and into Chinia.
Knocking on doors for food, a woman told him: "You must go to a Christian church. Look for a cross."
Remembering what his friend had said, he unknowingly found himself in a sophisticated underground network supporting North Korean defectors, amongst a group of Chinese-Korean Christians.
"If that hadn't happened, I don't know what other route I could have taken," Kim said in New York.
"I didn't have any relatives or friends I could find inside China, so this was my only hope."
Months later, he was put in touch with LiNK - Liberty in North Korea - a non-religious organisation which helps them seek asylum.
The next step was the US consulate in Shenyang before they secured his final move to the US.
He now attends a South Korean Church in Brooklyn and describes himself as a Christian.
His journey is described in his memoir, 'Under the Same Sky: From Starvation in North Korea to Salvation in America'.