Escape from Camp 14 (18 page)

The farmer bought Shin antibiotics for the burns on his legs, along with warm winter clothes and work boots. Shin soon threw away the stolen, ill-fitting clothes that identified him as a North
Korean.

He had a room of his own, where he slept on the floor with several blankets. He was able to sleep as much as ten hours a night, an unimaginable luxury. The young woman in the house – Shin
found out she was the farmer’s mistress – cooked for him and taught him rudimentary Chinese.

He worked from dawn until seven or eight at night for his sixty cents a day. Besides tending pigs, he hunted with the farmer for wild boar in the surrounding mountains. After the farmer shot
them, Shin lugged their carcasses out of the woods for slaughter and commercial sale.

While the work was often exhausting, no one slapped, kicked, punched or threatened Shin. Fear began to ebb away as abundant food and sleep made it possible for him to regain his strength. When
police visited the farm, the farmer told Shin to pretend to be a mute. The farmer vouched for his good character, and the police went away.

The capacity of the Chinese borderlands to absorb North Koreans is significant – and significantly underappreciated outside of Northeast Asia. The area is not all that
foreign or unwelcoming to Korean-speaking migrants.

When defectors cross into China, the first ‘foreigners’ they encounter are usually ethnic Koreans who speak the same language, eat similar food and share some of the same cultural
values. With a bit of luck, they can, like Shin, find work, shelter and a measure of safety.

This has been going on since the late 1860s, when famine struck North Korea and starving farmers fled across the Tumen and Yalu Rivers into northeast China. Later, China’s imperial
government recruited Korean farmers to create a buffer against Russian expansion, and Korea’s Choson Dynasty allowed them to depart legally. Before World War II, the Japanese who occupied the
Korean Peninsula and northeast China pushed tens of thousands of Korean farmers across the border to weaken China’s hold on the region.

Nearly two million ethnic Koreans now live in China’s three northeast provinces, with the highest concentration in Jilin, which Shin entered when he crawled across the frozen river. Inside
Jilin Province, China created the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, where forty per cent of the population is ethnic Korean and where the government subsidizes Korean-language schools and
publications.

Korean speakers living in northeast China have also been an unsung force for cultural change inside North Korea. They have affected this change by watching South Korean soap operas on home
satellite dishes, recording low-quality video CDs and smuggling hundreds of thousands of them across the border into North Korea, where they sell for as little as fifteen cents, according to
Rimjin-gang
magazine.

South Korean soaps, which display the fast cars, opulent houses and surging confidence of South Korea, are classified as ‘impure recorded visual materials’ and are illegal to watch
in North Korea. But they have developed a huge following in Pyongyang and other cities, where police officers assigned to confiscate the videos are reportedly watching them and where teenagers
imitate the silky intonations of the Korean language as it’s spoken by upper-crust stars in Seoul.
³

These TV programmes have demolished decades of North Korean propaganda, which claims that the South is a poor, repressed and unhappy place, and that South Koreans long for unification under the
fatherly hand of the Kim dynasty.

However, in the past half century, the governments of China and North Korea have cooperatively used their security forces to make sure that the intermittent seepage of Koreans across the border
never turns into a flood. A secret agreement on border security was signed between the two countries in the early 1960s, according to the South Korean government, and a second agreement in 1986
committed China to sending North Korean defectors back home, where they often face arrest, torture and months or years of forced labour.

By imprisoning its citizens inside the country, North Korea defies an international agreement it has pledged to uphold. The 1966 agreement says, ‘Everyone shall be free to leave any
country, including his own.’
⁴

By defining all North Korean defectors as ‘economic refugees’ and sending them home to be persecuted, China defies its obligations as a signatory to a 1951 international refugee
convention. Beijing refuses to allow defectors to make claims for asylum and prevents the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees from working along the border with North Korea.

International law, in effect, has been trumped by the strategic interests of North Korea and China. A mass exodus from North Korea could substantially depopulate the country, undermine its
already inadequate capacity to grow food and weaken, or perhaps even topple, the government. The risk of such an exodus increases as China’s economy soars, North Korea’s sinks and word
spreads that life is better in China.

For the Chinese government, an uncontrolled surge of impoverished Korean refugees is undesirable for several reasons. It would dramatically worsen poverty in China’s three northeast
provinces, which have largely missed out on the wealth generated by the country’s economic boom. More importantly, it might precipitate regime collapse in North Korea and lead to the
unification of the Korean Peninsula under a Seoul-based government closely allied with the United States. In the process, China would lose a key buffer between one of its poorest regions and a
united, affluent and West-oriented Korea. That, in turn, could arouse nationalist sentiments among ethnic Koreans in the Chinese borderlands.

Beijing’s distaste for North Korean defectors, as enforced by police and border soldiers, is well understood by farmers, factory foremen and other bosses in China’s northeast
provinces.

But, as Shin found out, they are quite willing to ignore national directives when presented with an industrious North Korean who keeps his mouth shut and works hard for sixty cents a day.
Chinese employers are also free to cheat, abuse, or get rid of their North Korean help at any time.

Within a month, Shin’s arrangement with the farmer turned sour.

He was fetching water from a brook near the farm when he met two other North Korean defectors. They were hungry, cold and living in an abandoned shack in the woods not far from the pig farm.
Shin asked the Chinese farmer to help them out, and he did so, but with a reluctance and resentment that Shin was slow to notice.

One of the defectors was a woman in her forties who had crossed the border before. She had an estranged Chinese husband and a child who lived nearby and she wanted to contact them by phone. The
farmer allowed her to use his telephone. Within a few days, she and the other defector were gone. But giving shelter to three North Koreans had annoyed the farmer, and he told Shin that he, too,
would have to go.

The farmer knew of another job: tending livestock up in the mountains. He offered to drive Shin there in his car. After driving on mountain roads for two hours, the farmer dropped Shin off at a
friend’s cattle ranch. It was not far from Helong, a city of about eighty-five thousand people. If Shin worked hard, the farmer told him, he would be generously compensated.

Only when the farmer drove away did Shin discover that no one on the ranch spoke Korean.

For the next ten months, Shin stayed where the pig farmer had left him, tending cattle in mountain pastures and sleeping on a ranch-house floor with two surly Chinese cowhands.
He was free to leave whenever he wanted, but he didn’t know where to go or what else to do.

The future was to have been Park’s responsibility. Back in Camp 14, Park had assured Shin that once they made it to China he would arrange for passage to South Korea. Park would enlist the
help of his uncle in China and they would be provided with money, paperwork and contacts. But Park was dead and South Korea seemed impossibly far away.

Staying put, though, had some benefits. Shin’s legs healed, with scar tissue finally covering the electricity burns. From the cowherds and ranch manager he learned some conversational
Chinese, and for the first time in his life he had access to an electric dream-making machine.

A radio.

Shin fiddled with its dial nearly every morning, switching between the dozen or so Korean-language stations that broadcast daily into North Korea and northeast China. These stations, with
funding from South Korea, the United States and Japan, mix Asian and world news with sharply critical coverage of North Korea and the Kim dynasty. They focus on the North’s chronic food
shortages, human rights violations, military provocations, nuclear programme and dependence on China. Considerable airtime is devoted to the comfortable lives, by North Korean standards, of
defectors living in South Korea, where they receive housing and other subsidies from the government in Seoul.

Defectors run some of these stations – with financial assistance from the United States and other sources – and they have recruited reporters inside North Korea. These reporters, who
use mobile phones and smuggle out sound and video recordings on tiny USB memory sticks, have revolutionized news coverage of North Korea. It took months for the outside world to learn of economic
reforms that eased restrictions on private markets in North Korea in 2002. Seven years later, when the North Korean government launched a disastrous currency reform that impoverished and enraged
tens of thousands of traders, the news was reported within hours by Free North Korea Radio.

Inside North Korea, the penalty for listening to these stations can be ten years in a labour camp. But the country has been flooded in recent years with three-dollar radios smuggled in from
China, and between five and twenty per cent of North Koreans are tuning in daily, according to survey research gathered in China from defectors, traders and other border crossers.
¹
Many of them have told researchers that listening to foreign radio provided an important motivation for leaving the country.
²

Listening on the Chinese cattle ranch, Shin was comforted to hear voices speaking a language he understood. He heard the thrilling news that several hundred North Korean defectors had been flown
from Vietnam to Seoul a year before. He paid particularly close attention to reports about border-crossing conditions, the routes defectors were taking to travel from China to South Korea and the
lives they led after getting there.

Shin struggled, though, to make sense of most of what he heard on the radio.

The broadcasts were targeted at educated North Koreans, who had grown up with state media that venerates the godlike powers and wisdom of the Kim family dynasty and also warns that Americans,
South Koreans and Japanese are scheming to take over the entire Korean Peninsula. Camp 14 had cut Shin out of this propaganda loop, and he listened to the West’s counterpropaganda with the
ears of a child – curious, confused, sometimes even bored, but always lacking in context. Without a common language to communicate with anyone, his loneliness on the cattle ranch became
greater than it had been in the labour camp.

In late 2005, with winter rolling into the mountains, Shin decided to make his move.

He had heard on the radio that Korean churches in China sometimes helped defectors, so he came up with a sketchy plan. He would travel west and south, putting as much distance as possible
between himself, North Korea and the border patrol soldiers, then he would seek out friendly Koreans. With their help, he hoped to find a stable job in southern China and build at school, a
position a low-profile life. He had by now given up all hope of reaching South Korea.

Shin knew enough Chinese by then to tell the manager of the cattle ranch why he was leaving. He explained that if he continued to live near the border, he would be arrested by the police and
forcibly sent back to North Korea.

Without saying much, the manager paid him six hundred yuan, or about seventy-two dollars. For the ten months he had tended the cattle, it amounted to less than twenty-five cents a day. Based on
the sixty cents a day he had earned at the pig farm, Shin had expected to be paid at least twice as much.

He had been cheated, but like all North Koreans working in China he was in no position to protest. As a going-away present, the ranch manager gave Shin a map and took him to the bus station in
nearby Helong.

Compared to travelling in North Korea, Shin found it easy and safe to travel in China. His clothing – a gift from the pig farmer – was made locally and attracted little attention.
Travelling alone and keeping his mouth shut, he discovered that his face and manner did not advertise his identity as a North Korean on the run.

Even when Shin mentioned that he came from North Korea in conversation with the ethnic Koreans he appealed to for food, cash, or work, he learned that he was nobody special. A long line of
defectors had come begging ahead of him. Most of the people he encountered were not alarmed by or interested in North Koreans. They were sick of them.

No one asked to see Shin’s identification papers when he bought a ticket in Helong for the one-hundred-and-five-mile bus ride to Changchun, the capital of Jilin Province,
or when he boarded a train for the five-hundred-mile journey to Beijing, or when he travelled more than a thousand miles by bus to Chengdu, a city of five million people in southwest China.

Shin started to look for work when he arrived in Chengdu, a destination he had picked randomly at the bus station in Beijing.

At a Korean restaurant, he found a magazine that listed the names and addresses of several small churches. At each church, he asked to speak to the pastor, explaining that he was a North Korean
in need of help. Ethnic Korean pastors gave him cash – as much as fifteen dollars’ worth of yuan – but none offered work or lodging. They also told him to go away. It was illegal,
they said, to help a defector.