Escape from Camp 14 (19 page)

When asking for help in China, Shin was careful not to say too much and avoided long conversations. He told no one that he was an escapee from a political labour camp, fearing that they might be
tempted to turn him over to the police. He also stayed away from hotels and guesthouses, where he feared he would be asked to show identification.

Instead, he spent many of his nights in PC bangs, the ubiquitous East Asian Internet cafés where young, mostly unmarried men play computer games and surf the Internet around the clock.

Shin found he could get directions and some rest at a PC bang, if not exactly sleep. He looked like many of the aimless, unemployed young men who hang out in such places, and no one asked him
for papers.

After eight churches turned him away in Chengdu, Shin made the long, miserable bus trip back to Beijing, where for ten days he refocused his job search on Korean restaurants. Sometimes the
owners or managers would feed him or give him a bit of money, but none offered him a job.

As he failed to find work, Shin did not panic or get discouraged. Food meant a lot more to him than it means to most people, and everywhere he went in China there was an impressive abundance of
it. To his amazement, China was a place where even dogs seemed well fed, and if he ran low on cash to buy food, he begged. He found that Chinese people would usually give him something.

Shin came to believe that he would never starve, and that alone calmed his nerves and gave him hope. He did not have to break into houses to find food, money or clothing.

Shin left Beijing and took a seventy-mile bus ride to Tianjin, a city of ten million people, where he again approached the Korean churches. Pastors once more offered him petty cash, but no work
or lodging. He took a bus about two hundred and twenty miles south to Jinan, a city of five million, and spent five days searching out more Korean churches. Still, no work.

Again, he moved south. On 6 February 2006 – a year and one week after he’d crossed the frozen Tumen River into China – Shin arrived in Hangzhou, a city of about six million
people in the Yangtze River Delta. At the third Korean restaurant he walked into, the owner offered him a job.

The restaurant, called Haedanghwa Korean Cuisine, was hectic and Shin worked long hours, washing dishes and cleaning tables. After eleven days, he had had enough. He told the owner he was
quitting, collected his pay and boarded a bus bound for Shanghai, about ninety miles to the south.

At a Shanghai bus station, Shin browsed through a Korean-language magazine, found a list of Korean restaurants and went off again in search of work.

‘May I meet the owner of this place?’ Shin asked a waitress in the first restaurant on his list.

‘Why do you ask?’ the waitress replied.

‘I am from North Korea, I just got off the bus and I have no place to go,’ Shin said. ‘I was wondering if I could work in this restaurant.’

The waitress said the owner was not available.

‘Is there anything I can do here?’ Shin begged.

‘There are no jobs, but that man eating over there says he’s from Korea, so you should ask him.’

The waitress pointed to a customer eating a late lunch.

‘Excuse me, I am from North Korea, looking for a job,’ Shin said. ‘Please help me.’

After studying Shin’s face for a while, the man asked him where his hometown was. Shin said he was from Bukchang, the town near Camp 14 where he had stolen his first bag of rice.

‘Are you really from North Korea?’ the man asked, pulling out a reporter’s notebook and beginning to scribble notes.

Shin had stumbled upon a journalist, a Shanghai-based correspondent for a major South Korean media company.

‘Why did you come to Shanghai?’ he asked Shin.

Shin repeated what he had just said: he was looking for work and he was hungry. The journalist wrote everything down. This was not the kind of conversation Shin was used to. He had never met a
journalist before and it made him anxious.

After a long silence, the man asked Shin if he wanted to go to South Korea – a question that made Shin even more anxious. By the time Shin got to Shanghai, he had long since abandoned any
hope of travelling to South Korea. He told the journalist he could not go there because he had no money.

The man suggested that they leave the restaurant together. Outside on the street, he stopped a cab, told Shin to get in and climbed in beside him. After several minutes, he told Shin they were
going to the South Korean Consulate.

Shin’s growing unease turned to panic when the journalist went on to explain that there could be danger when they got out of the taxi. He told Shin that if anyone grabbed him, he should
shake them off and run.

As they neared the consulate, they saw police cars and several uniformed officers milling around its entrance. Since 2002, the Beijing government had been attempting, with considerable success,
to stop North Koreans from rushing into foreign embassies and consulates to seek asylum.

Shin had stayed away from the Chinese police. Fearing arrest and deportation, he hadn’t dared break into houses for clothes or food. He had tried to be invisible, and he had succeeded.

Now a stranger was taking him into a heavily guarded building and advising him to run if police tried to apprehend him.

When the taxi stopped in front of a building flying the South Korean flag, Shin’s chest felt heavy. Out on the street, he feared he would not be able to walk. The journalist told him to
smile and put his arm around Shin, pulling him close to his body. Together they walked towards the consulate gate. Speaking in Chinese, the journalist told police that he and his friend had
business inside.

The police opened the gate and waved them through.

Once inside, the journalist told Shin to relax, but he did not understand he was safe. Diplomatic immunity did not make sense to him. Despite repeated assurances from consulate staff, he could
not believe he was really under the protection of the South Korean government.

The consulate was comfortable, South Korean officials were helpful and there was another North Korean defector inside the consulate to talk to.

For the first time in his life, Shin showered daily. He had new clothes and fresh underwear. Rested, scrubbed and feeling increasingly safe, Shin waited for paperwork to be processed that would
allow him to travel to South Korea.

He heard from officials in the consulate that the journalist who had helped him – and who still does not want his name or news organization made public – had got into trouble with
the Chinese authorities.

Finally, after six months inside the consulate, Shin flew to Seoul, where the South Korean National Intelligence Service took an uncommon interest in him. During interrogations that lasted an
entire month, Shin told NIS agents his life story. He tried to be as truthful as possible.

PART THREE

When intelligence agents were finished with Shin, he reported to Hanawon, which means ‘House of Unity’ in Korean. It’s a government-run resettlement centre
perched in verdant hill country about forty miles south of Seoul, a sprawling megalopolis of more than twenty million people. The complex looks like a well-funded, security-obsessed mental
hospital: three-storey redbrick buildings encircled by a high fence surmounted by video cameras and patrolled by armed guards.

Hanawon was built in 1999 by the Ministry of Unification to house, feed and teach North Korean defectors how to adjust and survive in the South’s ultra-competitive capitalist culture.

To that end, the centre has a staff of psychologists, career counsellors and teachers of everything from world history to driving. There are also doctors, nurses and dentists. During their
three-month stay, defectors learn their rights under South Korean law and go on field trips to shopping centres, banks and subway stations.

‘Everyone who defects has adjustment problems,’ Ko Gyoung-bin, director-general of Hanawon, told me when I visited the complex.

Initially, Shin seemed to be adjusting better than most.

Field trips did not surprise or frighten him. Having navigated several of China’s largest and most prosperous cities on his own, he was accustomed to pushy crowds, tall buildings, flashy
cars and electronic gadgets.

During his first month at Hanawon, he received documents and photo identification that certified his South Korean citizenship, which the government automatically bestows on all those who flee
the North. He also attended classes that explained the many government benefits and programmes offered to defectors, including a free apartment, an eight-hundred-dollar-a-month settlement stipend
for two years and as much as eighteen thousand dollars if he stuck with job training or higher education.

In a classroom with other defectors, he learned that the Korean War started when North Korea launched an unprovoked surprise invasion of the South on 25 June 1950. It’s a history lesson
that flabbergasts most newcomers from the North. Beginning in early childhood, their government has taught them that South Korea started the war with the encouragement and armed assistance of the
United States. At Hanawon, many defectors flatly refuse to believe that this fundamental pillar of North Korean history is built on a lie. It is a reaction comparable to the way Americans might
respond to someone who told them that World War II started in the Pacific after an American sneak attack on Tokyo harbour.

Since Shin had been taught next to nothing in Camp 14, a radically revised history of the Korean Peninsula was not meaningful to him. He was far more interested in classes that taught him how to
use a computer and find information on the Internet.

But towards the end of his first month at Hanawon, just as he had begun to feel comfortable there, Shin started to experience disturbing dreams. He saw his mother hanged and Park’s body on
the fence, and visualized the torture he believed his father had been subjected to after his escape. As the nightmares continued, he dropped out of a course in automobile repair. He did not take
his driving test. He stopped eating. He struggled to sleep. He was all but paralysed by guilt.

Nearly all defectors arrive at Hanawon showing clinical symptoms of paranoia. They whisper and get in fistfights. They are afraid to disclose their names, ages or places of
birth. Their manners often offend South Koreans. They tend not to say ‘thank you’ or ‘sorry’.

Questions from South Korean bank tellers, whom they meet on field trips to open bank accounts, often terrify defectors. They doubt the motives of nearly all people in positions of authority.
They feel guilty about those they left behind. They fret, sometimes to the point of panic, about their educational and financial inferiority to South Koreans. They are ashamed of the way they
dress, talk and even wear their hair.

‘In North Korea, paranoia was a rational response to real conditions and it helped these people survive,’ said Kim Heekyung, a clinical psychologist who spoke to me in her office at
Hanawon. ‘But it keeps them from understanding what is going on in South Korea. It is a real obstacle to assimilation.’

Teenagers from the North spend two months to two years at Hangyoreh Middle-High School, a government-funded remedial boarding school affiliated with Hanawon. It was built in 2006 to help newly
arrived youngsters from the North, most of whom are not fit to attend public school in South Korea.

Nearly all of them struggle with basic reading and maths. Some are cognitively impaired, apparently from acute malnourishment as infants. Even among the brightest youngsters, their knowledge of
world history essentially comprises the mythical personal stories of their Great Leader, Kim Il Sung, and his Dear Son, Kim Jong Il.

‘Education in North Korea is useless for life in South Korea,’ Gwak Jong-moon, principal of Hangyoreh, told me. ‘When you are too hungry, you don’t go to learn and
teachers don’t go to teach. Many of our students have been hiding in China for years with no access to schools. As young children in North Korea, they grew up eating bark off trees and
thinking it was normal.’

During field trips to the movies, young defectors often panic when the lights go down, afraid that someone might kidnap them. They are bewildered by the Korean spoken in South Korea, where the
language has been infected with Americanisms such as
syop’ing
(shopping) and
k’akt’eil
(cocktail). They find it incredible that money is stored in plastic
k’uredit k’adus
.

Pizza, hot dogs and hamburgers – staples of South Korean teen cuisine – give them indigestion. So does too much rice, a one-time staple that has become a food for the rich in
post-famine North Korea.

One teenage girl at Hangyoreh School gargled with liquid fabric softener, mistaking it for mouthwash. Another used laundry detergent as baking flour. Many are terrified when they first hear the
noise of an electric washing machine.

In addition to being paranoid, confused and intermittently technophobic, defectors tend to suffer from preventable diseases and conditions that are all but nonexistent in South Korea. The head
nurse at Hanawon for the past decade, Chun Jung-hee, told me that a high percentage of women from the North have chronic gynecological infections and cysts. She said many defectors arrive infected
with tuberculosis that has never been treated with antibiotics. They also commonly arrive with chronic indigestion and hepatitis B.

Routine medical ailments are often difficult to diagnose, the nurse said, because defectors are unaccustomed to and suspicious of doctors who ask personal questions and prescribe medications.
Men, women and children have serious dental problems resulting from malnutrition and a lack of calcium in their diets. Half the money spent annually on medical care at Hanawon goes on prosthetic
dental treatment.

Many, if not most, defectors arriving at Hanawon escaped North Korea with the help of brokers based in South Korea. The brokers wait eagerly for defectors to graduate from the settlement centre
and begin receiving monthly stipends from the government. Then they demand their money. Anxiety about debt torments defectors inside Hanawon, the head nurse told me.