‘Yes.’
‘Jang Hye Gyung is your mother’s name?’
‘Yes.’
‘Shin He Geun is the name of your brother?’
‘Yes.’
The officer stared at Shin for about five minutes. Shin could not figure out where the interrogation was headed.
‘Do you know why you’re here?’ the officer asked at last.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Shall I tell you then?’
Shin nodded yes.
‘At dawn today, your mother and your brother were caught trying to escape. That’s why you’re here. Understand? Were you aware of this fact or not?’
‘I … I didn’t know.’
Shin was so shocked by the news that he found it difficult to speak. He wasn’t sure if he was awake or dreaming. The officer became increasingly angry and incredulous.
‘How is it possible for you not to know that your mother and brother tried to run away?’ he asked. ‘If you want to live, you should spit out the truth.’
‘No, I really didn’t know,’ Shin said.
‘And your father didn’t mention anything?’
‘It’s been a while since I was last home,’ Shin replied. ‘When I visited a month ago, I heard nothing.’
‘What kind of grievance does your family have to risk an escape?’ the officer asked.
‘I honestly don’t know anything.’
This was the story that Shin told when he arrived in South Korea in the late summer of 2006. He told it consistently, he told it often and he told it well.
His debriefings in Seoul began with agents from the government’s National Intelligence Service (NIS). Experienced interrogators, they conduct extensive interviews with every North Korean defector and have been trained to screen out the assassins that Kim Jong Il’s government periodically dispatched to the South.
After the NIS, Shin told his story to counsellors and psychiatrists at a government centre for resettlement, then to human rights activists and fellow defectors, and then to the local and international news media. He wrote about it in his 2007 Korean-language memoir, and he told it to me when we first met in December 2008. He elaborated on it nine months later during a week of day-long interviews with me in Seoul.
There was, of course, no way to confirm what he was saying. Shin was the only available source of information about his early life. His mother and brother were dead. His father was still in the camp or perhaps dead too. The North Korean government could hardly set the record straight, since it denies that Camp 14 exists.
On a cloudless morning in Torrance, California, Shin revisited and revised the story.
We’d been working on the book on and off for about a year, and for the past week we had been sitting across from each other in my dimly lit room in a Best Western hotel, slowly sifting through the events of his early life.
A day before this session, Shin said he had something new and important to disclose. He insisted that we find a new translator. He also invited Hannah Song, his then boss and de facto guardian, to listen in. Song was the executive director of Liberty in North Korea, the human rights group that had helped bring Shin to the United States. A twenty-nine-year-old Korean American, she helped Shin manage his money, visas, travel, medical care and behaviour. She jokingly described herself as Shin’s mum.
Shin took off his sandals and tucked his bare feet underneath him on the hotel sofa. I turned on a tape recorder. The sound of morning traffic filtered into the room from Torrance Boulevard. Shin fidgeted with the buttons on his mobile phone.
‘So what’s up?’ I asked.
Shin said he had been lying about his mother’s escape. He invented the lie just before arriving in South Korea.
‘There were a lot of things I needed to hide,’ he said. ‘I was terrified of a backlash, of people asking me, “Are you even human?”’
‘It has been a burden to keep this inside. In the beginning, I didn’t think much of my lie. It was my intent to lie. Now the people around me make me want to be honest. They make me want to be more moral. In that sense, I felt like I need to tell the truth. I now have friends who are honest. I have begun to understand what honesty is. I feel extreme guilt for everything.
‘I was more faithful to the guards than to my family. We were each other’s spies. I know by telling the truth, people will look down on me.
‘Outsiders have a wrong understanding of the camp. It is not just the soldiers who beat us. It is the prisoners themselves who are not kind to each other. There is no sense of community. I am one of those mean prisoners.’
Shin said he did not expect forgiveness for what he was about to disclose. He said he had not forgiven himself. He also seemed to be trying to do something more than expiate guilt. He wanted to explain — in a way that he acknowledged would damage his credibility as a witness — how the camp had warped his character.
He said that if outsiders could understand what political prison camps have done, and are doing, to children born inside the fence, it would redeem his lie and his life.
5
This story begins a day earlier, on the afternoon of Friday, 5 April 1996.
As school wound down for the day, Shin’s teacher surprised him. He told Shin that he did not have to spend the night in the dormitory. He could go home and eat supper with his mother.
The teacher was rewarding Shin for good behaviour. After two years in the dormitory, he had begun to figure a few things out. He was less often a laggard, less often beaten, more often a snitch.
Shin did not particularly want to spend the night at his mother’s place. Living apart had not improved their relationship. He still didn’t trust her to take care of him; she still seemed tense in his presence. The teacher, however, told him to go home. So he went.
As unexpected as it had been for him to be sent home, there was a bigger surprise when he got there. His brother, Shin He Geun, had come home too. He worked at the camp’s cement factory, located several miles away in the far southeast of the camp. Shin barely knew and rarely saw Shin He Geun, who had been out of the house for a decade and was now twenty-one.
All that Shin knew about his brother was that he was not a hard worker. He had rarely been granted permission to leave the factory to see his parents. For him to be in his mother’s house, Shin thought, he must have finally done something right.
Shin’s mother was not delighted when her youngest son showed up unexpectedly for supper. She did not say welcome or that she had missed him.
Then she cooked, using her daily ration of seven hundred grams of corn meal to make porridge in the one pot she owned. With bowls and spoons, she and her sons ate on the kitchen floor. After he had eaten, Shin went to sleep in the bedroom.
Some time later, voices from the kitchen woke him up. He peeked through the bedroom door, curious about what his mother and brother were up to.
His mother was cooking rice. For Shin, this was a slap in the face. He had been served a watery corn soup, the same tasteless gruel he had eaten every day of his life. Now his brother was getting rice.
It is difficult to overstate the importance of rice in North Korean culture. It signifies wealth, evokes the closeness of family and sanctifies a proper meal. Labour camp prisoners almost never eat rice and its absence is a daily reminder of the normality they can never have.
