Outside the camp, too, chronic shortages have removed rice from the daily diets of many North Koreans, especially those in the hostile classes. Teenage defectors from the North, when they arrive in South Korea, have told government counsellors of a recurring dream: they are sitting at a table with their families, eating warm rice. Among the elite in Pyongyang, one of the most coveted signifiers of status is an electric rice cooker.
As Shin watched his mother cook, he guessed she must have stolen the rice, a few grains at a time, from the farm where she worked and secreted it away in her house.
In the bedroom, Shin fumed.
He also listened.
His brother was doing most of the talking. Shin heard that Shin He Geun had not been given the day off. Without permission, he had walked away from the cement factory, where he had apparently done something wrong.
Shin realized his brother was in trouble and that he would probably be punished when the guards caught up with him. His mother and brother were discussing what they should do.
Escape.
Shin was astonished to hear his brother say the word. He was planning to run. His mother was helping him and her precious hoard of rice was food for the flight.
Shin did not hear his mother say that she intended to go along. But she was not trying to argue her eldest into staying, even though she knew that if he escaped or died trying she and others in her family would be tortured and probably killed. Every prisoner knew the first rule of Camp 14, subsection 2: ‘Any witness to an attempted escape who fails to report it will be shot immediately.’
His mother did not sound alarmed, but Shin was. His heart pounded. He was angry that she would put his life at risk for the sake of his older brother. He was afraid he would be implicated in the escape and shot.
He was also jealous that his brother was getting rice.
On the floor of his mother’s bedroom, as the aggrieved thirteen-year-old struggled to contain his fear, Shin’s camp-bred instincts took over: he had to tell a guard. He got up off the floor, went into the kitchen and headed out the door.
‘Where are you going?’ his mother asked.
‘To the toilet,’ he said.
Shin ran back to his school. It was one in the morning. He entered the school dormitory. His teacher had gone home to the gated Bowiwon village.
Who could he tell?
In the crowded dormitory room where his class slept, Shin found his friend Hong Sung Jo and woke him up.
Shin trusted this boy as much as he trusted anyone.
Shin told him what his mother and brother were planning and asked for advice. Hong told him to tell the school’s night guard. They went together. As they walked to the guard’s office in the main school building, Shin thought of a way to profit from his information.
The guard was awake and in uniform. He told both boys to come inside his office.
‘I need to say something to you,’ Shin told the guard, whom he did not know. ‘But before I do, I want to get something in return.’
The guard assured Shin that he would help.
‘I want a guarantee of more food,’ Shin said.
Shin’s second demand was that he be named grade leader at school, a position that would allow him to work less and not be beaten as often.
The guard guaranteed Shin that his requests would be granted.
Accepting the guard’s word, Shin explained what his brother and mother were planning and where they were. The guard telephoned his superiors. He told Shin and Hong to go back to the dormitory and get some sleep. He would take care of everything.
On the morning after he betrayed his mother and brother, uniformed men did come to the schoolyard for Shin.
Just as he wrote in his memoir, and as he told everyone in South Korea, he was handcuffed, blindfolded, pushed into the backseat of a jeep and driven away in silence to an underground prison inside the camp.
But Shin knew why he had been summoned. And the guards in charge of Camp 14, he expected, knew he had tipped them off.
6
‘Do you know why you are here?’
Shin knew what he had done; he had followed camp rules and stopped an escape.
But the officer did not know, or did not care, that Shin had been a dutiful informer.
‘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? How is it possible for you not to know that your mother and brother tried to run away? If you want to live, you should spit out the truth.’
Confused and increasingly frightened, Shin found it difficult to speak. He was an informant. He could not understand why he was being interrogated as an accomplice.
Shin would eventually figure out that the night guard at the school had claimed all the credit for discovering the escape plan. When reporting to his superiors, he had not mentioned Shin’s role.
But on that morning in the underground prison, Shin understood nothing. He was a bewildered thirteen- year-old. The officer with four stars kept asking him about the whys, whens and hows of his family’s escape plan. Shin was unable to say anything coherent.
Finally, the officer pushed some papers across his desk.
‘In that case, bastard, read this and affix your thumbprint at the bottom.’
The document was a family rap sheet. It listed the names, ages and crimes of Shin’s father and of his father’s eleven brothers.
The eldest brother, Shin Tae Sub, was listed first. Next to his name was a date: 1951, the second year of the Korean War. On the same line, Shin saw his uncle’s crimes: disruption of public peace, acts of brutality and defection to the South. The same offences were listed beside the name of Shin’s second oldest uncle.
It took Shin many months to understand what he had been allowed to see. The papers explained why his father’s family had been locked up in Camp 14.
The unforgivable crime Shin’s father had committed was being the brother of two young men who had fled south during a fratricidal war that razed much of the Korean Peninsula and divided hundreds of thousands of families. Shin’s unforgivable crime was being his father’s son. Shin’s father had never explained any of this.
His father later told Shin about the day in 1965 when the family was taken away by the security forces. Before dawn, they forced their way into a house owned by Shin’s grandfather in Mundok County in South Pyongan Province. It’s a fertile farming area located about thirty-five miles north of the capital, Pyongyang. ‘Pack your things,’ the armed men shouted. They did not explain why the family was being arrested or where they were going. At daybreak, a truck showed up for their belongings. The family travelled for an entire day (a distance of about forty-five miles on mountain roads) before arriving at Camp 14.
As ordered, Shin put his thumbprint on the document.
Guards blindfolded him again, led him out of the interrogation room and marched him down a corridor. When they pulled away the blindfold, Shin read the number seven on a cell door. Guards pushed him inside and tossed him a prison uniform.
‘Hey, son of a bitch, change into this.’
The uniform would have fitted a large adult. When Shin pulled it over his short, bony frame, he disappeared into what felt like a burlap sack.
Shin’s cell was a concrete square, barely large enough for him to lie down. It had a toilet in the corner and a sink with running water. The light bulb hanging from the ceiling was on when Shin entered the cell and it could
