When guards dragged her to the gallows, Shin saw that his mother looked bloated. They forced her to stand on a wooden box, gagged her, tied her arms behind her back and tightened a noose around her neck. They did not cover her swollen eyes.
She scanned the crowd and found Shin. He refused to hold her gaze.
When guards pulled away the box, she jerked about desperately. As he watched his mother struggle, Shin thought she deserved to die.
Shin’s brother looked gaunt and frail as guards tied him to the wooden post. Three guards fired their rifles three times. Bullets snapped the rope that held his forehead to the pole. It was a bloody, brain-splattered mess of a killing, a spectacle that sickened and frightened Shin. But he thought his brother, too, had deserved it.
9
Executions of parents for attempted escape were not uncommon in Camp 14. Shin witnessed several before and after his mother’s hanging. It wasn’t clear, though, what happened to the children they left behind in the camp. As far as Shin could determine, none of these children was allowed to go to school.
Except for him.
Perhaps because he was a proven snitch, camp authorities sent him back to school. But his return wasn’t easy.
Trouble started as soon as Shin walked from the execution grounds to his school, where he had a private meeting with his teacher. Shin had known this man for two years (although he never learned his name) and regarded him as relatively fair-minded, at least by camp standards.
At the meeting, though, the teacher was seething. He wanted to know why Shin had tipped off the school’s night guard about the escape plot.
‘Why didn’t you come to me first?’ he shouted.
‘I wanted to, but I couldn’t find you,’ Shin replied, explaining that it was late at night and the teachers’ compound was off-limits to prisoners.
‘You could have waited until the morning,’ the teacher said.
The teacher had not received any credit from his superiors for uncovering the escape plot, and he blamed this miscarriage of justice on Shin, warning the boy that he would pay for his thoughtlessness. When Shin’s class — about thirty-five students — assembled later in the classroom, the teacher pointed at Shin and shouted, ‘Come up front. Kneel!’
Shin knelt on the concrete floor for nearly six hours. When he wiggled to ease his discomfort, the teacher whacked him with a blackboard pointer.
On his second day back at school, Shin walked with his class to a camp farm to gather corn straw and haul it to a threshing floor. Shin pulled an A-frame carrier loaded with straw. It was relatively light work compared to pushing coal carts, but it required that he wear a kind of harness with a leather strap that chafed the tender scars on his lower back and tailbone.
Soon, blood was oozing down his legs, soaking the pants of his school uniform.
Shin dared not complain. His teacher had warned him that he would need to work harder than his classmates to wash away the sins of his mother and brother.
At school and during field work, all students had to ask permission to urinate or defecate. When Shin made his first bathroom request after his release from prison, his teacher said no. Shin tried to hold it during the school day, but ended up peeing his pants a couple of times a week, usually when he and other students were working outside. Since it was winter and very cold, he worked in pants stiff with urine.
Shin had known most of his classmates since they were seven years old and started primary school together. He was smaller than most of the boys in his class, but they had usually treated him as a peer. Now, taking their cue from the teacher, they began to taunt and bully him.
They snatched away his food, punched him in the stomach and called him names. Almost all the names were elaborations on ‘reactionary son of a bitch’.
Shin is not certain if his classmates knew he had betrayed his mother and brother. He believes that his childhood friend, Hong, did not tell anyone. In any case, Shin was never teased for having betrayed his family. That would have been an unpatriotic and risky schoolyard taunt, since all students were under orders from teachers and guards to inform on their families and on each other.
Before his time in prison, Shin had managed to make a strategic classroom alliance. He had become friends with Hong Joo Hyun, the grade leader. (This was the job Shin had tried to win on the night he snitched on his family.) Hong led students on work details and was authorized by the teacher to hit and kick classmates he regarded as shirkers. He was also the teacher’s most trusted informer.
Hong himself could be beaten or denied meals if the class dithered during field work and failed to meet quotas. His position was similar to adult prisoners known as
After Shin’s mother and brother were executed, Hong began to watch Shin carefully. During a road repair assignment, he noticed that Shin had loaded far too many stones in a handcart. Shin tried again and again to push the cart, but it was too heavy for the emaciated boy to budge.
When Shin saw his grade leader approaching with a shovel, he initially expected some help. He thought that Hong would order other students to pitch in and roll the cart. Instead, Hong swung his shovel and struck Shin in the back, knocking him to the ground.
‘Pull your handcart correctly,’ Hong said.
He kicked Shin in the side of the head and told him to stand up. As Shin struggled to get to his feet, Hong again swung his shovel and mashed Shin’s nose, which began to bleed.
After that beating, students who were younger and smaller than Shin began to insult his mother. With the encouragement of the teacher, they called him names and punched him.
Owing to his confinement in the underground cell, Shin had lost much of his strength and nearly all of his endurance. His return to hard labour, long hours and skimpy meals at school made him almost insanely hungry.
In the school cafeteria, he scrounged constantly for spilled cabbage soup, dipping his hand in cold dirty soup that had spilled on the floor and licking his fingers clean. He searched floors, roads and fields for grains of rice, beans, or cow dung that contained undigested kernels of corn.
On a morning work detail in December, a couple of weeks after his return to school, Shin discovered a dried-up ear of corn in a pile of straw and devoured it. Hong Joo Hyun was nearby. He ran over to Shin, grabbed him by the hair, and dragged him to their nearby teacher.
‘Teacher, instead of working, Shin is just scavenging for food.’
As Shin fell to his knees to beg for forgiveness (a ritual abasement that he performed as a matter of instinct), his teacher hit him on the head with his walking stick and shouted for the rest of the class to help punish the scavenger.
‘Come here and slap him,’ the teacher said.
Shin knew what was coming. He had slapped and punched many of his classmates in a round-robin of collective punishment. Students queued up in front of Shin. Girls slapped him on the right cheek, boys on the left. Shin believes they went through five rotations before the teacher said it was time for lunch.
Before his confinement in the secret prison and before his teacher and schoolmates began picking on him, Shin hadn’t thought to blame anyone for his birth inside Camp 14.
His blinkered existence kept him focused on finding food and avoiding beatings. He was indifferent to the outside world, to his parents and to the history of his family. As much as he believed in anything, he believed the guards’ preaching about original sin. As the offspring of traitors, his one chance at redemption — and his only way of averting starvation — was hard work.
Back at school, however, he bristled with resentment. He was not yet hobbled by guilt about his mother and
