was ready to be assigned to a permanent job inside the camp.
About sixty per cent of Shin’s class was assigned to the coal mines, where accidental death from cave-ins, explosions and gas poisonings was common. Many miners developed black lung disease after ten to fifteen years of working underground. Most miners died in their forties, if not before. As Shin understood it, an assignment in the mines was a death sentence.
The decision about who went where was made by Shin’s teacher, the man who two years earlier had saved Shin’s life by providing him with extra food and halting abuse from his classmates. The teacher handed down assignments without explanation, curtly telling students where they would spend the rest of their lives. As soon as the teacher made his announcements, new masters — foremen from camp factories, mines and farms — came to the school and led the students away.
The teacher told Hong Joo Hyun that he was going to the mines. Shin never saw him again.
The girl who lost her big toe in the mines at the age of eleven, Moon Sung Sim, was assigned to the textile factory.
Hong Sung Jo, the friend who saved Shin from his torturers by confirming that he’d informed on his mother and brother, was also sent to the mines. Shin never saw him again, either.
If there was a rationale behind the assignments, Shin never understood it. He thinks it came down to the personal whim of the teacher, who was consistently unreadable. Perhaps the teacher liked Shin. Perhaps he pitied him. Maybe he had been ordered to look out for the boy. Shin just doesn’t know.
In any case, the teacher again saved his life. He assigned him to a permanent job at Camp 14’s pig farm, where two hundred men and women raised about eight hundred pigs, along with goats, rabbits, chickens and a few cows. Feed for the animals was grown in fields surrounding the livestock pens.
‘Shin In Geun, you’re assigned to the ranch,’ the teacher told him. ‘Work hard.’
Nowhere else in Camp 14 was there so much food to steal.
11
Shin did not work hard.
The foremen would sometimes beat him and other workers who performed poorly, but not seriously and never to death. The pig farm was as good as it got for Shin at Camp 14. He even sneaked the occasional mid- afternoon nap.
Mealtime portions in the farm’s cafeteria were no larger than at the cement factory, the textile mill, or the mines. Nor was the food any better. But between meals, Shin could help himself to ground corn intended for the piglets he fed between November and July. Out in the fields, where he weeded and harvested from August to October, he snacked on corn, cabbage and other vegetables. On occasion, the foremen would bring a cooking pot out to the fields and everyone could eat his or her fill.
The farm was located up in the mountains, away from the river, about half an hour’s walk from Shin’s former school and the house where he had lived with his mother. Women with children walked back and forth to the farm from family housing, but most of the farm workers stayed in a dormitory on the mountain.
Shin slept there on the floor in a room for men. Bullying was not a problem. He did not have to fight for a warm patch of concrete. He slept well.
There was a slaughterhouse on the farm where fifty or so pigs were butchered twice a year, exclusively for guards and their families. As a prisoner, Shin was not allowed to eat pork or the meat of any livestock raised on the farm, but he and other prisoners could sometimes steal. The smell of roasting pork on the farm would alert guards, leading to beatings and weeks of half rations, so they ate purloined pork raw.
What Shin did not do on the farm was think, talk, or dream about the outside world.
No one there mentioned the escape plan that had led to the execution of his mother and brother. The guards did not ask Shin to snitch on fellow workers. The anger that overwhelmed him in the wake of his mother’s death receded into numbness. Before he was tortured, confined in the underground prison and exposed to Uncle’s stories about the world beyond the fence, Shin had been uninterested in anything beyond his next meal.
On the pig farm, that passive blankness returned. Shin uses the word ‘relaxing’ to describe his time on the camp farm, which lasted from 1999 to 2003.
Outside the camp during those years, however, life in North Korea was anything but relaxing.
Famine and floods in the mid-1990s all but destroyed the centrally planned economy. The government’s Public Distribution System, which had fed most North Koreans since the 1950s, collapsed. As a panicked response to hunger and starvation, bartering trade ran wild and private markets exploded in number and importance. Nine out of ten households traded to survive.[15] More and more North Koreans sneaked across the border into China for food, work, trade and flight to South Korea. Neither China nor North Korea released figures, but estimates of these economic migrants ranged from tens of thousands to four hundred thousand.
Kim Jong Il tried to control the chaos. His government created a new network of detention centres for traders who travelled without authorization. But with crackers and cigarettes they could often buy their freedom from hungry police and soldiers. Rail stations, open-air markets and back alleys in major towns became crowded with starving drifters. The many orphaned children found in these places became known as ‘wandering sparrows’.
Shin did not yet know this, but grassroots capitalism, vagabond trading and rampant corruption were creating cracks in the police state that surrounded Camp 14.
Food aid from the United States, Japan, South Korea and other donors mitigated the worst of the famine by the late 1990s. But in an indirect and accidental way, it also energized the market ladies and travelling entrepreneurs who would give Shin sustenance, cover and guidance in his escape to China.
Unlike any other aid recipient in the world, North Korea’s government insisted on sole authority for transporting donated food. The demand angered the United States, the country’s largest aid donor, and frustrated the monitoring techniques that the UN World Food Programme had developed around the world to track aid and make sure it reached the intended recipients. But since the need was so urgent and the death toll so high, the West swallowed its disgust and delivered more than one billion dollars’ worth of food to North Korea between 1995 and 2003.
During these years, refugees from North Korea arrived in the South and told government officials that they had seen donated rice, wheat, corn, vegetable oil, non-fat dried milk, fertilizer, medicine, winter clothing, blankets, bicycles and other aid items on sale in private markets. Pictures and videos taken in the markets showed bags of grain marked as ‘A Gift from the American People’.
Bureaucrats, party officials, army officers and other well-placed government elites ended up stealing about thirty per cent of the aid, according to estimates by outside scholars and international aid agencies. They sold it to private traders, often for dollars or euros, and delivered the goods using government vehicles.
Without intending to do so, wealthy donor countries injected a kind of adrenaline rush into the grubby world of North Korean street trading. The lucrative theft of international food aid whetted the appetite of higher-ups for easy money as it helped transform private markets into the country’s primary economic engine.
Private markets, which today supply most of the food North Koreans eat, have become the fundamental reason why most outside experts say a catastrophic 1990s-style famine is unlikely to happen again. The markets, though, have not come close to eliminating hunger or malnutrition. They also appear to have increased inequity, creating a chasm between those who have figured out how to trade and those who have not.
In late 1998, a few months before Shin was assigned to the pig farm, the World Food Programme conducted a nutrition survey of children, which covered seventy per cent of North Korea. It found that about two thirds of those surveyed were stunted or underweight. The numbers were double that of Angola, then at the end of a long civil war, and the North Korean government became furious when they were released to the public.
Ten years later, when private markets in the North were well established and selling everything from imported fruit to Chinese-made CD players, nutrition in state-run institutions for children and the elderly had barely improved, according to a World Food Programme nutrition survey that was tolerated by the government as a condition of receiving aid.
