‘The children looked very sad, very emaciated, very pathetic,’ a nutritionist who worked on the 2008 food survey told me. She had participated in previous nutrition surveys dating back to the late 1990s and concluded that chronic hunger and severe malnutrition had persisted in much of North Korea despite the spread of markets.
International nutrition surveys have also found a pervasive pattern of geographic inequity. Hunger, stunting and wasting diseases are three to four times more prevalent in remote provinces of North Korea — home to the hostile classes — than they are in and around Pyongyang.
As Shin found in the labour camp, the most secure place for powerless North Koreans to live amid chronic hunger is a farm. By all indications, farmers — excepting those whose land was ruined by floods — weathered the famine far better than city dwellers. Even though they worked on cooperative farms, where crops belonged to the state, they were in a position to hide and hoard food, as well as selling it for cash or trading it for clothing and other necessities.
The government had little choice — after the famine, the collapse of its food-distribution system and the rise of private markets — but to offer farmers higher prices and increase incentives to grow more food. Private farming on small plots of land was legalized in 2002. This allowed more private farm-to-market trade, which increased the power of traders and the autonomy of productive farmers.
Kim Jong Il, however, never warmed to market reform and his government called it ‘honey-coated poison’.
‘It is important to decisively frustrate capitalist and non-socialist elements in their bud,’ according to the
The capitalism that bloomed in the cities and small towns of North Korea weakened the government’s iron grip on everyday life and did little to enrich the state. Kim Jong Il grumbled publicly, saying, ‘Frankly the state has no money, but individuals have two years’ budget worth.’[16]
His government counter-attacked.
As part of the ‘military first’ era that Kim’s government officially proclaimed in 1999, the Korean People’s Army, with more than a million soldiers to feed three times a day, moved aggressively to confiscate a substantial slice of all food grown on cooperative farms.
‘At harvest time, soldiers bring their own trucks to the farms and just take,’ Kwon Tae-jin, a specialist on North Korean agriculture at the Korea Rural Economic Institute, which is funded by the South Korean government, told me in Seoul.
In the far north, where food supplies are historically lean and farmers are regarded as politically hostile, the military takes a quarter of total grain production, Kwon said. In other areas of the country, it takes five to seven per cent. To make sure that workers at state farms do not short change the military, the army stations soldiers at all three thousand of the farms throughout the harvest season. When tens of thousands of city dwellers are brought to the farms to assist with the fall harvest, soldiers monitor them to make sure they do not steal food.
The permanent deployment of soldiers on farms has spawned corruption. Kwon said that farm managers pay off soldiers, who then turn a blind eye to large-scale theft of food that is later sold in private markets. Disputes among groups of corrupt soldiers periodically lead to fistfights and shootouts, according to a number of defectors and reports by aid groups. Good Friends, the Buddhist aid group with informants in the North, reported in 2009 that one soldier on a state farm was stabbed with a sickle during a fight over corn.
Sealed away on the pig farm, Shin heard nothing about the street trading, corruption and extralegal intercity travel that would, in less than two years’ time, help him escape.
Holed up on a mountaintop that was a kind of camp within the camp, he drifted uneventfully through the last of his teenage years, keeping his head down, his mind blank and his energies focused on stealing food. His most vivid memory of those years was getting busted for barbecuing stolen pig intestines. He was beaten, deprived of food for five days, and his cafeteria rations were cut in half for three months.
Turning twenty on the farm, he believed he had found the place where he would grow old and die.
But the pig farm interlude ended abruptly in March 2003. For reasons never explained, Shin was transferred to the camp’s garment factory, a crowded, chaotic, stressful work site where two thousand women and five hundred men made military uniforms.
At the factory, Shin’s life again became complicated. There was relentless pressure to meet production quotas, as well as renewed pressure to snitch. Guards scavenged for sex among the factory’s seamstresses.
There was also a newcomer, an educated prisoner from Pyongyang. He had been schooled in Europe and had lived in China. He was to tell Shin about what he was missing.
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A thousand women stitched together military uniforms during twelve-hour shifts, and when their temperamental foot-powered sewing machines broke down, Shin fixed them.
He was responsible for about fifty machines and the seam-stresses who operated them. If the machines did not spew out their daily quota of army uniforms, Shin and the seamstresses were forced to perform ‘bitter humiliation work’, which meant two extra hours on the floor of the factory, usually from ten to midnight.
Experienced seamstresses could keep their machines in working order, but those who were new, inept, or very ill could not. To fix a broken machine, which was forged out of cast iron at a foundry inside Camp 14, Shin and the other repairmen had to haul it on their backs to a repair shop upstairs.
The extra labour incensed many of the repairmen, who took their anger out on the seamstresses by grabbing their hair, slamming their heads against walls and kicking them in the face. Foremen in the factory, who were prisoners chosen by guards for their toughness, generally looked the other way when seamstresses were beaten. They told Shin that fear encouraged production.
Although he was still short and skinny, Shin was no longer a passive, malnourished, torture-traumatized child. During his first year in the factory, he proved this to himself and to his coworkers in a confrontation with another sewing-machine repairman.
Gong Jin Soo was a hot head. Shin had watched him go into a rage when one of the seamstresses in Gong’s stable broke the axle of her sewing machine. Gong kicked the woman in the face until she collapsed to the floor.
When Gong demanded a feed dog — a crucial part of a sewing machine that controls stitch size by regulating the speed of fabric moving to the needle — from a seamstress who worked with Shin, she curtly refused.
As Shin watched, Gong punched her in the face and bloodied her nose.
Astonishing himself and his seamstresses, Shin lost his composure. He grabbed a large wrench and swung it as hard as he could, trying to crack open Gong’s skull. The wrench crunched into his forearm, which Gong raised just in time to protect his head.
Gong yowled and fell to the floor. The shift foreman who had trained Shin rushed over. He found Shin, wild-eyed and wrench in hand, standing over Gong, whose bloody arm had a lump on it the size of an egg. The foreman slapped Shin’s face and took his wrench, the seamstresses returned to sewing and from then on, Gong kept his distance.
The garment factory is a sprawling cluster of seven large buildings, all of which are visible on satellite photographs. Located near the Taedong River, its grounds lie at the entrance to Valley 2, not far from the hydroelectric dam and factories that make glassware and porcelain.
During Shin’s time at the garment factory, there were dormitories on the grounds for the seamstresses and the men who worked in sewing-machine repair, garment design, plant maintenance and shipping. The factory superintendent was the only Bowiwon on the site. All the other foremen, including the
Working in the factory put Shin in close daily contact with several hundred women in their teens, twenties and thirties. Some were strikingly attractive, and their sexuality created tension on the factory floor. Part of this
