was due to their ill-fitting uniforms and the fact that they had no bras and few wore underwear. Sanitary napkins were not available.
As a twenty-year-old virgin, Shin was nervous around these women. They interested him, but he worried about the camp rule that prescribed death for prisoners who had sexual relations without prior approval. Shin said he was careful not to get involved with any of the women, but the prohibition on sex meant nothing to the factory superintendent and the handful of favoured prisoners who served as foremen.
The superintendent, a guard in his thirties, wandered among the seamstresses like a buyer at a cattle auction. Shin watched him choose a different girl every few days, ordering her to come and clean his room, which was located inside the factory. Seamstresses not cleaning the superintendent’s room were fair game for the chief foreman and other prisoners with supervisory jobs in the factory.
Women had no choice but to comply. There was also something in it for them, at least in the short term. If they pleased the superintendent or one of the foremen, they could expect less work and more food. If they broke a sewing machine, they were not beaten.
One seamstress who regularly cleaned the superintendent’s room was Park Choon Young, whom Shin knew from secondary school and who operated a sewing machine that he maintained. She was twenty-two and exceptionally pretty. Four months after she began spending afternoons in the superintendent’s room, Shin heard from another former schoolfriend that she was pregnant.
Her condition was kept secret until her belly began to poke through her uniform, then she disappeared.
Shin learned how to tell from a sewing machine’s sound what was wrong with it, but he was less adept at lugging the bulky machines to the repair shop. In the summer of 2004, while carrying one up a flight of stairs on his back, it slipped from his grasp. The sewing machine tumbled down the stairwell, broken beyond repair.
His immediate superior, the foreman who had been patient with Shin as he learned the ropes in the factory, slapped Shin a few times when he saw the ruined machine and reported the damage up the factory’s chain of command. Sewing machines were considered more valuable than prisoners, and ruining one was regarded as a grave offence.
A few minutes after he dropped the sewing machine, Shin was called into the office of the plant superintendent, along with the chief foreman and the floor foreman who had reported the incident.
‘What were you thinking?’ the superintendent shouted at Shin. ‘Do you want to die? How could you be so weak that you lost your grip? You’re always stuffing your face with food.’
‘Even if you die, the sewing machine can’t be brought back,’ the superintendent added. ‘Your hand is the problem. Cut his finger off!’
The chief foreman grabbed Shin’s right hand and held it down on a table in the superintendent’s office. With a kitchen knife, he hacked Shin’s middle finger off just above the first knuckle.
Shin’s foreman helped him leave the superintendent’s office and escorted him back to the factory floor. Later that night, the foreman took Shin to the camp’s health centre, where a prisoner who worked as a nurse soaked his finger in salt water, stitched it up and wrapped it in cloth.
That did not keep it from getting infected. But from his time in the underground cell, Shin remembered how Uncle had rubbed salted cabbage soup into his wounds. At mealtimes, Shin soaked his finger in soup. The infection did not spread into the bone and within three months new skin healed over the stumpy finger.
For the first two days after the injury, Shin’s foreman filled in on the factory floor. It was an unexpected gesture of concern that allowed Shin to recover. The kind foreman did not last long on the job. He disappeared, along with his wife, a few months after Shin dropped the sewing machine. Shin heard from other repairmen that the foreman’s wife, while out working in the woods, had stumbled upon a secret execution in a mountain gorge.
Before the foreman disappeared, he brought Shin a gift.
‘It’s rice flour, and your father wants you to have it,’ the foreman said.
At the mention of his father’s name, Shin became angry. Although he had tried to repress it, the resentment he felt towards his mother and brother had grown since their deaths, poisoning his feelings for his father. Shin wanted nothing to do with him.
‘You eat it,’ Shin said.
‘Your father intended it for you,’ the foreman replied, looking puzzled. ‘Shouldn’t you eat it?’
Despite his hunger, Shin refused.
With so many prisoners working so close together, the factory was a petri dish for snitching.
A co-worker betrayed Shin a few weeks after he dropped the sewing machine. His shift had failed to meet the day’s production quota and was required to do bitter humiliation work. Along with three other repairmen, Shin did not get back to his dormitory room until after midnight.
They were all wildly hungry and one suggested they raid the factory’s vegetable garden, where there were cabbages, lettuce, cucumbers, eggplant and radishes. It was raining and there was no moonlight, so they figured the chances of being caught were low. They snuck outside, filled their arms with vegetables and brought them back to their room, where they ate and fell asleep.
In the morning, the four were called to the superintendent’s office. Someone had reported their midnight meal. The superintendent whacked each of them on the head with a stick. He then told one repairman, Kang Man Bok, to leave the room. A snitch can smell a snitch, and Shin instinctively knew Kang had informed.
The superintendent ordered that rations for the three remaining men be cut in half for two weeks, and he clubbed them on the head a few more times. Returning to the factory, Shin noticed that Kang would not meet his eye.
Soon, Shin was asked to spy on his fellow workers. The superintendent called him to his office and said that to wash away the sins of his mother and brother, he had to report wrong-doers. It took Shin two months before he found one.
Lying sleepless on the floor one night, he watched as a roommate, a transport worker named Kang Chul Min, who was in his late twenties, got up and began mending his work trousers. He used a swatch of military uniform cloth to cover a hole in his pants. Apparently he had stolen the cloth from the factory floor.
The following morning, Shin went to the superintendent.
‘Teacher, I saw a stolen piece of cloth.’
‘Really? Who had it?
‘It was Kang Chul Min, in my room.’
Shin worked late that night in the factory and was among the last of the sewing-machine repairmen to walk into a ten o’clock meeting of ideological struggle, a mandatory session of self-criticism.
As he entered the room, he saw Kang Chul Min. He was on his knees and bound in chains. His bare back was covered with welts from a whip. His secret girlfriend, a seamstress whom Shin had heard rumours about, knelt beside him. She, too, was in chains. They remained kneeling in silence throughout the ninety-minute meeting. When it ended, the superintendent ordered each worker to slap Kang and his girlfriend in the face before leaving the room. Shin slapped them both.
He heard that they were then dragged outside and forced to kneel on a concrete floor for several more hours. The two never figured out who had reported the stolen cloth. Shin did his best to avoid their eyes.
13
The superintendent had another job for Shin.
Park Yong Chul, short and stout, with a shock of white hair, was an important new prisoner. He had lived abroad, his wife was well-connected and he knew senior people in the North Korean government.
The superintendent ordered Shin to teach Park how to fix sewing machines and to become his friend. Shin was to report back on everything Park said about his past, his politics and his family.
‘Park needs to confess,’ the superintendent said. ‘He’s holding out on us.’
In October 2004, Shin and Park began spending fourteen hours a day together in the garment factory. Park paid polite attention to Shin’s instructions on sewing-machine maintenance. Just as politely, he avoided questions
