about his past. Shin learned little.
Then, after four weeks of near silence, Park surprised Shin with a personal question.
‘Sir, where is your home?’
‘My home?’ Shin said. ‘My home is here.’
‘I am from Pyongyang, sir,’ Park said.
Park addressed Shin using honorific nouns and verb endings. In the Korean language, they signified the seniority and superiority of Shin the teacher over Park the apprentice. Park was a dignified man in his mid-forties, but the linguistic fussiness annoyed and embarrassed Shin.
‘I’m younger than you,’ Shin said. ‘Please drop the honorific with me.’
‘I will,’ said Park.
‘By the way,’ asked Shin, ‘where is Pyongyang?’
Shin’s question stunned Park.
The older man, though, did not laugh or make light of Shin’s ignorance. He seemed intrigued by it. He carefully explained that Pyongyang, located about fifty miles south of Camp 14, was the capital of North Korea, the city where all the country’s powerful people lived.
The ice had been broken by Shin’s naivete. Park began to talk about himself. He said he had grown up in a large, comfortable apartment in Pyongyang and had followed the privileged educational trajectory of North Korea’s elites, studying in East Germany and the Soviet Union. After returning home, he had become chief of a tae kwon do training centre in Pyongyang. In that high-profile job, Park said, he had met many of the men who ruled North Korea.
Touching his oil-stained right hand to a sewing machine, Park said, ‘With this hand, I shook Kim Jong Il’s hand.’
Park looked like an athlete. His hands were large and meaty. He was impressively strong, if a bit thick around the middle. But what impressed Shin was Park’s decency. He did not make Shin feel stupid. He patiently attempted to explain what life was like outside Camp 14 — and outside North Korea.
So began a month-long one-on-one seminar that would change Shin’s life for ever.
As they walked the factory floor, Park told Shin that the giant country next door to Korea was called China. Its people were rapidly getting rich. He said that in the south there was another Korea. In South Korea, he said, everyone was already rich. Park explained the concept of money. He told Shin about the existence of television, computers and mobile phones. He explained that the world was round.
Much of what Park talked about, especially at the beginning, was difficult for Shin to understand, believe, or care about. Shin wasn’t especially interested in how the world worked. What delighted him — what he kept begging Park for — were stories about food and eating, particularly when the main course was grilled meat.
These were the stories that kept Shin up at night fantasizing about a better life. Partly it was the grinding exhaustion of work in the factory — meals were skimpy, the hours were endless and Shin was always hungry — but there was something more, something buried in Shin’s memory from when he was thirteen and struggling to recover from his burns in the underground prison. His aging cellmate had inflamed his imagination with tales of hearty meals. Uncle had dared Shin to dream about one day getting out of the camp and eating whatever he wanted. Freedom, in Shin’s mind, was just another word for grilled meat.
While the old man in the underground prison had eaten well in North Korea, Park’s gustatory adventures were global. He described the enchantments of chicken, pork and beef in China, Hong Kong, Germany, England and the former Soviet Union. The more Shin listened to these stories, the more he wanted out of the camp. He ached for a world where an insignificant person like himself could walk into a restaurant and fill his stomach with rice and meat. He fantasized about escaping with Park because he wanted to eat like Park.
Intoxicated by what he heard from the prisoner he was supposed to betray, Shin made perhaps the first free decision of his life. He chose not to snitch.
It marked a major shift in his calculations about how to survive. Based on Shin’s experience, snitching paid. It saved him from the executioners who killed his mother and brother. After the execution, it may have been the reason his second secondary school teacher made sure he had food, put a stop to the abuse Shin suffered at the hands of his fellow students and assigned him to an easy job on the pig farm.
Shin’s decision to honour Park’s confidences did not signify new insight into the nature of right and wrong. Looking back, Shin views his behaviour as fundamentally selfish. If he informed on Park, he could have earned an extra serving of cabbage, but Park’s stories were much more valuable to Shin. They became an essential and energizing addiction, changing his expectations about the future and giving him the will to plan for it. He believed he would go mad without hearing more.
In his reports to the superintendent, Shin found himself telling a wonderfully liberating lie. Park, he said, had nothing to say.
A decade earlier in the underground prison, Shin’s aging cellmate had dared to talk about food outside the camp. But Uncle had never talked about himself or his politics. He was careful, suspicious and withholding. He guessed Shin was an informer and he did not trust him. Shin took no offence. He saw it as normal. Trust was a good way to get shot.
But after Park’s initial reticence, he was not suspicious. In the apparent belief that Shin was as trustworthy as he was ignorant, Park told his life story.
Park told Shin he lost his position as head of tae kwon do training in Pyongyang in 2002, after squabbling with a mid-level apparatchik who apparently snitched on him to higher-ups in the government. Without a job, Park travelled north to the border with his wife, where they crossed illegally into China and stayed with his uncle for eighteen months. They intended to return to Pyongyang, where they had left behind a teenage child who lived with Park’s parents.
While in China, Park listened daily to radio broadcasts from South Korea. He paid close attention to coverage of Hwang Jang Yop, a principal architect of North Korea’s ideology and the highest-ranking official ever to defect. Hwang, who fled in 1997, had become a celebrity in Seoul.
As Shin and Park did their rounds in the garment factory, Park explained that Hwang had criticized Kim Jong Il for turning North Korea into a corrupt feudal state. Kim’s government dispatched agents in 2010 to try to assassinate Hwang. The agents, however, were arrested in Seoul, and Hwang died of natural causes that year at eighty-seven.
Park left China and returned to North Korea in the summer of 2003, along with his wife and a baby son born in China. He wanted to get back to Pyongyang in time to vote in the August election for the Supreme People’s Assembly, the rubber-stamp parliament of North Korea.
Elections in North Korea are empty rituals. Candidates are chosen by the Korean Workers’ Party and run without opposition. But Park feared that if he missed the vote, the government would notice his absence, declare him to be a traitor and send his family to a labour camp. Voting in North Korea is not mandatory, but the government keeps close track of those who do not show up.
At the border, North Korean authorities detained Park and his family. He tried to convince them that he wasn’t a defector and had merely been visiting family in China and was coming home to vote, but the authorities did not buy it. They accused him of being a convert to Christianity and a spy for South Korea. After several rounds of interrogation, Park and his wife and son were sent to Camp 14. Park was assigned to the camp’s textile factory in the autumn of 2004.
When Shin met him, Park was furious with himself for returning to North Korea. His foolishness had cost him his freedom and, as he told Shin, it would soon cost him his wife, who was divorcing him. She came from a prominent family in Pyongyang with strong party connections, Park said, and she was trying to convince camp guards that she had been a loyal and submissive wife while her husband was a political criminal.
Despite Park’s anger — at the rottenness of North Korea, his wife and himself — he always carried himself with dignity, especially when it was time to eat.
Shin found this utterly amazing. Everyone he knew in the camp behaved like a panicked animal at mealtimes. Park, even when hungry, did not. When Shin caught rats in the factory, Park insisted on patience. He refused to allow Shin to eat them until they’d found a furnace or flame where the rat could be spread out on the head of a shovel and cooked properly.
Park could also be a blithe spirit. In Shin’s view, he sometimes took this a bit too far.
Take, for example, Park’s singing.
