were stiff with blood and snow. He tried to bandage the burns on his legs with ripped-out pages from a book he found in the shed. The pages stuck to his mangled shins. He put on the ratty, too-big uniform and slipped his feet into the cotton shoes.
No longer instantly recognizable as a runaway prisoner, he had become just another ill-clothed, ill-shod and ill-nourished North Korean. In a country where a third of the population is chronically malnourished, where local markets and train stations are crowded with filthy itinerant traders, and where almost everyone has served in the army, Shin blended in easily.
Outside the shed, he also found a road, and he followed it down into a village at the bottom of the valley. There, to his surprise, he saw the Taedong River.
For all his running, he was only two miles upstream from Camp 14.
News of his escape had not reached the village. The streets were dark and empty. Shin crossed a bridge over the Taedong and headed east on a road parallel to the river. He hid from headlights when a single car drove by, then he climbed up to a railroad track that seemed deserted and kept walking.
By late evening, he had walked about six miles and entered the outskirts of Bukchang, a coal town just south of the river with a population of about ten thousand people. A few pedestrians were out, but Shin did not sense that his presence warranted special attention. With an aluminum factory, coal mines and a large power plant, the town was perhaps accustomed to night-shift workers walking the streets at all hours.
Shin saw a pigpen, a familiar and comforting sight. He crawled over a fence, found some rice straw and dug in for the night.
For the next two days, Shin scavenged around the outskirts of Bukchang, eating whatever he could find on the ground or in garbage heaps. He had no idea what to do or where to go. People in the street seemed to ignore him. His legs hurt and he was hungry and cold, yet he was exhilarated. He felt like an alien fallen to earth.
In the months and years ahead, Shin would discover all things modern: streaming video, blogs and international air travel. Therapists and career counsellors would advise him. Preachers would show him how to pray to Jesus Christ. Friends would teach him how to brush his teeth, use a debit card and fool around with a smartphone. From obsessive reading online, the politics, history and geography of the two Koreas, China, Southeast Asia, Europe and the United States would all become familiar.
None of this, though, did more to change his understanding of how the world works, and how human beings interact with each other, than his first days outside the camp.
It shocked him to see North Koreans going about their daily lives without having to take orders from guards. When they had the temerity to laugh together in the streets, wear brightly coloured clothes or haggle over prices in an open-air market, he expected armed men to step in, knock heads and stop the nonsense.
The word Shin uses again and again to describe those first days is ‘shock’.
It was not meaningful to him that North Korea in the dead of winter is ugly, dirty and dark, or that it is poorer than Sudan, or that, taken as a whole, it is viewed by human rights groups as the world’s largest prison.
His context had been twenty-three years in an open-air cage run by men who hanged his mother, shot his brother, crippled his father, murdered pregnant women, beat children to death, taught him to betray his family and tortured him over a fire.
He felt wonderfully free and, as best he could determine, no one was looking for him.
He was also weak with hunger, and as he wandered the streets, he began searching for an empty house where he could eat and rest. He found one at the end of a small road. Tearing open a rear window made of vinyl, he climbed inside.
In the kitchen, he found three bowls of cooked rice. He guessed that someone who would soon return had prepared it. Afraid to risk eating or sleeping in the house, he emptied the rice into a plastic bag and spooned in some soybean paste he found on a shelf.
Searching the rest of the house, he found a pair of winter-weight trousers draped over a hanger and another pair of shoes. He also found a rucksack and a dark brown winter coat, which was military in style and much warmer than any coat he had ever worn. He opened one last kitchen drawer and found a ten-pound bag of rice, which he stuffed in the rucksack and left.
Near the centre of Bukchang, a market lady shouted at him. She wanted to know what was in his rucksack and if he had anything to sell. Trying to keep calm, Shin said he had some rice. She offered to buy it for four thousand North Korean won, which was worth about four dollars at blackmarket exchange rates.
Shin had first learned about the existence of money from Park. Before the market lady yelled at him, he had watched in wonder as people used small pieces of paper, which he guessed was money, to buy food and other goods.
He had no idea if four thousand won was a fair price for his stolen rice, but he happily sold it and bought some crackers and cookies. He pocketed the remaining money and left town on foot. His destination was China, but he still didn’t know where that might be.
On the road, Shin encountered several shabby-looking men and eavesdropped on their conversations. They were searching for work, scrounging for food, travelling among street markets and trying to steer clear of the police. One or two of them asked Shin where he was from. He said he had grown up in the Bukchang area, which was true enough and seemed to satisfy their curiosity.
Shin soon figured out that most of these men were strangers to each other, but he was afraid to ask too many questions. He did not want to feel an obligation to talk about himself.
According to a survey of more than thirteen hundred North Korean refugees that was conducted in China in late 2004 and 2005,[24] the people wandering around North Korea at that time were mostly unemployed labourers and failed farmers, as well as students, soldiers, technicians and a few former government officials.
The survey suggested they were on the road primarily for economic reasons, hoping to find work or trade in China. Their lives had been exceedingly difficult and their relationship with the government was strained: nearly a quarter of the men and thirty-seven per cent of the women said family members had died of hunger. More than a quarter of them had been arrested in North Korea, and ten per cent said they had been sent to jails, where forced starvation, torture and executions were commonplace. To get out of North Korea, more than half of the refugees said they used cash to bribe officials or buy help from professional smugglers.
Shin fell in with these wanderers, guessing he would be safer in their company than travelling by himself. He tried to copy the behaviour of the men he met on the road. It was not difficult. Like him, they dressed shabbily, looked dirty, smelled bad and were desperate for food.
As a police state, North Korea does not tolerate intercity vagabonds. Laws strictly prohibit citizens from travelling between cities without proper authorization. But in the aftermath of the famine — with the collapse of the state-run economy, the rise of private markets and the near ubiquity of traders hustling around the country with goods smuggled from China — laws were often ignored. Police could be bribed; indeed, many lived off bribes. Vagabonds with a bit of cash could travel towards China without attracting attention.
There are no reliable numbers on defections to China, or on the movement of people drifting around inside North Korea. The odds of avoiding arrest and successfully crossing to China seem to change from season to season. It depends on how recently the North Korean government has ordered a security crackdown, how vigilant Chinese authorities are in repatriating defectors, how willing border guards are to take bribes and how desperate North Koreans are to cross the border. The North Korean government has created new labour camps to hold traders and travellers too poor or unlucky to bribe their way north.
One trend, though, is clear. The number of North Koreans seeking asylum in South Korea has increased nearly every year since 1995. Forty-one arrived in 1995. By 2009, the number had jumped to nearly three thousand. More defectors turned up in the South between 2005 and 2011 than fled North Korea over the entire period since the end of the Korean War in 1953.
When Shin began walking towards the border in January 2005, conditions for escape seem to have been relatively good. Numerical evidence can be found in the large number of North Koreans — about forty-five hundred — who arrived in South Korea in 2006 and 2007. It usually takes a year or two for defectors to find their way from China to South Korea.
The permeability of North Korea’s border tends to improve when border guards and local officials can accept bribes without draconian punishment from higher-ups.
