To force traders to pay, North Korean security forces invented a new twist on labour camps of the sort that Shin was born in. Instead of holding political criminals for life, these camps briefly incarcerated — and occasionally tortured — traders who failed to pay bribes to security officials. Officials periodically descended on the markets and arrested traders under vague laws that criminalize buying and selling. Traders avoided a grisly trip to a labour camp only by paying hard currency bribes.
The existence of these camps, which the government began to build before Shin’s escape, was first disclosed in ‘Repression and Punishment in North Korea’, a 2009 report based on surveys of more than sixteen hundred refugees interviewed in China and South Korea between 2004 and 2008.
Security officials used the camps as ‘a system for shaking people down’, Marcus Noland, a Washington- based economist and co-author of the report, told me. ‘It really looks like the work of a gang, a kind of “Soprano” state.’
About two thirds of those held in these camps were allowed to go home within a month, according to the refugee survey. The compounds were often small, with few guards and not much fencing, but during their brief stays inside, many North Koreans said they routinely witnessed executions and deaths from torture and starvation. The effect of this revolving-door incarceration for economic crimes spread fear among people who made their living by trading.
‘[The North Korean government] orders police to restrict the markets, but they don’t always do what they are told because so many police and other authorities are making money,’ said Jiro Ishimaru, the editor of
Shin arrived at night near the train station in Hamhung, a coastal city of about three quarters of a million people. Most of them worked in factories — or did, before the factories shut down owing to a lack of electricity and manufacturing supplies.
During the 1990s famine, the state distribution system utterly collapsed in Hamhung, leaving workers with no alternative sources of food. As a result, the city was hit harder by famine and starvation than any other population centre in North Korea, according to refugee accounts.[27] Visiting Western journalists noticed in 1997 that hills surrounding the city were covered with fresh graves. One survivor said that ten per cent of the city’s population died, while another estimated that ten per cent had fled the city in search of food.
In 2005, when Shin arrived in Hamhung, most of its factories were still closed, but the bulk of North Korea’s north–south train traffic continued to pass through its rail yards.
Under cover of darkness, Shin went with other traders from the truck to a part of the rail yard where freight trains were assembled and dispatched. He saw a few guards around the station, but they were not checking IDs and they made no effort to keep traders away from the freight trains.
Still following other men, Shin climbed into a boxcar bound for Chongjin, the largest city in the far north of the country and a gateway to rail lines leading to the Chinese border. The train pulled out before dawn on a journey of about a hundred and seventy-four miles. If all went well, it would take a day, maybe two.
Shin soon learned what everyone else in North Korea had known for years: trains go slow, if they go at all.
Over the next three days, he travelled less than a hundred miles. In the boxcar, Shin befriended a young man of about twenty who said he was headed home to Gilju, a city of sixty-five thousand people on the main rail line to Chongjin. The man said he was returning from a failed attempt to find work. He had no food, no money and no winter coat, but he offered to let Shin stay for a few days in his family’s apartment, where he said it would be warm and where there was food to eat.
Shin needed rest. He was exhausted and starving, the food he had purchased in Bukchang was gone and the burns on his legs continued to bleed. He gratefully accepted the young man’s offer.
It was early evening, cold and beginning to snow when they got off the train at Gilju station. At the suggestion of Shin’s new friend, who knew cheap places to eat, they stopped on the way to his apartment and bought hot noodles from a street vendor. Shin paid for the meal with the last of the money he had received for his stolen rice.
When they finished their noodles, the young man said his family’s apartment was just around the corner, but that he was embarrassed to greet his parents wearing threadbare clothes. He asked if Shin would mind loaning him his coat for a few minutes. As soon as he had paid his respects to his family, the young man said, he would return to the noodle stand and take Shin up to the apartment, where they could get warm and sleep.
Since escaping the camp, Shin had been struggling to learn what normal behaviour was for North Koreans. But after only a week, he had not figured out much. Loaning a coat to a friend who needed to save face with his mother and father could be normal, Shin thought, so he handed over the coat and agreed to wait.
Hours passed. Snow continued to fall. His friend did not return. Shin had not thought to follow him and see what apartment building he had disappeared into. Shin started to search the nearby streets, but he found no trace of him. After several hours of confused shivering, he wrapped himself in a dirty plastic tarp he found on the street and waited for morning. He had been betrayed.
For the next twenty days, Shin roamed around Gilju. With no coat, no money, no contacts and no idea of where he should go, it was a formidable task simply to stay alive. The average January temperature in the city is 18 degrees Fahrenheit, well below freezing.
One thing saved him: the company — and larcenous advice — of the city’s homeless, many of whom were teenagers. He found them around the train station, where they begged, gossiped and periodically struck off in packs looking for food.
The crew Shin joined specialized in digging up daikon, which is a large, white, carrot-shaped East Asian radish that is often made into
During the day Shin followed teams of teenage thieves to the outskirts of the city, looking for isolated houses with tell-tale mounds of dirt in their gardens. After a day of digging up and eating raw daikon, Shin returned to the city centre with as many as he could carry, sold them in markets and bought snacks. When he couldn’t steal daikon, he scavenged through trash.
At night, Shin again followed the homeless to semi-sheltered sleeping places they had found near buildings with central heating systems. He also slept in haystacks and near open fires that the homeless sometimes built.
He made no friends and continued to be careful not to talk about himself.
In Gilju, as across all of North Korea, Shin saw photographs of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung everywhere — in train stations, town squares and the homes he sometimes broke into. But no one, not even vagabonds and homeless teens, dared criticize or poke fun at their leaders. Surveys of recent defectors in China have found that this fear is persistent and almost universal.
For Shin, the biggest struggle remained finding enough to eat. But marauding for food was hardly an exceptional activity in North Korea.
‘Stealing was always a problem,’ Charles Robert Jenkins wrote in his 2008 memoir about forty years of living inside the country. ‘If you didn’t watch your things, someone would always be happy to relieve you of them.’[28]
Jenkins was an ill-educated and deeply unhappy US Army sergeant serving in South Korea in 1965, when he decided the grass would be greener in North Korea. He drank ten beers, stumbled across the world’s most heavily militarized border and surrendered his M14 rifle to startled North Korean soldiers.
‘I was so ignorant,’ he told me. He said he had deserted the army for self-imposed incarceration in ‘a giant, demented prison’.
Yet as an American deserter, Jenkins was much more than a prisoner. The North Korean government turned him into an actor who always played an evil Caucasian face in propaganda movies that demonized the United States.
Security officials also gave him a young Japanese woman and, sickeningly, urged him to rape her. She had been abducted from her hometown in Japan on 12 August 1978, as part of a long-running and long-concealed
