traders had begun to move back and forth across the border in their thousands, supplying food and goods for markets that had all but replaced the government’s public distribution system.
Following Kim’s decree, arrested border crossers were released after a few days of questioning or, at most, a few months in a labour camp, unless interrogators determined that they’d had contact in China with South Koreans or missionaries.[30] The North Korean government also began to recognize and enable the role of traders in feeding the population. After six months of paperwork and a background check, government officials — especially if they had received bribes — would sometimes issue certificates to traders that allowed them to cross back and forth into China legally. [31]
A porous border changed lives. Regular travellers to rural parts of North Korea noticed that far more people seemed to be wearing warm winter coats and that private markets were selling used Chinese television sets and video players, along with pirate video tapes and video CDs. (Video CDs offer much lower resolution than DVDs, but CD players were cheaper than DVD players and more affordable to North Koreans.)
North Korean defectors arriving in Seoul said that Chinese-made transistor radios had allowed them to listen to Chinese and South Korean stations, as well as to Radio Free Asia and Voice of America. Many told stories of how they had become addicted to Hollywood movies and South Korean soap operas.
‘We closed the drapes and turned the volume down low whenever we watched the James Bond videos,’ a forty-year-old housewife from North Korea told me in Seoul. She fled her fishing village in a boat with her husband and son. ‘Those movies were how I started to learn what is going on in the world, how people learned the government of Kim Jong Il is not really for their own good.’
Her son told me he fell in love with the United States, where he hoped to live one day, by watching blurry videos of
As the trickle of foreign videos turned into a flood, North Korean police became alarmed and came up with new tactics to arrest people who watched them. They cut electricity to specific apartment blocks and then raided every apartment to see what tapes and disks were stuck inside the players.
Around the time that Shin and Park were formulating their escape plan, the North Korean government concluded that the border had become far too porous and posed a threat to internal security. Pyongyang was particularly enraged by South Korean and American initiatives that made it easier for North Korean defectors who’d crossed into China to travel even further and settle in the West. In the summer of 2004, in the largest single mass defection, South Korea flew four hundred and sixty-eight North Koreans from Vietnam to Seoul. North Korea’s news agency denounced the flight as ‘premeditated allurement, abduction and terrorism’. About the same time, Congress passed a law that accepted North Korean refugees for resettlement in the United States, which the North derided as an attempt to topple its government under the pretext of promoting democracy.
For these reasons, border rules began to change in late 2004. North Korea announced a new policy of harsh punishment for illegal border crossings, with prison terms of up to five years. In 2006, Amnesty International interviewed sixteen border crossers who said that the new rules were in effect and that authorities in the North were circulating warnings that even first-time crossers would be sent to prison for at least a year. To enforce its rules, North Korea began a substantial buildup of electronic and photographic surveillance along the border. It extended barbed wire and built new concrete barriers.[32] China, too, increased border security to discourage North Koreans from entering the country in the run-up to the 2008 Summer Olympics.
At the end of January 2005, when Shin went walking towards China with cigarettes and snacks, the window on low-risk passage across the border was almost certainly beginning to close. But he was lucky: orders from on high had not yet changed the bribe-hungry behaviour of the four bedraggled soldiers Shin met at guard stations along the Tumen River.
‘I’m dying of hunger here,’ said the last soldier Shin bribed on his way out of North Korea. He looked to be about sixteen. ‘Don’t you have anything to eat?’
His guard post was near a bridge that crossed into China. Shin gave him bean-curd sausage, cigarettes and a bag of candy.
‘Do a lot of people cross into China?’ Shin asked.
‘Of course,’ the guard replied. ‘They cross with the army’s blessing and return after making good money.’
In Camp 14, Shin had often discussed with Park what they would do after they crossed the border. They had planned to stay with Park’s uncle, and that uncle now came into Shin’s mind.
‘Would it be possible for me to visit my uncle who lives in the village across the river?’ Shin asked, although he had no idea where Park’s uncle actually lived. ‘When I return, I’ll treat you.’
‘Sure, go ahead,’ the guard replied. ‘But I am only on duty until seven tonight, so come back before then, all right?’
The guard led Shin through a forest to the river, where he said the crossing would be safe. It was late afternoon, but Shin promised to be back in plenty of time with food for the guard.
‘Is the river frozen?’ Shin asked. ‘Will I be OK?’
The guard assured him that the river was frozen, and that even if he broke through, the water was only ankle-deep.
‘You should be fine,’ he said.
The river was about a hundred yards wide. Shin walked slowly out onto the ice. Halfway across, he broke through and icy water soaked his shoes. He jumped backwards onto firm ice and crawled the rest of the way to China.
19
Shin scurried up the riverbank and hid briefly in the woods, where his wet feet began to freeze. It was getting dark and he was exhausted from a long day in the cold. Having reserved his limited cash for the cigarettes and snacks he gave to the border guards, he had eaten little in recent days.
To warm up and get away from the river, he climbed a hill and followed a road through fields blanketed in snow. In the near distance, beyond the fields, he could see a cluster of houses.
Between Shin and the houses, there were two men on the road. They had flashlights and wore vests with Chinese lettering printed across the back. He later learned they were Chinese border patrol soldiers. Since 2002, when hundreds of North Korean asylum seekers embarrassed China by rushing into foreign embassies, soldiers had begun rounding up illegal border crossers and forcibly repatriating tens of thousands of them.[33] The soldiers Shin saw were gazing up at the sky. He guessed they were counting stars. In any case, Shin’s presence did not seem to interest them, so he hurried on towards the houses.
His plan for surviving in China was as half-baked as his plan for escaping North Korea. He did not know where to go or whom to contact. He simply wanted to get as far from the border as possible. He had walked into a poor, mountainous and sparsely populated part of China’s Jilin Province. The nearest town of any size was Helong, which is about thirty miles north of where he had crossed the river. His one hope was the gossip he had picked up from itinerant traders in North Korea: that ethnic Koreans living in the Chinese border region might be willing to offer him shelter, food and maybe a job.
Entering a yard outside one of the houses, Shin set off a mad eruption of barking dogs. He counted seven of them — an eyebrow-raising number by the standards of North Korea, where the pet population had been culled by scavengers, many of them orphans, who stole, skinned and barbecued dogs during the famine years.[34]
When the front door opened Shin pleaded for something to eat and a place to sleep. A Korean Chinese man told him to go away. He said police had warned him that very morning not to help North Koreans. Shin moved on to a nearby brick house, where he asked another Korean Chinese man for help. Again, he was told to move on. This time rudely.
Shin was desperately cold as he left the yard. He saw the remains of a fire in an outdoor cooking pit. After
