digging out three smouldering logs, he carried them into a nearby larch forest, scraped away the snow from the ground, found some kindling and managed to start a campfire. He took off his wet shoes and socks so they could dry near the fire, then without intending to, he fell asleep.
At dawn, the fire was dead and Shin’s face was covered in frost. Cold to the bone, he put on his shoes and socks, which were still wet. He walked all morning, following back roads, which he hoped led away from the border. Around noon, he saw a police checkpoint in the distance, left the road, found another house and knocked on the door.
‘Could I get some help, please?’ he begged.
A Korean Chinese man refused to let him in the house, saying his wife was mentally ill. But he gave Shin two apples.
To avoid checkpoints and get further away from the border, Shin followed a winding footpath up into the mountains, where he walked for most of the day. (Shin is not sure where he walked that first day in China; Google Earth images of the region near the border show forested mountains and a few scattered houses.) At dusk, he tried another farmhouse, which was newly built of cinder blocks and surrounded by pigpens. Five dogs barked as Shin entered the yard.
A middle-aged man poked his pudgy face out the front door.
‘Are you from North Korea?’ the man asked.
Shin nodded wearily.
The man, a Chinese farmer who spoke some Korean, invited Shin inside and ordered a young woman to cook rice. The farmer said he had once employed two North Korean defectors and that they had been useful workers. He offered Shin food, lodging and five yuan a day — about sixty cents — to tend the pigs.
Before he had eaten his first hot meal in China, Shin had a job and a place to sleep. He had been a prisoner, a snitch, a fugitive and a thief, but never an employee. The job was a new beginning and a colossal relief, ending a fearful, freezing month on the run. A lifetime of slavery shifted suddenly into the past tense.
In the pig farmer’s kitchen over the next month, Shin found plenty to eat. He filled his stomach three times a day with the roasted meat that he and Park had fantasized about in Camp 14. He bathed with soap and hot water. He got rid of the lice he had lived with since birth.
The farmer bought Shin antibiotics for the burns on his legs, along with warm winter clothes and work boots. Shin soon threw away the stolen, ill-fitting clothes that identified him as a North Korean.
He had a room of his own, where he slept on the floor with several blankets. He was able to sleep as much as ten hours a night, an unimaginable luxury. The young woman in the house — Shin found out she was the farmer’s mistress — cooked for him and taught him rudimentary Chinese.
He worked from dawn until seven or eight at night for his sixty cents a day. Besides tending pigs, he hunted with the farmer for wild boar in the surrounding mountains. After the farmer shot them, Shin lugged their carcasses out of the woods for slaughter and commercial sale.
While the work was often exhausting, no one slapped, kicked, punched or threatened Shin. Fear began to ebb away as abundant food and sleep made it possible for him to regain his strength. When police visited the farm, the farmer told Shin to pretend to be a mute. The farmer vouched for his good character, and the police went away.
The capacity of the Chinese borderlands to absorb North Koreans is significant — and significantly underappreciated outside of Northeast Asia. The area is not all that foreign or unwelcoming to Korean-speaking migrants.
When defectors cross into China, the first ‘foreigners’ they encounter are usually ethnic Koreans who speak the same language, eat similar food and share some of the same cultural values. With a bit of luck, they can, like Shin, find work, shelter and a measure of safety.
This has been going on since the late 1860s, when famine struck North Korea and starving farmers fled across the Tumen and Yalu Rivers into northeast China. Later, China’s imperial government recruited Korean farmers to create a buffer against Russian expansion, and Korea’s Choson Dynasty allowed them to depart legally. Before World War II, the Japanese who occupied the Korean Peninsula and northeast China pushed tens of thousands of Korean farmers across the border to weaken China’s hold on the region.
Nearly two million ethnic Koreans now live in China’s three northeast provinces, with the highest concentration in Jilin, which Shin entered when he crawled across the frozen river. Inside Jilin Province, China created the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, where forty per cent of the population is ethnic Korean and where the government subsidizes Korean-language schools and publications.
Korean speakers living in northeast China have also been an unsung force for cultural change inside North Korea. They have affected this change by watching South Korean soap operas on home satellite dishes, recording low-quality video CDs and smuggling hundreds of thousands of them across the border into North Korea, where they sell for as little as fifteen cents, according to
South Korean soaps, which display the fast cars, opulent houses and surging confidence of South Korea, are classified as ‘impure recorded visual materials’ and are illegal to watch in North Korea. But they have developed a huge following in Pyongyang and other cities, where police officers assigned to confiscate the videos are reportedly watching them and where teenagers imitate the silky intonations of the Korean language as it’s spoken by upper-crust stars in Seoul.[35]
These TV programmes have demolished decades of North Korean propaganda, which claims that the South is a poor, repressed and unhappy place, and that South Koreans long for unification under the fatherly hand of the Kim dynasty.
However, in the past half century, the governments of China and North Korea have cooperatively used their security forces to make sure that the intermittent seepage of Koreans across the border never turns into a flood. A secret agreement on border security was signed between the two countries in the early 1960s, according to the South Korean government, and a second agreement in 1986 committed China to sending North Korean defectors back home, where they often face arrest, torture and months or years of forced labour.
By imprisoning its citizens inside the country, North Korea defies an international agreement it has pledged to uphold. The 1966 agreement says, ‘Everyone shall be free to leave any country, including his own.’[36]
By defining all North Korean defectors as ‘economic refugees’ and sending them home to be persecuted, China defies its obligations as a signatory to a 1951 international refugee convention. Beijing refuses to allow defectors to make claims for asylum and prevents the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees from working along the border with North Korea.
International law, in effect, has been trumped by the strategic interests of North Korea and China. A mass exodus from North Korea could substantially depopulate the country, undermine its already inadequate capacity to grow food and weaken, or perhaps even topple, the government. The risk of such an exodus increases as China’s economy soars, North Korea’s sinks and word spreads that life is better in China.
For the Chinese government, an uncontrolled surge of impoverished Korean refugees is undesirable for several reasons. It would dramatically worsen poverty in China’s three northeast provinces, which have largely missed out on the wealth generated by the country’s economic boom. More importantly, it might precipitate regime collapse in North Korea and lead to the unification of the Korean Peninsula under a Seoul-based government closely allied with the United States. In the process, China would lose a key buffer between one of its poorest regions and a united, affluent and West-oriented Korea. That, in turn, could arouse nationalist sentiments among ethnic Koreans in the Chinese borderlands.
Beijing’s distaste for North Korean defectors, as enforced by police and border soldiers, is well understood by farmers, factory foremen and other bosses in China’s northeast provinces.
But, as Shin found out, they are quite willing to ignore national directives when presented with an industrious North Korean who keeps his mouth shut and works hard for sixty cents a day. Chinese employers are also free to cheat, abuse, or get rid of their North Korean help at any time.
Within a month, Shin’s arrangement with the farmer turned sour.
He was fetching water from a brook near the farm when he met two other North Korean defectors. They were hungry, cold and living in an abandoned shack in the woods not far from the pig farm. Shin asked the Chinese farmer to help them out, and he did so, but with a reluctance and resentment that Shin was slow to notice.
