One of the defectors was a woman in her forties who had crossed the border before. She had an estranged Chinese husband and a child who lived nearby and she wanted to contact them by phone. The farmer allowed her to use his telephone. Within a few days, she and the other defector were gone. But giving shelter to three North Koreans had annoyed the farmer, and he told Shin that he, too, would have to go.
The farmer knew of another job: tending livestock up in the mountains. He offered to drive Shin there in his car. After driving on mountain roads for two hours, the farmer dropped Shin off at a friend’s cattle ranch. It was not far from Helong, a city of about eighty-five thousand people. If Shin worked hard, the farmer told him, he would be generously compensated.
Only when the farmer drove away did Shin discover that no one on the ranch spoke Korean.
20
For the next ten months, Shin stayed where the pig farmer had left him, tending cattle in mountain pastures and sleeping on a ranch-house floor with two surly Chinese cowhands. He was free to leave whenever he wanted, but he didn’t know where to go or what else to do.
The future was to have been Park’s responsibility. Back in Camp 14, Park had assured Shin that once they made it to China he would arrange for passage to South Korea. Park would enlist the help of his uncle in China and they would be provided with money, paperwork and contacts. But Park was dead and South Korea seemed impossibly far away.
Staying put, though, had some benefits. Shin’s legs healed, with scar tissue finally covering the electricity burns. From the cowherds and ranch manager he learned some conversational Chinese, and for the first time in his life he had access to an electric dream-making machine.
A radio.
Shin fiddled with its dial nearly every morning, switching between the dozen or so Korean-language stations that broadcast daily into North Korea and northeast China. These stations, with funding from South Korea, the United States and Japan, mix Asian and world news with sharply critical coverage of North Korea and the Kim dynasty. They focus on the North’s chronic food shortages, human rights violations, military provocations, nuclear programme and dependence on China. Considerable airtime is devoted to the comfortable lives, by North Korean standards, of defectors living in South Korea, where they receive housing and other subsidies from the government in Seoul.
Defectors run some of these stations — with financial assistance from the United States and other sources — and they have recruited reporters inside North Korea. These reporters, who use mobile phones and smuggle out sound and video recordings on tiny USB memory sticks, have revolutionized news coverage of North Korea. It took months for the outside world to learn of economic reforms that eased restrictions on private markets in North Korea in 2002. Seven years later, when the North Korean government launched a disastrous currency reform that impoverished and enraged tens of thousands of traders, the news was reported within hours by Free North Korea Radio.
Inside North Korea, the penalty for listening to these stations can be ten years in a labour camp. But the country has been flooded in recent years with three-dollar radios smuggled in from China, and between five and twenty per cent of North Koreans are tuning in daily, according to survey research gathered in China from defectors, traders and other border crossers.[37] Many of them have told researchers that listening to foreign radio provided an important motivation for leaving the country.[38]
Listening on the Chinese cattle ranch, Shin was comforted to hear voices speaking a language he understood. He heard the thrilling news that several hundred North Korean defectors had been flown from Vietnam to Seoul a year before. He paid particularly close attention to reports about border-crossing conditions, the routes defectors were taking to travel from China to South Korea and the lives they led after getting there.
Shin struggled, though, to make sense of most of what he heard on the radio.
The broadcasts were targeted at educated North Koreans, who had grown up with state media that venerates the godlike powers and wisdom of the Kim family dynasty and also warns that Americans, South Koreans and Japanese are scheming to take over the entire Korean Peninsula. Camp 14 had cut Shin out of this propaganda loop, and he listened to the West’s counterpropaganda with the ears of a child — curious, confused, sometimes even bored, but always lacking in context. Without a common language to communicate with anyone, his loneliness on the cattle ranch became greater than it had been in the labour camp.
In late 2005, with winter rolling into the mountains, Shin decided to make his move.
He had heard on the radio that Korean churches in China sometimes helped defectors, so he came up with a sketchy plan. He would travel west and south, putting as much distance as possible between himself, North Korea and the border patrol soldiers, then he would seek out friendly Koreans. With their help, he hoped to find a stable job in southern China and build at school, a position a low-profile life. He had by now given up all hope of reaching South Korea.
Shin knew enough Chinese by then to tell the manager of the cattle ranch why he was leaving. He explained that if he continued to live near the border, he would be arrested by the police and forcibly sent back to North Korea.
Without saying much, the manager paid him six hundred yuan, or about seventy-two dollars. For the ten months he had tended the cattle, it amounted to less than twenty-five cents a day. Based on the sixty cents a day he had earned at the pig farm, Shin had expected to be paid at least twice as much.
He had been cheated, but like all North Koreans working in China he was in no position to protest. As a going-away present, the ranch manager gave Shin a map and took him to the bus station in nearby Helong.
Compared to travelling in North Korea, Shin found it easy and safe to travel in China. His clothing — a gift from the pig farmer — was made locally and attracted little attention. Travelling alone and keeping his mouth shut, he discovered that his face and manner did not advertise his identity as a North Korean on the run.
Even when Shin mentioned that he came from North Korea in conversation with the ethnic Koreans he appealed to for food, cash, or work, he learned that he was nobody special. A long line of defectors had come begging ahead of him. Most of the people he encountered were not alarmed by or interested in North Koreans. They were sick of them.
No one asked to see Shin’s identification papers when he bought a ticket in Helong for the one-hundred- and-five-mile bus ride to Changchun, the capital of Jilin Province, or when he boarded a train for the five- hundred-mile journey to Beijing, or when he travelled more than a thousand miles by bus to Chengdu, a city of five million people in southwest China.
Shin started to look for work when he arrived in Chengdu, a destination he had picked randomly at the bus station in Beijing.
At a Korean restaurant, he found a magazine that listed the names and addresses of several small churches. At each church, he asked to speak to the pastor, explaining that he was a North Korean in need of help. Ethnic Korean pastors gave him cash — as much as fifteen dollars’ worth of yuan — but none offered work or lodging. They also told him to go away. It was illegal, they said, to help a defector.
When asking for help in China, Shin was careful not to say too much and avoided long conversations. He told no one that he was an escapee from a political labour camp, fearing that they might be tempted to turn him over to the police. He also stayed away from hotels and guesthouses, where he feared he would be asked to show identification.
Instead, he spent many of his nights in PC bangs, the ubiquitous East Asian Internet cafes where young, mostly unmarried men play computer games and surf the Internet around the clock.
Shin found he could get directions and some rest at a PC bang, if not exactly sleep. He looked like many of the aimless, unemployed young men who hang out in such places, and no one asked him for papers.
After eight churches turned him away in Chengdu, Shin made the long, miserable bus trip back to Beijing, where for ten days he refocused his job search on Korean restaurants. Sometimes the owners or managers would feed him or give him a bit of money, but none offered him a job.
As he failed to find work, Shin did not panic or get discouraged. Food meant a lot more to him than it
