means to most people, and everywhere he went in China there was an impressive abundance of it. To his amazement, China was a place where even dogs seemed well fed, and if he ran low on cash to buy food, he begged. He found that Chinese people would usually give him something.
Shin came to believe that he would never starve, and that alone calmed his nerves and gave him hope. He did not have to break into houses to find food, money or clothing.
Shin left Beijing and took a seventy-mile bus ride to Tianjin, a city of ten million people, where he again approached the Korean churches. Pastors once more offered him petty cash, but no work or lodging. He took a bus about two hundred and twenty miles south to Jinan, a city of five million, and spent five days searching out more Korean churches. Still, no work.
Again, he moved south. On 6 February 2006 — a year and one week after he’d crossed the frozen Tumen River into China — Shin arrived in Hangzhou, a city of about six million people in the Yangtze River Delta. At the third Korean restaurant he walked into, the owner offered him a job.
The restaurant, called Haedanghwa Korean Cuisine, was hectic and Shin worked long hours, washing dishes and cleaning tables. After eleven days, he had had enough. He told the owner he was quitting, collected his pay and boarded a bus bound for Shanghai, about ninety miles to the south.
At a Shanghai bus station, Shin browsed through a Korean-language magazine, found a list of Korean restaurants and went off again in search of work.
‘May I meet the owner of this place?’ Shin asked a waitress in the first restaurant on his list.
‘Why do you ask?’ the waitress replied.
‘I am from North Korea, I just got off the bus and I have no place to go,’ Shin said. ‘I was wondering if I could work in this restaurant.’
The waitress said the owner was not available.
‘Is there anything I can do here?’ Shin begged.
‘There are no jobs, but that man eating over there says he’s from Korea, so you should ask him.’
The waitress pointed to a customer eating a late lunch.
‘Excuse me, I am from North Korea, looking for a job,’ Shin said. ‘Please help me.’
After studying Shin’s face for a while, the man asked him where his hometown was. Shin said he was from Bukchang, the town near Camp 14 where he had stolen his first bag of rice.
‘Are you really from North Korea?’ the man asked, pulling out a reporter’s notebook and beginning to scribble notes.
Shin had stumbled upon a journalist, a Shanghai-based correspondent for a major South Korean media company.
‘Why did you come to Shanghai?’ he asked Shin.
Shin repeated what he had just said: he was looking for work and he was hungry. The journalist wrote everything down. This was not the kind of conversation Shin was used to. He had never met a journalist before and it made him anxious.
After a long silence, the man asked Shin if he wanted to go to South Korea — a question that made Shin even more anxious. By the time Shin got to Shanghai, he had long since abandoned any hope of travelling to South Korea. He told the journalist he could not go there because he had no money.
The man suggested that they leave the restaurant together. Outside on the street, he stopped a cab, told Shin to get in and climbed in beside him. After several minutes, he told Shin they were going to the South Korean Consulate.
Shin’s growing unease turned to panic when the journalist went on to explain that there could be danger when they got out of the taxi. He told Shin that if anyone grabbed him, he should shake them off and run.
As they neared the consulate, they saw police cars and several uniformed officers milling around its entrance. Since 2002, the Beijing government had been attempting, with considerable success, to stop North Koreans from rushing into foreign embassies and consulates to seek asylum.
Shin had stayed away from the Chinese police. Fearing arrest and deportation, he hadn’t dared break into houses for clothes or food. He had tried to be invisible, and he had succeeded.
Now a stranger was taking him into a heavily guarded building and advising him to run if police tried to apprehend him.
When the taxi stopped in front of a building flying the South Korean flag, Shin’s chest felt heavy. Out on the street, he feared he would not be able to walk. The journalist told him to smile and put his arm around Shin, pulling him close to his body. Together they walked towards the consulate gate. Speaking in Chinese, the journalist told police that he and his friend had business inside.
The police opened the gate and waved them through.
Once inside, the journalist told Shin to relax, but he did not understand he was safe. Diplomatic immunity did not make sense to him. Despite repeated assurances from consulate staff, he could not believe he was really under the protection of the South Korean government.
The consulate was comfortable, South Korean officials were helpful and there was another North Korean defector inside the consulate to talk to.
For the first time in his life, Shin showered daily. He had new clothes and fresh underwear. Rested, scrubbed and feeling increasingly safe, Shin waited for paperwork to be processed that would allow him to travel to South Korea.
He heard from officials in the consulate that the journalist who had helped him — and who still does not want his name or news organization made public — had got into trouble with the Chinese authorities.
Finally, after six months inside the consulate, Shin flew to Seoul, where the South Korean National Intelligence Service took an uncommon interest in him. During interrogations that lasted an entire month, Shin told NIS agents his life story. He tried to be as truthful as possible.
PART THREE
21
When intelligence agents were finished with Shin, he reported to Hanawon, which means ‘House of Unity’ in Korean. It’s a government-run resettlement centre perched in verdant hill country about forty miles south of Seoul, a sprawling megalopolis of more than twenty million people. The complex looks like a well-funded, security- obsessed mental hospital: three-storey redbrick buildings encircled by a high fence surmounted by video cameras and patrolled by armed guards.
Hanawon was built in 1999 by the Ministry of Unification to house, feed and teach North Korean defectors how to adjust and survive in the South’s ultra-competitive capitalist culture.
To that end, the centre has a staff of psychologists, career counsellors and teachers of everything from world history to driving. There are also doctors, nurses and dentists. During their three-month stay, defectors learn their rights under South Korean law and go on field trips to shopping centres, banks and subway stations.
‘Everyone who defects has adjustment problems,’ Ko Gyoung-bin, director-general of Hanawon, told me when I visited the complex.
Initially, Shin seemed to be adjusting better than most.
Field trips did not surprise or frighten him. Having navigated several of China’s largest and most prosperous cities on his own, he was accustomed to pushy crowds, tall buildings, flashy cars and electronic gadgets.
During his first month at Hanawon, he received documents and photo identification that certified his South Korean citizenship, which the government automatically bestows on all those who flee the North. He also attended classes that explained the many government benefits and programmes offered to defectors, including a free apartment, an eight-hundred-dollar-a-month settlement stipend for two years and as much as eighteen thousand
