dollars if he stuck with job training or higher education.
In a classroom with other defectors, he learned that the Korean War started when North Korea launched an unprovoked surprise invasion of the South on 25 June 1950. It’s a history lesson that flabbergasts most newcomers from the North. Beginning in early childhood, their government has taught them that South Korea started the war with the encouragement and armed assistance of the United States. At Hanawon, many defectors flatly refuse to believe that this fundamental pillar of North Korean history is built on a lie. It is a reaction comparable to the way Americans might respond to someone who told them that World War II started in the Pacific after an American sneak attack on Tokyo harbour.
Since Shin had been taught next to nothing in Camp 14, a radically revised history of the Korean Peninsula was not meaningful to him. He was far more interested in classes that taught him how to use a computer and find information on the Internet.
But towards the end of his first month at Hanawon, just as he had begun to feel comfortable there, Shin started to experience disturbing dreams. He saw his mother hanged and Park’s body on the fence, and visualized the torture he believed his father had been subjected to after his escape. As the nightmares continued, he dropped out of a course in automobile repair. He did not take his driving test. He stopped eating. He struggled to sleep. He was all but paralysed by guilt.
Nearly all defectors arrive at Hanawon showing clinical symptoms of paranoia. They whisper and get in fistfights. They are afraid to disclose their names, ages or places of birth. Their manners often offend South Koreans. They tend not to say ‘thank you’ or ‘sorry’.
Questions from South Korean bank tellers, whom they meet on field trips to open bank accounts, often terrify defectors. They doubt the motives of nearly all people in positions of authority. They feel guilty about those they left behind. They fret, sometimes to the point of panic, about their educational and financial inferiority to South Koreans. They are ashamed of the way they dress, talk and even wear their hair.
‘In North Korea, paranoia was a rational response to real conditions and it helped these people survive,’ said Kim Heekyung, a clinical psychologist who spoke to me in her office at Hanawon. ‘But it keeps them from understanding what is going on in South Korea. It is a real obstacle to assimilation.’
Teenagers from the North spend two months to two years at Hangyoreh Middle-High School, a government-funded remedial boarding school affiliated with Hanawon. It was built in 2006 to help newly arrived youngsters from the North, most of whom are not fit to attend public school in South Korea.
Nearly all of them struggle with basic reading and maths. Some are cognitively impaired, apparently from acute malnourishment as infants. Even among the brightest youngsters, their knowledge of world history essentially comprises the mythical personal stories of their Great Leader, Kim Il Sung, and his Dear Son, Kim Jong Il.
‘Education in North Korea is useless for life in South Korea,’ Gwak Jong-moon, principal of Hangyoreh, told me. ‘When you are too hungry, you don’t go to learn and teachers don’t go to teach. Many of our students have been hiding in China for years with no access to schools. As young children in North Korea, they grew up eating bark off trees and thinking it was normal.’
During field trips to the movies, young defectors often panic when the lights go down, afraid that someone might kidnap them. They are bewildered by the Korean spoken in South Korea, where the language has been infected with Americanisms such as
Pizza, hot dogs and hamburgers — staples of South Korean teen cuisine — give them indigestion. So does too much rice, a one-time staple that has become a food for the rich in post-famine North Korea.
One teenage girl at Hangyoreh School gargled with liquid fabric softener, mistaking it for mouthwash. Another used laundry detergent as baking flour. Many are terrified when they first hear the noise of an electric washing machine.
In addition to being paranoid, confused and intermittently technophobic, defectors tend to suffer from preventable diseases and conditions that are all but nonexistent in South Korea. The head nurse at Hanawon for the past decade, Chun Jung-hee, told me that a high percentage of women from the North have chronic gynecological infections and cysts. She said many defectors arrive infected with tuberculosis that has never been treated with antibiotics. They also commonly arrive with chronic indigestion and hepatitis B.
Routine medical ailments are often difficult to diagnose, the nurse said, because defectors are unaccustomed to and suspicious of doctors who ask personal questions and prescribe medications. Men, women and children have serious dental problems resulting from malnutrition and a lack of calcium in their diets. Half the money spent annually on medical care at Hanawon goes on prosthetic dental treatment.
Many, if not most, defectors arriving at Hanawon escaped North Korea with the help of brokers based in South Korea. The brokers wait eagerly for defectors to graduate from the settlement centre and begin receiving monthly stipends from the government. Then they demand their money. Anxiety about debt torments defectors inside Hanawon, the head nurse told me.
Shin did not have to worry about brokers, and his physical health was relatively good after half a year of rest and regular meals in the consulate in Shanghai.
But his nightmares would not go away.
They became more frequent and more upsetting. He found his comfortable, well-nourished life impossible to reconcile with the grisly images from Camp 14 that played inside his head.
As his mental health deteriorated, Hanawon’s medical staff realized he needed special care and transferred him to the psychiatric ward of a nearby hospital, where he spent two and a half months, some of it in isolation and most of it on medication that allowed him to sleep and eat.
He had started keeping a diary in the South Korean Consulate in Shanghai, and doctors in the hospital’s psychiatric ward encouraged him to keep writing it as part of his treatment for what they diagnosed as post- traumatic stress disorder.
Shin remembers little of his time in the hospital, except that the nightmares slowly diminished.
After his discharge, he moved into a small apartment purchased for him by the Ministry of Unification. It was located in Hwaseong, a city of about five hundred thousand people in the low plains of the central Korean Peninsula, near the Yellow Sea and about thirty miles south of Seoul.
For the first month, Shin rarely went outdoors, watching South Korean life unfold from the windows of his apartment. Eventually, he ventured out onto the streets. Shin compares his emergence to the slow growth of a fingernail. He cannot explain how it happened or why. It just did.
After he began to venture into the city, he took driving lessons. Owing to his limited vocabulary, he twice flunked the written driver’s licence test. Shin found it difficult to find a job that interested him or to keep a job he was offered. He collected scrap metal, made clay pots and worked in a convenience store.
Career counsellors at Hanawon say most North Koreans have similar experiences of exile. They often depend on the South Korean government to solve their problems and fail to take personal responsibility for poor work habits or for showing up late on the job. Defectors frequently quit jobs found for them by the government and start businesses that fail. Some newcomers are disgusted by what they see as the decadence and inequality of life in the South. So to find employers who will put up with the prickliness of newcomers from the North, the Ministry of Unification pays companies up to eighteen hundred dollars a year if they risk hiring a defector.
Shin spent long hours by himself, feeling desperately lonely in his one-room apartment. He tried to locate his oldest uncle, Shin Tae Sub, whose flight to South Korea after the Korean War was the crime for which Shin’s father and his entire family had been sent to Camp 14. But Shin had only a name, and the South Korean government told him it had no information on that name. The Unification Ministry said it could search only for people who had registered to be reunited with lost family members, so Shin gave up the search.
One of the psychiatrists who had treated Shin in the hospital put him in touch with a counsellor from the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights, a non-government organization in Seoul that gathers, analyses and publishes information about abuses in the North.
The counsellor encouraged Shin to turn his therapeutic diary into a memoir, which the Database Center published in Korean in 2007. While working on the book, Shin began spending nearly all his time at the office of the Database Center in Seoul, where he was given a place to sleep and made friends with his editors and other staff.
