that has moved about eighty per cent of its total military firepower to within sixty miles of the Demilitarized Zone, the heavily guarded border strip that separates the two Koreas, and has repeatedly threatened to turn Seoul (located just thirty-five miles from the border) into a ‘sea of fire’. Bloody surprise attacks from the North have a way of recurring every ten to fifteen years, from the 1968 raid by a hit squad that tried to assassinate a South Korean president, to the 1987 bombing of a Korean Air passenger jet and the failed 1996 submarine infiltration by special forces commandos, to the 2010 sinking of the warship and the shelling of the island.
The attacks have killed hundreds of South Koreans, but they have yet to provoke the electorate into demanding that their government launch a major counterattack. Nor have they stopped the average South Korean from getting richer, better educated and better housed in what has become the fourth largest economy in Asia and the eleventh largest in the world.
South Koreans have paid close attention to the price tag of German unification. The proportional burden on South Korea, some studies have found, would be two and a half times greater than on West Germany after it absorbed the former East Germany. Studies have found that it could cost more than two trillion dollars over thirty years, raise taxes for six decades and require that ten per cent of the South’s gross domestic product be spent in the North for the foreseeable future.
South Koreans want reunification with the North, but they do not want it right away. Many do not want it during their lifetimes, largely because the cost would be unacceptably high.
Shin and many other North Korean defectors complain, with considerable justification, that South Koreans view them as ill-educated, badly spoken and poorly dressed bumpkins whose mess of a country is more trouble than it’s worth.
There is ample evidence that South Korean society makes it hard for defectors to fit in. The unemployment rate of North Koreans in the South is four times the national average, while the suicide rate for defectors is more than two and a half times as high as the rate for South Koreans.
Even South Koreans themselves struggle mightily to fit into their own success-obsessed, status-conscious, education-crazed culture. Shin was attempting to find his way in a society that is singularly overworked, insecure and stressed out. South Koreans work more, sleep less and kill themselves at a higher rate than citizens of any other developed country, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a group that supports sustainable economic growth in thirty-four wealthy countries.
They also view each other with a witheringly critical eye. Self-worth tends to be narrowly defined by admission to a few highly selective universities and prestigious, high-paying jobs at conglomerates like Samsung, Hyundai and LG.
‘This society is unforgiving, relentless and the competition is constant,’ Andrew Eungi Kim, a sociology professor at Korea University, one of the country’s most elite schools, told me. ‘If young people do not obtain the right credentials — they call it the “right spec” — they become very pessimistic. They believe they cannot get started in life. The pressure to do well in school begins to build at grade four, believe it or not, and it becomes everything to students by grade seven.’
The pursuit of the “right spec” has supercharged spending on schooling. Among wealthy countries, South Korea ranks first in per capita spending on private education, which includes home tutors, cramming sessions and English-language courses at home and abroad. Four out of five students from elementary age to high school attend after-school cramming courses. About six per cent of the country’s gross domestic product is spent on education, more than double the percentage of comparable spending in the United States, Japan or Britain.
South Korea’s obsession with achievement has paid astonishing dividends. International economists often describe South Korea as the single most impressive example of what free markets, democratic government and elbow grease can do to transform a small agrarian backwater into a global powerhouse.
But the human cost of sudden affluence has also been astonishing.
Although the suicide rate in most other wealthy countries peaked in the early 1980s, it continues to climb in South Korea, doubling since 2000. The suicide rate in 2008 was two and half times higher than in the United States and significantly higher than in nearby Japan, where suicide is deeply embedded in the culture. It seems to have spread as a kind of infectious disease, exacerbated by the strains of ambition, affluence, family disintegration and loneliness.
‘We are unwilling to seek help for depression. We are very afraid of being seen as crazy,’ Ha Kyoo-seob, a psychiatrist at Seoul National University College of Medicine and head of the Korean Association for Suicide Prevention, told me. ‘This is the dark aspect of our rapid development.’
Although the stresses of affluence go a long way towards explaining South Korea’s indifference to defectors like Shin, there is another important factor: a schism in public opinion about how to manage the risks of living next to North Korea.
Depending on which way the political winds are blowing, the public and the government in Seoul swing between blinkered conciliation and careful confrontation.
After coming into office in 2008, President Lee and his ruling party stiffened the government’s attitude towards North Korea, cutting nearly all aid and applying conditions for cooperation on progress in nuclear disarmament and human rights. The policy has led to several jittery years of missile launches, frozen economic deals, border shootings and periodic threats from the North of ‘total war’.
Before Lee, South Korea took almost exactly the opposite approach. As part of its Sunshine Policy, Presidents Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun attended summits with Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang, approved massive shipments of food and fertilizer and agreed to generous economic deals. The policy all but ignored the existence of the labour camps and made no attempt to monitor who in North Korea benefited from the aid, but it won Kim Dae-jung the Nobel Peace Prize.
The South’s schizophrenia over how to deal with the North is occasionally acted out in a kind of Kabuki theatre on the border between the two Koreas. There, defectors launch balloons bound for their homeland with messages intended to offend Kim Jong Il. The leaflets describe him as a drinker of pricey imported wine, a seducer of other men’s wives, a murderer, a slaveholder and ‘the devil’.
I attended one of these balloon launches and watched police from Lee’s government struggle to protect a North Korean defector named Park Sang Hak from angry unionists and university intellectuals, who insisted that non-threatening engagement with North Korea’s government was the only permissible policy.
Before it was over, Park kicked one of the counter-protesters squarely in the head — a blow that sounded like a bat whacking a baseball — and spat on several others. He pulled a tear-gas revolver from his jacket and fired it into the air before police grabbed it. He failed to stop his opponents from ripping apart most of the bags containing anti-North Korean leaflets.
In the end, Park’s group managed to launch just one of its ten balloons and tens of thousands of leaflets were spilled onto the ground.
Shin and I met for the first time on the day after that balloon debacle. He had not attended. Street confrontation was not his style. He had been watching old films of the Allied liberation of Nazi concentration camps, footage that included scenes of bulldozers unearthing corpses that Adolf Hitler’s collapsing Third Reich had tried to hide.
‘It is just a matter of time,’ Shin told me, before North Korea decides to destroy the camps. ‘I hope that the United States, through pressure and persuasion, can convince [the North Korean government] not to murder all those people in the camps.’
Shin had not figured out how to pay his bills, make a living, or find a girlfriend in South Korea, but he had decided what he wanted to do with the rest of his life: he would be a human rights activist and raise international awareness about the existence of the labour camps.
To that end, he intended to leave South Korea and move to the United States. He had accepted an offer from Liberty in North Korea, the non-profit organization that sponsored his first American trip. He was moving to Southern California.
23
On a cool late-summer evening in an oceanside suburb of Los Angeles, Shin stood in front of a small
