audience of Korean American teenagers. Dressed in a red T-shirt, jeans and sandals, he looked relaxed and smiled sweetly at the attentive kids seated in stackable chairs. He was the featured speaker at the Torrance First Presbyterian Church. His topic, as always in public appearances, was life in Camp 14.
For more than a year, his sponsors at LiNK had been sending him to this kind of event and nagging him to prepare appropriate remarks. They wanted him to deliver a crisply organized, emotionally powerful speech, preferably in English, which would use his unique story to shake up American audiences, motivate volunteers and perhaps raise money for the cause of North Korean human rights. As one of LiNK’s executives told me, ‘Shin could be an incredible asset for us and this movement. “You could be the face of North Korea,” we tell him.’
Shin wasn’t so sure.
On that night in Torrance, he had not prepared anything. After he was introduced by a LiNK staffer, he said hello to the students in Korean and asked, through a translator, if they had any questions. When a girl in the audience asked him to explain how he escaped, he looked pained.
‘This is really private and sensitive,’ he said. ‘I try to avoid talking about it as much as I can.’
Reluctantly, he told a story about his escape that was short, sketchy, sanitized and largely incomprehensible to someone who wasn’t steeped in the details of his life.
‘My story can be very heartbreaking,’ he said, wrapping up the session after about fifteen minutes. ‘I don’t want you to be depressed.’
He had bored and baffled his audience. One boy — clearly confused about who Shin was and what he had done in North Korea — asked a final question. What had it been like to serve in the North Korean military? Shin corrected the boy, saying he had not served in the Korean People’s Army. ‘I was not worthy,’ he said.
After watching his appearance in the church, I pressed Shin to explain what was going on: why do you want to be a human rights witness when it seems so difficult for you to talk in public about what happened in the camp? Why do you leave out the parts of your story that could rile up an audience?
‘The things I went through were mine alone,’ he replied without looking me in the eye. ‘I believe most people will find it nearly impossible to know what I am talking about.’
Nightmares — images of his mother’s hanging — continued to haunt his sleep. His screams woke up roommates in the group house he shared in Torrance with LiNK volunteers. He refused free counselling from Los Angeles-based, Korean-speaking psychotherapists and declined to enrol in courses that could give him a high- school equivalency degree. He also refused to consider college.
Several times during our long weeks of interviews, he mentioned a ‘dead space’ inside him, which he said made it difficult for him to feel much of anything. Sometimes he pretended to be happy, he said, to see how other people reacted to him. Often he did not make any effort.
Shin’s adjustment to life in the United States had not been easy.
Shortly after arriving in California in the spring of 2009, Shin began having severe and recurring headaches. His colleagues at LiNK worried that he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, but it turned out the headaches were a symptom of runaway tooth decay. A dentist performed root canal surgery and the headaches went away.
That instant cure was the exception.
There is — there will be — no quick, easy way for Shin to adapt to life outside the fence, whether in the United States or in South Korea. His friends told me as much, and so did he.
‘Shin is still a prisoner,’ said Andy Kim, a young Korean American who helped run LiNK and who, for a time, was Shin’s closest confidant. ‘He cannot enjoy his life when there are people suffering in the camps. He sees happiness as selfishness.’
Andy and Shin are about the same age and they often ate lunch together at Los Chilaquiles, a cheap Mexican joint in a strip mall not far from LiNK’s office in a Torrance industrial park. Shin was passionate about food and did his best talking in Korean and Mexican restaurants. For several months, Andy met Shin once a week for an hour to discuss how his life was shaping up in the United States.
There were a number of good things going on. Shin had become chatty and playful in the office. He stunned Andy and others at LiNK by popping into their offices and telling them that he ‘loved’ them. But he often did not respond well to advice from these same people, and had trouble distinguishing between constructive criticism and personal betrayal. Shin made little progress in learning how to manage money, sometimes spending more than he could afford on dinners and airline tickets for friends. In tearful conversations with Andy he would describe himself as ‘worthless garbage’.
‘Sometimes Shin sees himself through the eyes of his new self, and sometimes he sees himself through the eyes of the guards in the camp,’ said Andy. ‘He is kind of here and kind of there.’
When I asked Shin if this were true, he nodded yes.
‘I am evolving from being an animal,’ he said. ‘But it is going very, very slowly. Sometime I try to cry and laugh like other people, just to see if it feels like anything. Yet tears don’t come. Laughter doesn’t come.’
His behaviour was consistent with a pattern that researchers have found among concentration camp survivors the world over. They often move through life with what Harvard psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman calls a ‘contaminated identity’.
‘They suffer not only from a classic post-traumatic syndrome but also from profound alterations in their relations with God, with other people, and with themselves,’ Herman wrote in her book,
Soon after Shin arrived in California, Kyung Soon Chung, a pastor’s wife born in Seoul, began cooking for him, mothering him and monitoring his adjustment to American life. When he first showed up at her home for dinner, she ran to him and tried to give him a hug. He would not have it. He felt uncomfortable being touched.
He kept coming to dinner, though, in part because he loved Kyung’s cooking. He also became friends with Kyung’s twenty-something children: Eunice, a human rights activist he had met in Seoul, and her younger brother, David, a recent Yale graduate who was also interested in human rights. The family, which has befriended a number of North Korean immigrants, lives in Riverside, a city sixty miles east of Torrance. Kyung and her husband, Jung Kun Kim, head a small Christian ministry called the Ivy Global Mission.
In them, Shin discovered a Korean family that was open, welcoming and loving. He was envious and a bit overwhelmed by the intensity with which they cared for each other — and for him. For nearly two years, he spent every other Saturday evening at Kyung’s dinner table, sleeping over in a guest room and attending church with the family on Sunday.
Kyung, who doesn’t speak much English, began calling Shin her eldest son. He tolerated, and then returned, her hugs. He learned that she loved frozen yogurt, and before coming to dinner he would stop at a supermarket and buy her some. She teased him, saying, ‘When are you going to bring me a daughter-in-law?’ He flattered her, telling her that she was losing weight and looking younger. They talked for hours, just the two of them.
‘Why are you so nice to me?’ Shin once asked her, his mood darkening. ‘Don’t you know what I have done?’
He told Kyung that he ‘disgusts’ himself, that he cannot escape dreams of his mother’s death, that he cannot forgive himself for leaving his father behind in the camp and that he hates himself for crawling over Park’s body. He said, too, that he was ashamed of stealing rice and clothing from poor North Koreans during his flight out of the country.
There will be no end to Shin’s guilt, Kyung believes, but she often told him he had a powerful conscience and a good heart. She also said he had an advantage over other North Koreans: he had not been contaminated by propaganda or the cult of personality that surrounds the Kim dynasty.
‘With Shin, there is a certain purity,’ she said. ‘He has never been brainwashed.’
Her children saw striking changes in Shin’s confidence and social skills after a couple of years in California: he was less shy, quicker to smile and became something of a hugger. Before and after some of my interviews with him in California, he hugged me too.
‘He used to be embarrassed meeting my church friends,’ said Eunice. ‘Now he knows how to make jokes. He laughs out loud.’
David agreed. ‘Shin shows real empathy for others. This thing called love — he may have quite a lot of love in there.’
