Shin’s self-assessment was less sanguine.
‘Because I am surrounded by good people, I try to do what good people do,’ he told me. ‘But it is very difficult. It does not flow from me naturally.’
In California, Shin began giving God all the credit for his escape from Camp 14 and for his good fortune in finding a way out of North Korea and China. His emerging Christian faith, though, did not square with the timeline of his life. He did not hear about God until it was too late for his mother, his brother and Park. He doubted, too, that God had protected his father from the vengeance of the guards.
Similarly, guilt had not been an issue for Shin inside Camp 14. As an adolescent, he was furious with his mother for beating him, for risking escape, for causing his torture. He did not grieve when she was hanged. But as an adult survivor, as his emotional distance from the camp increases, his fury has given way to guilt and self- loathing. ‘These are emotions that slowly started to come out from within me,’ he said. Having seen first-hand how loving families behave, he cannot bear the memory of the kind of son he once was.
Shin had come to Torrance with the understanding that he would help LiNK by working with its volunteers and speaking at its events. In return, LiNK provided him with free housing and a living stipend, but no salary. With LiNK’s help, he obtained a ten-year multiple-entry visa that allowed him to stay in the United States for up to six months at a time.
US immigration law grants special consideration to North Korean refugees, and Shin’s unique status as a born and bred victim of a political prison camp gave him an excellent chance of obtaining permanent residency in the United States. Despite this, he did not apply for a green card as he couldn’t decide where he wanted to live.
Committing to anything was difficult. He enrolled in an English language course in Torrance, but dropped out after three months. He spent most of his time in LiNK’s office, where he read North Korean news on the Web and chatted with Korean-speaking staff. He was sometimes content to sweep floors, sort boxes and carry furniture. He told Hannah Song, the executive director, that he should be treated no differently to any other staff member. But he also pouted about work assignments and succumbed to fits of anger. Every six months his work was interrupted when he travelled back to South Korea for several weeks at a time.
LiNK pushes the North Koreans it helps bring to the United States to make a ‘life plan’ soon after they arrive. It is a list of practical, achievable goals that can help a newcomer build a stable, productive life; it usually includes English fluency, job training, counselling and lessons in money management.
Shin refused to make a life plan, and Song said she and others at LiNK allowed him to get away with it.
‘His story is so powerful,’ said Song. ‘He felt entitled to be an exception and we enabled him. He just floated around Torrance. He feels a need to make sense of why he survived that camp. I don’t think he has figured it out yet.’
Outside of the Korean Peninsula, there’s no place easier than greater Los Angeles for a Korean to float around without learning another language. More than three hundred thousand Korean Americans have settled in and around the city.
In Torrance and the adjacent towns, Shin could eat, shop, work and worship in Korean. He learned enough English to order burgers and Mexican food and to talk about baseball and the weather with his housemates.
He slept on a bunk bed in the four-bedroom ranch-style house provided by LiNK, where up to sixteen college-age volunteers and interns came and went. In the kitchen on the day I visited, the dishwasher displayed a sign that said, ‘Please don’t open. I am broken and I smell bad.’ The furniture was worn, the carpet faded and the wide front porch was littered with sneakers, sandals and flip-flops. Shin shared a cramped bedroom with three LiNK volunteers.
The quasi-chaotic, dormlike camaraderie suited him. Although his American-born housemates were sometimes noisy, spoke little Korean and never stayed around very long, he preferred their energetic transience to living alone. It was a lingering effect of the life he had known in Camp 14. He slept better and enjoyed food more when surrounded by people, even if they were strangers. When he struggled to fall asleep in the group house or when nightmares woke him up, he crawled out of his bunk and slept as he had in the camp — on a bare floor with a blanket.
Shin cycled to work on his easy twenty-minute commute through Torrance, a sun-soaked, industrial- suburban, multi-cultural mishmash of a place. Located nineteen miles southwest of downtown Los Angeles, it has a fine stretch of beach on Santa Monica Bay, where Shin sometimes went for walks. The wide avenues of Torrance were drawn up a century ago by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., who helped design the Mall in Washington. The Mediterranean Revival facade of Torrance High School was the backdrop for TV’s
LiNK moved to Torrance from Washington, DC, to find cheaper rent and to focus on building a grass-roots movement. It viewed Southern California as a better place to recruit and house the young volunteers it calls ‘Nomads’. They are trained in Torrance to travel across the United States, give presentations and raise awareness about human rights abuses in North Korea.
At the end of Shin’s second summer in California, one of those newly arrived Nomads-in-training was Harim Lee, a slim and strikingly attractive young woman who was born in Seoul and moved to the United States with her family when she was four.
She attended high school in the suburbs of Seattle and was a second-year student studying sociology at the University of Washington when she first saw Shin in a YouTube video. He was speaking in an auditorium in Mountain View, California, answering questions about his life from people who worked at Google. She also found the
Harim, who is bilingual, had travelled back to South Korea to work briefly as a translator for an NGO (non- governmental organization) that focused on North Korea. After her third year in college, she decided to leave school and get involved full time in the North Korean issue. She learned about LiNK’s Nomad programme on the Web. She did not realize that Shin was living in Torrance until two weeks before she flew from Seattle to start at LiNK.
On the flight to Los Angeles, she couldn’t stop thinking about Shin. She regarded him as a celebrity and prayed on the plane that they would become close. In Torrance, she quickly spotted him cruising into LiNK’s office on his bicycle and made it her business to find a time and place where they could talk. They liked each other immediately. He was twenty-seven; she was twenty-two.
LiNK has a strict no-dating rule between North Korean refugees and interns, many of whom are college age and far from their parents. The rule is intended to protect both the interns and the refugees, and ease the management challenges of the Nomad programme.
Shin and Harim ignored the rule. When they were warned to stop seeing each other until she finished her internship, both became angry and Harim threatened to quit. ‘We made a big deal to show that we felt the rule was wrong,’ she told me.
Shin viewed the warning as a personal insult. He complained of a double standard that made him a second-class person. ‘It is because they thought so little of me,’ Shin told me. ‘They thought they could rule my private life.’
After a trip to South Korea and several months of brooding, Shin quit LiNK. His relationship with Harim was not the only reason behind the break. Hannah Song was frustrated that Shin sometimes avoided responsibility, expected special treatment and made little effort to learn English, which limited his usefulness as a spokesman in the United States. There was also a miscommunication about housing. As Shin heard it, LiNK would no longer provide him with a place to live. Song said she had told Shin that at some point he would have to find a place of his own.
The strain was probably inevitable and it certainly wasn’t unusual. In South Korea, North Korean defectors routinely quit their jobs, claiming they have been singled out for persecution. At Hanawon, the resettlement centre in South Korea, job counsellors say that workplace paranoia, stormy resignations and lingering feelings of betrayal are chronic problems as North Koreans adjust to their new lives. Many of them never land on their feet.
