In the United States, the pattern is similar. Cliff Lee, a Korean-born American who lives in Alexandria, Virginia, has provided housing to several North Koreans in recent years and seen a pattern in their adjustment troubles: ‘They know that everything they were told in North Korea was a lie, and they have a very tough time in America believing anything that an organization says.’
Song was heartbroken by Shin’s decision to quit. She blamed herself for not demanding, when he first arrived in California, that he take responsibility for himself. Her main worry, she said, is not knowing what Shin is planning to do for the rest of his life.
Epilogue
In February 2011, days after his break with LiNK, Shin flew up the West Coast to Washington State. He moved in with Harim and her parents in Sammamish, a Seattle suburb in the western foothills of the Cascade Mountains.
His sudden relocation surprised me. I was also worried, like his friends in Los Angeles, that he was being impulsive and burning bridges without good reason, but his move certainly simplified the logistics of spending time with him. I happen to be from the state of Washington, and after leaving Tokyo and the
Our work together was nearly done and Shin had kept his word. He had allowed me to move around in the darkest corners of his past. But I needed a bit more: a better sense of what he wanted in the future. As he sat with Harim on the couch in my living room, I asked if I could visit their home. I wanted to meet Harim’s parents.
Shin and Harim were too polite to say no. Instead, they said the house was too messy. They would have to check on a good time. They would get back to me. Without saying so, they made it clear that they would prefer that my long interrogation come to an end — and soon.
He and Harim had formed a two-person NGO called North Korea Freedom Plexus. To fund it, they hoped to raise money from donations and Shin intended to give a lot of speeches. Their ambitious mission was to open asylum shelters for defectors who crossed into China and to smuggle anti-regime pamphlets into North Korea. To that end, Shin said he had twice travelled to border areas inside China and planned to do so again. When I asked if he was afraid of being abducted or arrested in China, where North Korean agents are known to hunt down and kidnap defectors, he said he has the protection of a South Korean passport and that he is always careful. But this was not an answer that satisfied his friends, who warned him to stay out of China.
Lowell and Linda Dye, the Columbus couple who read my first story about Shin in 2008 and helped pay for his travel to the United States, were disappointed and worried when they heard he had quit LiNK and moved to Seattle. The Dyes and the Kim family in Riverside, California, have told Shin that creating a new NGO is a risky idea and that he would be more effective if he continued to work with a well-established and well-funded organization.
Shin has become close to the Dyes. He calls them his ‘parents’ and takes their concerns seriously. After he moved to Seattle, he accepted an invitation to travel to Columbus and stay with them for a couple of weeks, while Harim stayed at home in Seattle.
The Dyes wanted to help Shin make a plan for managing his future. Lowell, a management consultant, believes he needs an agent, a money manager and a lawyer. But in Columbus, he and Shin did not have a serious talk, in part because Shin kept Seattle hours, sleeping in until late morning and staying up at night to talk to Harim on Skype.
‘He told us he really loves Harim,’ Lowell said. ‘That is the way he is going. She makes him happy.’
When Shin returned to Seattle, I met with him and Harim again. Their house was still too messy for me to visit, they said, so we had coffee at Starbucks. When I asked how their relationship was going, Harim blushed, smiled and looked lovingly at Shin.
Shin did not smile.
He did not want to talk about it.
I persisted, reminding him that he had often told me he did not consider himself capable of love, and certainly not of marriage. Had he changed his mind?
‘We have to work before anything else,’ he said. ‘But after work is done there is hope for progress.’
The relationship did not work out. Six months after he moved in with Harim, Shin called me to say that they were splitting up. He did not want to talk about why. Shin flew the next day to Ohio to live with the Dye family. He was not certain where he would go from there, perhaps back to South Korea.
While Shin was still in the Seattle area, he invited me to a Korean American Pentecostal church in the city’s northern suburbs. He was giving a speech and seemed especially eager for me to come and listen. When I showed up at the church a few minutes early on a cold and rainy Sunday evening, Shin was waiting for me. He shook my hand with both of his, looked me in the eye and told me to sit in a pew near the front. He was dressed more formally than I could remember seeing him: a grey business suit, a blue dress shirt, open at the collar, and polished black loafers. The church was full.
After a hymn and a prayer from the pastor, Shin strode to the front of the church and took command of the evening. Without notes or a hint of nerves, he spoke for a solid hour. He began by goading his audience of Korean immigrants and their American-raised adult children, asserting that Kim Jong Il was worse than Hitler. While Hitler attacked his enemies, Shin said, Kim worked his own people to death in places like Camp 14.
Having grabbed the congregation’s attention, Shin then introduced himself as a predator who had been bred in the camp to inform on family and friends and to feel no remorse. ‘The only thing I thought was that I had to prey on others for my survival,’ he said.
In the camp, when his teacher beat a six-year-old classmate to death for having five grains of corn in her pocket, Shin confessed to the congregation that he ‘didn’t think much about it’.
‘I did not know about sympathy or sadness,’ he said. ‘They educated us from birth so that we were not capable of normal human emotions. Now that I am out, I am learning to be emotional. I have learned to cry. I feel like I am becoming human.’
But Shin made it clear that he still had a long way to go. ‘I escaped physically,’ he said. ‘I haven’t escaped psychologically.’
Near the end of his speech, Shin described how he had crawled over Park’s smouldering body. His motives in fleeing Camp 14, he said, were not noble. He did not thirst for freedom or political rights. He was merely hungry for meat.
Shin’s speech astonished me. Compared to the diffident, incoherent speaker I had seen six months earlier in Southern California, he was unrecognizable. He had harnessed his self-loathing and used it to indict the state that had poisoned his heart and killed his family.
His confessional, I later learned, was the calculated result of hard work. Shin had noticed that his meandering question and answer sessions were putting people to sleep, so he decided to act on advice he had been resisting for years: he outlined his speech, tailored it to his audience and memorized what he wanted to say. In a room by himself, he polished his delivery.
The preparation paid off. That evening, his listeners squirmed in their pews, their faces showing discomfort, disgust, anger and shock. Some faces were stained with tears. When Shin was finished, when he told the congregation that one man, if he refuses to be silenced, could help free the tens of thousands who remain in North Korea’s labour camps, the church exploded in applause.
In that speech, if not yet in his life, Shin had seized control of his past.
