‘They go nuts when you talk about it.’
The camps have barely pricked the world’s collective conscience. In the United States, newspaper stories notwithstanding, ignorance of their existence remains widespread. For several years in Washington, a handful of North Korean defectors and camp survivors gathered each spring on the Mall for speeches and marches. The Washington press corps paid little attention. Part of the reason was language. Most of the defectors spoke only Korean. As important, in a media culture that feeds on celebrity, no movie star, pop idol or Nobel Prize winner stepped forward to demand that outsiders invest emotionally in a distant issue that lacks good video footage.
‘Tibetans have the Dalai Lama and Richard Gere, Burmese have Aung San Suu Kyi, Darfurians have Mia Farrow and George Clooney,’ Suzanne Scholte, a long-time activist who brought camp survivors to Washington, told me. ‘North Koreans have no one like that.’
Shin told me he does not deserve to speak for the tens of thousands still in the camps. He is ashamed of what he did to survive and escape. He has resisted learning English, in part because he does not want to have to tell his story again and again in a language that might make him important. But he desperately wants the world to understand what North Korea has tried so diligently to hide. His burden is a heavy one. No one else born and raised in the camps has escaped to explain what went on inside — what still goes on inside.
PART ONE
1
Shin and his mother lived in the best prisoner quarters Camp 14 had to offer: a ‘model village’ next to an orchard and just across from the field where his mother was later hanged.
Each of the forty one-storey buildings in the village housed four families. Shin and his mother had their own room, where they slept side by side on a concrete floor. The four families shared a common kitchen, which had a single bare light bulb. Electricity ran for two hours a day, from four to five in the morning and ten to eleven at night. Windows were made of grey vinyl too opaque to see through. Rooms were heated in the Korean way by a coal fire in the kitchen with flues running under the bedroom floor. The camp had its own coal mines and coal for heating was readily available.
There were no beds, chairs or tables. There was no running water. No bath or shower. Prisoners who wanted to bathe sometimes sneaked down to the river in the summer. About thirty families shared a well for drinking water. They also shared a privy, which was divided in half for men and women. Defecating and urinating there was mandatory, as human waste was used as fertilizer on the camp farm.
If Shin’s mother met her daily work quota, she could bring home food for that night and the following day. At four in the morning, she would prepare breakfast and lunch for her son and for herself. Every meal was the same: corn porridge, pickled cabbage and cabbage soup. Shin ate this meal nearly every day for twenty-three years, unless he was denied food as punishment.
When he was still too young for school, his mother often left him alone in the house in the morning, and came back from the fields at midday for lunch. Shin was always hungry and he would eat his lunch as soon as his mother left for work in the morning.
He also ate her lunch.
When she came back at midday and found nothing to eat, she would become furious and beat her son with a hoe, a shovel, anything that was close at hand. Some of the beatings were as violent as those he later received from the guards.
Still, Shin took as much food as he could from his mother as often as he could. It did not occur to him that if he ate her lunch she would go hungry. Many years later, after she was dead and he was living in the United States, he would tell me that he loved his mother. But that was in retrospect. That was after he had learned that a civilized child should love his mother. When he was in the camp — depending upon her for all his meals, stealing her food, enduring her beatings — he saw her as competition for survival.
Her name was Jang Hye Gyung. Shin remembers her as small and slightly plump with powerful arms. She wore her hair cut short, like all women in the camp, and was required to cover her head with a white cloth folded into a triangle that tied around the back of her neck. Shin discovered her birth date — 1 October 1950 — from a document he saw during his interrogation in the underground prison.
She never talked to him about her past, her family, or why she was in the camp, and he never asked. His existence as her son had been arranged by the guards. They chose her and the man who became Shin’s father as prizes for each other in a ‘reward’ marriage.
Single men and women slept in dormitories segregated by sex. The eighth rule of Camp 14, as Shin was required to memorize it, said, ‘Should sexual physical contact occur without prior approval, the perpetrators will be shot immediately.’
Rules were the same in other North Korean labour camps. If unauthorized sex resulted in a pregnancy or a birth, the woman and her baby were usually killed, according to my interviews with a former camp guard and several former prisoners. They said that women who had sex with guards in an attempt to get more food or easier work knew that the risks were high. If they became pregnant, they disappeared.
A reward marriage was the only safe way around the no-sex rule. Marriage was dangled in front of prisoners as the ultimate bonus for hard work and reliable snitching. Men became eligible at twenty-five, women at twenty-three. Guards announced marriages three or four times a year, usually on propitious dates, such as New Year’s Day or Kim Jong Il’s birthday. Neither bride nor groom had much say in deciding whom they would marry. If one partner found his or her chosen mate to be unacceptably old, cruel, or ugly, guards would sometimes cancel a marriage. If they did, neither the man nor the woman would be allowed to marry again.
Shin’s father, Shin Gyung Sub, told Shin that the guards gave him Jang as payment for his skill in operating a metal lathe in the camp’s machine shop. Shin’s mother never told Shin why she had been given the honour of marriage.
But for her, as for many brides in the camp, marriage was a kind of promotion. It came with a slightly better job and better housing — in the model village, where there was a school and health clinic. Shortly after her marriage, she was transferred there from a crowded dormitory for women in the camp’s garment factory. Jang was also given a coveted job on a nearby farm, where there were opportunities to steal corn, rice and green vegetables.
After their marriage, the couple was allowed to sleep together for five consecutive nights. From then on, Shin’s father, who continued to live in a dormitory at his work site, was permitted to visit Jang a few times a year. Their liaison produced two sons. The eldest, Shin He Geun, was born in 1974. Shin was born eight years later.
The brothers barely knew each other. When Shin was born, his older brother was away in primary school for ten hours a day. By the time Shin was four, his brother had moved out of the house (at the mandatory age of twelve) and into a dormitory.
As for his father, Shin remembers that he sometimes showed up at night and left early in the morning. He paid little attention to the boy, and Shin grew up indifferent to his presence.
In the years after he escaped the camp, Shin learned that many people associate warmth, security and affection with the words ‘mother’, ‘father’ and ‘brother’. That was not his experience. The guards taught him and the other children in the camp that they were prisoners because of the ‘sins’ of their parents. The children were told that while they should always be ashamed of their traitorous blood, they could go a long way towards ‘washing away’ their inherent sinfulness by working hard, obeying the guards and informing on their parents. The tenth rule of Camp 14 said that a prisoner ‘must truly’ consider each guard as his teacher. That made sense to Shin. As a child and teenager, his parents were exhausted, distant and uncommunicative.
Shin was a scrawny, incurious and for the most part friendless child whose one source of certainty was the guards’ lectures about redemption through snitching. His understanding of right and wrong, though, was often muddied by encounters he witnessed between his mother and the camp guards.
