When he was ten, Shin left his house one evening and went looking for his mother. He was hungry and it was time for her to prepare dinner. He walked to a nearby rice field where his mother worked and asked a woman if she had seen her.
‘She’s cleaning the
Shin walked to the guard’s office and found the front door locked. He peeked through a window on the side of the building. His mother was on her knees cleaning the floor. As Shin watched, the
He never asked his mother about what he saw, and he never mentioned it to his father.
That same year, students in Shin’s class at primary school were required to volunteer to help their parents at work. He joined his mother one morning to plant rice seedlings. She seemed unwell and fell behind in her planting. Shortly before the lunch break, her slack pace caught the eye of a guard.
‘You bitch,’ he shouted at her.
‘Bitch’ was the standard form of address when camp guards spoke to female prisoners, while Shin and the other male prisoners were called sons of bitches.
‘How are you able to stuff your face when you can’t even plant rice?’ the guard asked.
She apologized, but the guard grew increasingly angry.
‘This bitch won’t do,’ he shouted.
As Shin stood beside his mother, the guard invented a punishment for her.
‘Go kneel on that ridge there and raise your arms. Stay in that position until I come back from lunch.’
Shin’s mother knelt on the ridge in the sun for an hour and a half, arms reaching for the sky. The boy stood nearby and watched. He did not know what to say to her so he said nothing.
When the guard returned, he ordered Shin’s mother back to work. Weak and hungry, she passed out in the middle of the afternoon. Shin ran to the guard, begging him for help. Other workers dragged his mother to a shaded rest area, where she regained consciousness.
That evening, Shin went with his mother to an ‘ideological struggle’ meeting, a compulsory gathering for self-criticism. Shin’s mother again fell to her knees at the meeting as forty of her fellow farm workers followed the
On summer nights, Shin and some of the other small boys in his village would sneak into the orchard just north of the cluster of concrete dwellings where they lived. They picked unripe pears and cucumbers and ate them as quickly as they could. When they were caught, guards would beat them with batons and ban them from lunch at school for several days.
Guards, though, did not care if Shin and his friends ate rats, frogs, snakes and insects. They were intermittently abundant in the sprawling camp, which used few pesticides, relied on human waste as fertilizer, and supplied no water for cleaning privies or taking baths.
Eating rats not only filled empty stomachs, it was essential to survival. Their flesh could help prevent pellagra, a sometimes fatal disease that was rampant in the camp, especially in the winter. Prisoners with pellagra, the result of a lack of protein and niacin in their diets, suffered weakness, skin lesions, diarrhoea and dementia. It was a frequent cause of death.
Catching and roasting rats became a passion for Shin. He caught them in his house, in the fields and in the privy. He would meet his friends in the evening at his primary school, where there was a coal grill to roast them. Shin peeled away their skin, scraped away their innards, salted what was left and chewed the rest — flesh, bones and tiny feet.
He also learned to use the stems of foxtail grass to spear grasshoppers, longheaded locusts and dragonflies, which he roasted over a fire in late summer and autumn. In the mountain forests, where groups of students were often sent to gather wood, Shin ate wild grapes, gooseberries and Korean raspberries by the fistful.
During winter, spring and early summer, there was much less to eat. Hunger drove him and his boyhood friends to try strategies that older prisoners in the camp claimed could ease the discomfort of an empty stomach. They ate meals without water or soup, under the theory that liquid accelerated digestion and quickened the return of hunger pangs. They also tried to refrain from defecating, believing that this would make them feel full and less obsessed with food. An alternative hunger-fighting technique was to imitate cows, regurgitating a recent meal and eating it again. Shin tried this a few times, but found it didn’t ease his hunger.
The summertime, when children were sent to the fields to help plant and weed, was peak season for rats and field mice. Shin remembers eating them every day. His happiest, most contented childhood moments were when his belly was full.
The ‘eating problem’, as it’s often called in North Korea, is not confined to labour camps. It has stunted the bodies of millions across the country. Teenage boys fleeing the North in the past decade are on average five inches shorter and weigh twenty-five pounds less than boys growing up in South Korea.[7]
Mental retardation caused by early childhood malnutrition disqualifies about a quarter of potential military conscripts in North Korea, according to the National Intelligence Council, a research institution that is part of the US intelligence community. Its report said hunger-caused intellectual disabilities among the young were likely to cripple economic growth even if the country opened to the outside world or united with the South.
Since the 1990s, North Korea has been unable to grow, buy or deliver enough food to feed its population. Famine in the mid-1990s killed perhaps a million North Koreans. A similar death rate in the United States would claim about twelve million lives.
The North’s food disaster eased in the late 1990s as the government agreed to receive international food aid. The United States became North Korea’s largest aid donor while remaining its most demonized enemy.
Every year North Korea needs to produce more than five million tons of rice and cereal grain to feed its twenty-three million people. Nearly every year it falls short, usually by about a million tons. With long winters and high mountains, the country lacks arable land, denies incentives to farmers and cannot afford fuel or modern farm equipment.
It squeaked by for years without a food catastrophe thanks to subsidies from Moscow, but when the Soviet Union collapsed, the subsidies ended and North Korea’s centrally planned economy stopped functioning. There was no free fuel for its aging factories, no guaranteed market for its often-shoddy goods and no access to cheap, Soviet-made chemical fertilizers on which state farms had become dependent.
For several years, South Korea helped fill the gap, giving Pyongyang half a million tons of fertilizer annually as part of its ‘Sunshine Policy’ to try to ease North–South tensions.
When new leadership in Seoul cut off the free fertilizer in 2008, North Korea tried to do nationally what it has been doing for decades in its labour camps. The masses were told to make
Sealed away behind an electrified fence during the 1990s, Shin was unaware that millions of his countrymen were desperately hungry.
Neither he nor his parents (as far as Shin knew) had heard that the government was struggling to feed the army or that people were dying of starvation in their apartments in North Korean cities, including the capital.
They did not know that tens of thousands of North Koreans had abandoned their homes and were walking into China in search of food. Nor were they beneficiaries of the billions of dollars’ worth of food aid that poured into North Korea. During those chaotic years, as the basic functioning of Kim Jong Il’s government stalled, think- tank experts in the West were writing books with doomsday titles such as
The end was nowhere in sight inside Camp 14, which was self-sufficient except for occasional trainloads of salt.
