Escape from Camp 14

by Blaine Harden

  For the Chinese government, an uncontrolled surge of impoverished Korean refugees is undesirable for several reasons. It would dramatically worsen poverty in China’s three northeast provinces, which have largely missed out on the wealth generated by the country’s economic boom. More importantly, it might precipitate regime collapse in North Korea and lead to the unification of the Korean Peninsula under a Seoul-based government closely allied with the United States. In the process, China would lose a key buffer between one of its poorest regions and a united, affluent and West-oriented Korea. That, in turn, could arouse nationalist sentiments among ethnic Koreans in the Chinese borderlands.

  Beijing’s distaste for North Korean defectors, as enforced by police and border soldiers, is well understood by farmers, factory foremen and other bosses in China’s northeast provinces.

  But, as Shin found out, they are quite willing to ignore national directives when presented with an industrious North Korean who keeps his mouth shut and works hard for sixty cents a day. Chinese employers are also free to cheat, abuse, or get rid of their North Korean help at any time.

  Within a month, Shin’s arrangement with the farmer turned sour.

  He was fetching water from a brook near the farm when he met two other North Korean defectors. They were hungry, cold and living in an abandoned shack in the woods not far from the pig farm. Shin asked the Chinese farmer to help them out, and he did so, but with a reluctance and resentment that Shin was slow to notice.

  One of the defectors was a woman in her forties who had crossed the border before. She had an estranged Chinese husband and a child who lived nearby and she wanted to contact them by phone. The farmer allowed her to use his telephone. Within a few days, she and the other defector were gone. But giving shelter to three North Koreans had annoyed the farmer, and he told Shin that he, too, would have to go.

  The farmer knew of another job: tending livestock up in the mountains. He offered to drive Shin there in his car. After driving on mountain roads for two hours, the farmer dropped Shin off at a friend’s cattle ranch. It was not far from Helong, a city of about eighty-five thousand people. If Shin worked hard, the farmer told him, he would be generously compensated.

  Only when the farmer drove away did Shin discover that no one on the ranch spoke Korean.

  20

  For the next ten months, Shin stayed where the pig farmer had left him, tending cattle in mountain pastures and sleeping on a ranch-house floor with two surly Chinese cowhands. He was free to leave whenever he wanted, but he didn’t know where to go or what else to do.

  The future was to have been Park’s responsibility. Back in Camp 14, Park had assured Shin that once they made it to China he would arrange for passage to South Korea. Park would enlist the help of his uncle in China and they would be provided with money, paperwork and contacts. But Park was dead and South Korea seemed impossibly far away.

  Staying put, though, had some benefits. Shin’s legs healed, with scar tissue finally covering the electricity burns. From the cowherds and ranch manager he learned some conversational Chinese, and for the first time in his life he had access to an electric dream-making machine.

  A radio.

  Shin fiddled with its dial nearly every morning, switching between the dozen or so Korean-language stations that broadcast daily into North Korea and northeast China. These stations, with funding from South Korea, the United States and Japan, mix Asian and world news with sharply critical coverage of North Korea and the Kim dynasty. They focus on the North’s chronic food shortages, human rights violations, military provocations, nuclear programme and dependence on China. Considerable airtime is devoted to the comfortable lives, by North Korean standards, of defectors living in South Korea, where they receive housing and other subsidies from the government in Seoul.

  Defectors run some of these stations – with financial assistance from the United States and other sources – and they have recruited reporters inside North Korea. These reporters, who use mobile phones and smuggle out sound and video recordings on tiny USB memory sticks, have revolutionized news coverage of North Korea. It took months for the outside world to learn of economic reforms that eased restrictions on private markets in North Korea in 2002. Seven years later, when the North Korean government launched a disastrous currency reform that impoverished and enraged tens of thousands of traders, the news was reported within hours by Free North Korea Radio.

  Inside North Korea, the penalty for listening to these stations can be ten years in a labour camp. But the country has been flooded in recent years with three-dollar radios smuggled in from China, and between five and twenty per cent of North Koreans are tuning in daily, according to survey research gathered in China from defectors, traders and other border crossers.1 Many of them have told researchers that listening to foreign radio provided an important motivation for leaving the country.2

  Listening on the Chinese cattle ranch, Shin was comforted to hear voices speaking a language he understood. He heard the thrilling news that several hundred North Korean defectors had been flown from Vietnam to Seoul a year before. He paid particularly close attention to reports about border-crossing conditions, the routes defectors were taking to travel from China to South Korea and the lives they led after getting there.

  Shin struggled, though, to make sense of most of what he heard on the radio.

  The broadcasts were targeted at educated North Koreans, who had grown up with state media that venerates the godlike powers and wisdom of the Kim family dynasty and also warns that Americans, South Koreans and Japanese are scheming to take over the entire Korean Peninsula. Camp 14 had cut Shin out of this propaganda loop, and he listened to the West’s counterpropaganda with the ears of a child – curious, confused, sometimes even bored, but always lacking in context. Without a common language to communicate with anyone, his loneliness on the cattle ranch became greater than it had been in the labour camp.

  In late 2005, with winter rolling into the mountains, Shin decided to make his move.

  He had heard on the radio that Korean churches in China sometimes helped defectors, so he came up with a sketchy plan. He would travel west and south, putting as much distance as possible between himself, North Korea and the border patrol soldiers, then he would seek out friendly Koreans. With their help, he hoped to find a stable job in southern China and build at school, a position a low-profile life. He had by now given up all hope of reaching South Korea.

  Shin knew enough Chinese by then to tell the manager of the cattle ranch why he was leaving. He explained that if he continued to live near the border, he would be arrested by the police and forcibly sent back to North Korea.

  Without saying much, the manager paid him six hundred yuan, or about seventy-two dollars. For the ten months he had tended the cattle, it amounted to less than twenty-five cents a day. Based on the sixty cents a day he had earned at the pig farm, Shin had expected to be paid at least twice as much.

  He had been cheated, but like all North Koreans working in China he was in no position to protest. As a going-away present, the ranch manager gave Shin a map and took him to the bus station in nearby Helong.

  Compared to travelling in North Korea, Shin found it easy and safe to travel in China. His clothing – a gift from the pig farmer – was made locally and attracted little attention. Travelling alone and keeping his mouth shut, he discovered that his face and manner did not advertise his identity as a North Korean on the run.

  Even when Shin mentioned that he came from North Korea in conversation with the ethnic Koreans he appealed to for food, cash, or work, he learned that he was nobody special. A long line of defectors had come begging ahead of him. Most of the people he encountered were not alarmed by or interested in North Koreans. They were sick of them.

  No one asked to see Shin’s identification papers when he bought a ticket in Helong for the one-hundred-and-five-mile bus ride to Changchun, the capital of Jilin Province, or when he boarded a train for the five-hundred-mile jou
rney to Beijing, or when he travelled more than a thousand miles by bus to Chengdu, a city of five million people in southwest China.

  Shin started to look for work when he arrived in Chengdu, a destination he had picked randomly at the bus station in Beijing.

  At a Korean restaurant, he found a magazine that listed the names and addresses of several small churches. At each church, he asked to speak to the pastor, explaining that he was a North Korean in need of help. Ethnic Korean pastors gave him cash – as much as fifteen dollars’ worth of yuan – but none offered work or lodging. They also told him to go away. It was illegal, they said, to help a defector.

  When asking for help in China, Shin was careful not to say too much and avoided long conversations. He told no one that he was an escapee from a political labour camp, fearing that they might be tempted to turn him over to the police. He also stayed away from hotels and guesthouses, where he feared he would be asked to show identification.

  Instead, he spent many of his nights in PC bangs, the ubiquitous East Asian Internet cafés where young, mostly unmarried men play computer games and surf the Internet around the clock.

  Shin found he could get directions and some rest at a PC bang, if not exactly sleep. He looked like many of the aimless, unemployed young men who hang out in such places, and no one asked him for papers.

  After eight churches turned him away in Chengdu, Shin made the long, miserable bus trip back to Beijing, where for ten days he refocused his job search on Korean restaurants. Sometimes the owners or managers would feed him or give him a bit of money, but none offered him a job.

  As he failed to find work, Shin did not panic or get discouraged. Food meant a lot more to him than it means to most people, and everywhere he went in China there was an impressive abundance of it. To his amazement, China was a place where even dogs seemed well fed, and if he ran low on cash to buy food, he begged. He found that Chinese people would usually give him something.

  Shin came to believe that he would never starve, and that alone calmed his nerves and gave him hope. He did not have to break into houses to find food, money or clothing.

  Shin left Beijing and took a seventy-mile bus ride to Tianjin, a city of ten million people, where he again approached the Korean churches. Pastors once more offered him petty cash, but no work or lodging. He took a bus about two hundred and twenty miles south to Jinan, a city of five million, and spent five days searching out more Korean churches. Still, no work.

  Again, he moved south. On 6 February 2006 – a year and one week after he’d crossed the frozen Tumen River into China – Shin arrived in Hangzhou, a city of about six million people in the Yangtze River Delta. At the third Korean restaurant he walked into, the owner offered him a job.

  The restaurant, called Haedanghwa Korean Cuisine, was hectic and Shin worked long hours, washing dishes and cleaning tables. After eleven days, he had had enough. He told the owner he was quitting, collected his pay and boarded a bus bound for Shanghai, about ninety miles to the south.

  At a Shanghai bus station, Shin browsed through a Korean-language magazine, found a list of Korean restaurants and went off again in search of work.

  ‘May I meet the owner of this place?’ Shin asked a waitress in the first restaurant on his list.

  ‘Why do you ask?’ the waitress replied.

  ‘I am from North Korea, I just got off the bus and I have no place to go,’ Shin said. ‘I was wondering if I could work in this restaurant.’

  The waitress said the owner was not available.

  ‘Is there anything I can do here?’ Shin begged.

  ‘There are no jobs, but that man eating over there says he’s from Korea, so you should ask him.’

  The waitress pointed to a customer eating a late lunch.

  ‘Excuse me, I am from North Korea, looking for a job,’ Shin said. ‘Please help me.’

  After studying Shin’s face for a while, the man asked him where his hometown was. Shin said he was from Bukchang, the town near Camp 14 where he had stolen his first bag of rice.

  ‘Are you really from North Korea?’ the man asked, pulling out a reporter’s notebook and beginning to scribble notes.

  Shin had stumbled upon a journalist, a Shanghai-based correspondent for a major South Korean media company.

  ‘Why did you come to Shanghai?’ he asked Shin.

  Shin repeated what he had just said: he was looking for work and he was hungry. The journalist wrote everything down. This was not the kind of conversation Shin was used to. He had never met a journalist before and it made him anxious.

  After a long silence, the man asked Shin if he wanted to go to South Korea – a question that made Shin even more anxious. By the time Shin got to Shanghai, he had long since abandoned any hope of travelling to South Korea. He told the journalist he could not go there because he had no money.

  The man suggested that they leave the restaurant together. Outside on the street, he stopped a cab, told Shin to get in and climbed in beside him. After several minutes, he told Shin they were going to the South Korean Consulate.

  Shin’s growing unease turned to panic when the journalist went on to explain that there could be danger when they got out of the taxi. He told Shin that if anyone grabbed him, he should shake them off and run.

  As they neared the consulate, they saw police cars and several uniformed officers milling around its entrance. Since 2002, the Beijing government had been attempting, with considerable success, to stop North Koreans from rushing into foreign embassies and consulates to seek asylum.

  Shin had stayed away from the Chinese police. Fearing arrest and deportation, he hadn’t dared break into houses for clothes or food. He had tried to be invisible, and he had succeeded.

  Now a stranger was taking him into a heavily guarded building and advising him to run if police tried to apprehend him.

  When the taxi stopped in front of a building flying the South Korean flag, Shin’s chest felt heavy. Out on the street, he feared he would not be able to walk. The journalist told him to smile and put his arm around Shin, pulling him close to his body. Together they walked towards the consulate gate. Speaking in Chinese, the journalist told police that he and his friend had business inside.

  The police opened the gate and waved them through.

  Once inside, the journalist told Shin to relax, but he did not understand he was safe. Diplomatic immunity did not make sense to him. Despite repeated assurances from consulate staff, he could not believe he was really under the protection of the South Korean government.

  The consulate was comfortable, South Korean officials were helpful and there was another North Korean defector inside the consulate to talk to.

  For the first time in his life, Shin showered daily. He had new clothes and fresh underwear. Rested, scrubbed and feeling increasingly safe, Shin waited for paperwork to be processed that would allow him to travel to South Korea.

  He heard from officials in the consulate that the journalist who had helped him – and who still does not want his name or news organization made public – had got into trouble with the Chinese authorities.

  Finally, after six months inside the consulate, Shin flew to Seoul, where the South Korean National Intelligence Service took an uncommon interest in him. During interrogations that lasted an entire month, Shin told NIS agents his life story. He tried to be as truthful as possible.

  PART THREE

  21

  When intelligence agents were finished with Shin, he reported to Hanawon, which means ‘House of Unity’ in Korean. It’s a government-run resettlement centre perched in verdant hill country about forty miles south of Seoul, a sprawling megalopolis of more than twenty million people. The complex looks like a well-funded, security-obsessed mental hospital: three-storey redbrick buildings encircled by a high fence surmounted by video cameras and patrolled by armed guards.

  Hanawon was built in 1999 by the Ministry of Unification to house, feed and teach North Korean defectors how to adjust and survive
in the South’s ultra-competitive capitalist culture.

  To that end, the centre has a staff of psychologists, career counsellors and teachers of everything from world history to driving. There are also doctors, nurses and dentists. During their three-month stay, defectors learn their rights under South Korean law and go on field trips to shopping centres, banks and subway stations.

  ‘Everyone who defects has adjustment problems,’ Ko Gyoung-bin, director-general of Hanawon, told me when I visited the complex.

  Initially, Shin seemed to be adjusting better than most.

  Field trips did not surprise or frighten him. Having navigated several of China’s largest and most prosperous cities on his own, he was accustomed to pushy crowds, tall buildings, flashy cars and electronic gadgets.

  During his first month at Hanawon, he received documents and photo identification that certified his South Korean citizenship, which the government automatically bestows on all those who flee the North. He also attended classes that explained the many government benefits and programmes offered to defectors, including a free apartment, an eight-hundred-dollar-a-month settlement stipend for two years and as much as eighteen thousand dollars if he stuck with job training or higher education.

  In a classroom with other defectors, he learned that the Korean War started when North Korea launched an unprovoked surprise invasion of the South on 25 June 1950. It’s a history lesson that flabbergasts most newcomers from the North. Beginning in early childhood, their government has taught them that South Korea started the war with the encouragement and armed assistance of the United States. At Hanawon, many defectors flatly refuse to believe that this fundamental pillar of North Korean history is built on a lie. It is a reaction comparable to the way Americans might respond to someone who told them that World War II started in the Pacific after an American sneak attack on Tokyo harbour.