Escape from Camp 14

by Blaine Harden

  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 façade of Torrance High School was the backdrop for TV’s Beverly Hills, 90210 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Torrance also has an ExxonMobil refinery that churns out much of Southern California’s petrol. Before living in the group house, Shin spent much of his first year in Torrance in an aging, over-crowded, three-bedroom garden apartment that LiNK rented near a vast oil storage depot called the ConocoPhillips/ Torrance Tank Farm.

  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 Washington Post story I wrote about Shin, which quoted him as saying he would like to have a girlfriend, but didn’t know how to find one.

  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.

  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 Washington Post, I had moved back to Seattle to work on this book. When Shin telephoned me at home and told me in broken English that he had become my neighbour, I invited him over for tea.

  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 fir
st 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.

  Shin in 2008.

  (Photo by Blaine Harden)

  Acknowledgements

  This book, of course, could not have been written without the courage, intelligence and patience of Shin Dong-hyuk. For two years and on two continents, he took the time and endured the pain of telling his story in all its awful detail.

  I also want to thank Lisa Colacurcio, a member of the board of the US Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, who first told me about Shin. Kenneth Cukier, a correspondent at The Economist, told me that Shin’s story needed a book in English and offered useful suggestions about how to write it.

  Since I do not speak Korean, I depended on translators. I would like to thank Stella Kim and Jennifer Cho in Seoul. Also in Seoul, Yoonjung Seo helped with reporting, as did Brian Lee. In Tokyo, Akiko Yamamoto helped with reporting and logistics. In Southern California, David Kim was a masterful translator and friend to Shin and to me. He also gave me advice on the manuscript.

  At Liberty in North Korea (LiNK) in Torrance, Hannah Song and Andy Kim helped me understand Shin’s adjustment to the United States. In addition, Song spent many hours solving logistical problems for Shin and for me. In Seattle, Harim Lee was also helpful. In Columbus, Ohio, Lowell and Linda Dye, who have helped Shin and whom he regards as parents, offered perspective and advice.

  For guidance in my attempt to understand what is going on inside North Korea, I thank Marcus Noland, deputy director and senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. He gave generously of his time and expertise. His research on North Korea with Stephan Haggard was a key resource. Also, conversations with Kongdan Oh, a research staff member at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Alexandria, Virginia, helped me understand what I heard from Shin and from other North Koreans. The books she has written with her husband, Ralph Hassig, a North Korean scholar, were also invaluable. In Seoul, Andrei Lankov, who teaches North Korean studies at Kookmin University, was always willing to share his insight.

  Two tireless bloggers, Joshua Stanton from One Free Korea and Curtis Melvin of North Korean Economy Watch, provided useful and constantly updated information and analysis about the North’s economy, leadership, military and politics. Also, Barbara Demick’s fine book, Nothing to Envy, was a key to the thinking of ordinary North Koreans.

  I especially want to thank the Seoul-based Database Center for North Korean Human Rights. It published Shin’s Korean-language memoir and generously encouraged him to cooperate with me. Also, the Korean Bar Association’s ‘White Paper on Human Rights in North Korea 2008’ was a valuable resource.

  David Hawk, author of ‘The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps’ and perhaps the single most important individual in alerting outsiders to the existence and operation of the camps, shared his expertise and research. Suzanne Scholte, who has led campaigns around the world for human rights in North Korea, also has my thanks. In Seattle, Blaise Aguera y Arcas made shrewd narrative suggestions and Sam Howe Verhovek gave reporting advice.

  My agent, Raphae
l Sagalyn, did a masterful job in making this book possible. At Viking, editor Kathryn Court embraced the project and offered advice that significantly improved the manuscript, as did Tara Singh, Kathryn’s assistant.

  David Hoffman, the Washington Post foreign editor who sent me to Asia, told me to dig into North Korea. When I hesitated, he insisted. When I struggled, he was encouraging. Post editors Doug Jehl and Kevin Sullivan were also demanding and supportive. Donald G. Graham, the chairman of the Washington Post Company, paid amazingly close attention to North Korea and always let me know if I managed to write anything interesting about it.

  Finally, my wife, Jessica Kowal, played a major role in making this book. In addition to reading and editing it, she convinced me that telling Shin’s story was the best possible thing I could do. My children, Lucinda and Arno, asked a lot of good questions about Shin’s life. They could not comprehend the cruelty of North Korea, but recognized Shin as an amazing person. I feel the same way.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1. Amnesty International, ‘Images Reveal Scale of North Korean Political Prison Camps’, 3 May 2011,

  http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/images-reveal-scale-north-korean-political-prison-camps-2011-05-03.

  2. Kang Chol-hwan and Pierre Rigoulot, The Aquariums of Pyongyang (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 79.

  3. These eyewitnesses, including Shin, have been interviewed by David Hawk, a researcher for the US Committee on Human Rights in North Korea. Their stories and satellite photos of the camps can be found in Hawk’s periodically updated report, ‘The Hidden Gulag: Exposing North Korea’s Prison Camps’, first published in 2003.