Escape from Camp 14: Chapters 13–19

He said he had grown up in a large, comfortable apartment in Pyongyang and had followed the privileged educational trajectory of North Korea’s elites, studying in East Germany and the Soviet Union.

Park asked why he was so afraid of a little song when he was willing to hear seditious stories about how Kim Jong II was a thief and North Korea was a hellhole.

The lyrics of “Song of the Winter Solstice,” which recent defectors say is the theme song of a popular program on North Korean state television, are about traveling companions who endure hardship and pain.

Park’s spirit, his dignity, and his incendiary information gave Shin something that was both enthralling and unbearable: a context, a way to dream about the future.

Even after Park embraced the idea, Shin’s paranoia was difficult to shake: he had sold out his own mother; why shouldn’t Park sell him out?

In 1999, during the governmental breakdown and security lapses that marked the height of the North Korean famine, he hid under a metal panel wedged into the bottom of a dilapidated train car that was being loaded with coal.

By the unforgiving calculus of relations between distant fathers and resentful sons, that was reason enough for Shin’s loathing.

He had told himself, as he walked to see his father, that any show of emotions, any hint of final leave-taking could imperil the escape.

After Shin was assigned to the garment factory, where opportunities to find or steal extra food were particularly meager, his father had gone to the extraordinary trouble of obtaining the rice flour and sending it to his son as a paternal offering.

The cult of personality surrounding the Kim family began with the Great Leader, KIM IL SUNG, who was depicted in government propaganda as a loving father to his people.

Children in the camps scavenged constantly for food, eating rats, insects, and undigested kernels of corn they found in cow dung.

He liked the semichaotic camaraderie of group houses, where up to sixteen young people lived and ate together.

As Shin worked and waited, he brooded about how the other prisoners were oblivious to the fence and the opportunities that lay beyond it.

They were like cows, he thought, with a cud-chewing passivity, resigned to their no-exit lives.

The fences that surround some of the labor camps in North Korea include moats with spikes designed to impale anyone who falls in, according to Kwon Hyuk, a defector who worked as a manager at Camp 22.

With Park siphoning off current and funneling it to the ground, the level of voltage that Shin was exposed to as he crawled over his friend’s back was probably not close to being lethal.

In a country where a third of the population were chronically malnourished, where local markets and train stations were crowded with filthy itinerant traders, and where almost everyone has served in the army, Shin easily blended in.

When they had the temerity to laugh together in the streets or wear brightly colored clothes or haggle over prices in an open-air market, he expected armed men to step in, knock heads, and stop the nonsense.

On the road, Shin encountered several worn-looking men and eavesdropped on their conversations.

But in the aftermath of the famine—with the collapse of the state-run economy, the rise of private markets, and the near ubiquity of traders hustling around the country with goods smuggled from China—laws were often ignored.

There are no reliable numbers on defections to China, or on the movement of people drifting around inside North Korea.

It depends on how recently the North Korean government has ordered a security crackdown, how vigilant Chinese authorities are in repatriating defectors, how willing border guards are to take bribes, and how desperate North Koreans are to cross the border.

This new breed of brokers would often receive advance payment in cash from affluent or middle-income South Korean families seeking the release of a relative.

He supervised undercover agents who pretended to be brokers and guides in order to infiltrate and disrupt the smuggling trade.

As he walked out of Bukchang that day, wearing his newly stolen coat and carrying a small cache of cookies, Shin joined a small group of traders that by chance was going north.

Savvy operators within these organizations diverted trucks and colluded with smugglers to import fleets of secondhand cars, vans, and buses from China.

Instead of holding political criminals for life, these camps briefly incarcerated—and occasionally tortured—traders who failed to pay bribes to security officials.

When they finished their noodles, the young man said his family’s apartment was just around the corner, but that he was embarrassed to greet his parents wearing threadbare clothes.

She had been abducted from her hometown in Japan on August 12, 1978, as part of a long-running and long-concealed North Korean operation that snatched young Japanese from coastal communities.

Food aid from China and the World Food Program was also flooding into state coffers—and some of it ended up in street markets.

That tolerance became semiofficial policy in 2000, when North Korea promised leniency to those who had fled the country in search of food.

It was a belated admission that tens of thousands of famine-stricken North Koreans had already gone to China and that the country was increasingly dependent on their remittances.

North Korea’s news agency denounced the flight as “premeditated allurement, abduction, and terrorism.”

About the same time, Congress passed a law that accepted North Korean refugees for resettlement in the United States, which the North derided as an attempt to topple its government under the pretext of promoting democracy.

But he was lucky: orders from on high had not yet changed the bribe-hungry behavior of the four bedraggled soldiers Shin met at guard stations along the Tumen River.

He counted seven of them—an eyebrow-raising number by the standards of North Korea, where the pet population had been culled by scavengers, many of them orphans, who stole, skinned, and barbecued dogs during the famine years.

The young woman in the house—Shin found out she was the farmer’s mistress—cooked for him and taught him rudimentary Chinese.

South Korean soaps—which display the fast cars, opulent houses, and surging confidence of South Korea—are classified as “impure recorded visual materials” and are illegal to watch in North Korea.

A mass exodus from North Korea could substantially depopulate the country, undermine its already inadequate capacity to grow food, and weaken—or perhaps even topple—the government.