Escape from Camp 14

14

Their plan was simple — and insanely optimistic.

Shin knew the camp. Park knew the world. Shin would get them over the fence. Park would lead them to China, where his uncle would give them shelter, money and assistance in travelling on to South Korea.

Shin was the first to suggest that they escape together. But before he broached the idea, he fretted for days, fearing that Park might be an informer, that he was being set up and that he would be executed like his mother and brother. 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?

Still, the escape plan, such as it was, went forward. Shin’s excitement overcame his fear. He would wake up in high spirits after a night of dreaming about grilled meat. Carrying sewing machines up and down factory stairs no longer wore him out. For the first time in his life, Shin had something to look forward to.

Since Park was under orders to follow Shin around, every working day became a marathon session of whispered escape preparations and motivational stories about the fine dining awaiting them in China. They decided that if guards discovered them at the fence, Park would take them out using tae kwon do. Although the guards carried automatic weapons, Shin and Park persuaded each other that their chances of not getting killed were good.

By any measure, these expectations were absurd. Just two people other than Shin are known to have escaped from any political prison camp in North Korea and made it to the West. One is Kim Yong, the former lieutenant colonel who had highly placed friends across North Korea. But he did not go over the fence. He escaped because of what he described as a ‘totally miraculous chance’. In 1999, during the government breakdown and the security lapses that marked the height of the North Korean famine, Kim hid under a metal panel wedged into the bottom of a dilapidated train car, which was being loaded with coal. When the train rolled out of Camp 18, so did Kim, who knew the countryside well and used his personal contacts at the border to find a safe way to cross into China.

Kim fled a prison that was not nearly as well guarded as the one where Shin and Park were planning their escape. As Kim wrote in his memoir, Long Road Home, he could never have escaped from Camp 14 because ‘the guards there acted as if they were on a war front’.[22] Before Kim was transferred to the camp he eventually escaped from, he says he spent two years in Camp 14. He described the conditions there as ‘so severe that I could not even think of the possibility’ of flight.

The other escapee is Kim Hye Sook, who also fled Camp 18. Along with her family, she was first imprisoned in the camp in 1975, at the age of thirteen. Authorities released her in 2001, but later sent her back to the same camp. She then escaped, and in 2009 found her way out of North Korea to South Korea, via China, Laos and Thailand.

Shin and Park were unaware of Kim’s escape, and they had no way to gauge the odds of getting out of Camp 14 or of finding safe passage to China. But Park was inclined to believe the radio broadcasts from Seoul, which he had heard while living in China and which focused on the failures and weaknesses of the North Korean government. Park told Shin that the United Nations had begun to criticize human rights violations inside the North’s political labour camps. He also said he had heard that the camps would disappear in the not too distant future.[23]

Although Park was well-travelled in North Korea and China, he confided to Shin that he knew little about the steep, snowy, thinly populated mountains outside the fence. Nor did he know much about the roads that could lead them safely to China.

Shin knew the layout of the camp from countless days of gathering wood and collecting acorns, but he knew nothing about how to get over or through the high-voltage fence surrounding the camp.

He also found it difficult, during the weeks and days before the escape, to avoid thoughts of what had happened to his mother and brother. It wasn’t guilt he felt. It was fear. He feared he would die as they had. His mind flashed to images of their executions. He imagined standing in front of a firing squad or on a wooden box with a noose around his neck.

Making a calculation that was short on information and long on aspiration, Shin told himself he had a ninety per cent chance of getting through the fence and a ten per cent chance of getting shot.

Shin’s primary pre-escape preparation was to steal warm clothes and new shoes from a fellow prisoner.

That prisoner slept on the same dormitory floor and worked in the factory as a garment cutter, a job that allowed him to accumulate scraps of fabric, which he traded for food and other goods. He was also meticulous about his clothes. Unlike anyone else in the camp, the cutter had assembled a complete extra set of winter clothing and shoes.

Shin had never stolen clothing from another prisoner, but since he had stopped snitching, he’d become increasingly intolerant of prisoners who continued to inform on their neighbours. He particularly disliked the cutter, who reported on everyone who stole food from the factory garden. Shin thought he deserved to be robbed.

Since prisoners did not have access to lockers or any other way of securing their belongings, it was a simple matter for Shin to wait for the cutter to leave the dormitory room, take his belongings and hide them until the escape. The cutter did not suspect Shin when the clothes went missing. The stolen shoes did not fit Shin’s feet (shoes in the camp almost never did), but they were relatively new.

Clothing in the camp was only distributed every six months. By late December, when Shin and Park were planning their escape, Shin’s winter-season pants had holes in the knees and in the seat. When it came time to run, he decided that for warmth he would nevertheless wear his old clothes beneath his stolen clothes. He did not have a coat, hat, or gloves to protect him from the bitter cold.

Planning to escape meant waiting for a work detail that would get Shin and Park out of the factory and give them an excuse to be near the fence.

Their chance came on New Year’s Day, a rare holiday when machines in the factory went silent for two days. Shin learned in late December that on 2 January, the second day of the closure, his crew of sewing-machine repairmen and some of the seamstresses would leave the factory and be escorted to a mountain ridge on the eastern edge of the camp. There, they would spend the day trimming trees and stacking wood.

Shin had worked on that mountain before. It was near the fence that ran along the top of the ridge. Apprised of all this, Park agreed they would escape on 2 January 2005.

When the factory shut down on 1 January, Shin decided, with some reluctance, to pay a final visit to his father.

Their relationship, always distant, had grown colder still. Shin, on the few days when he did not have to work on the farm or in the factory, had rarely taken advantage of camp rules that allowed him to visit. Spending time with his father had become an ordeal.

What made Shin so angry with his father was not clear, at least not to Shin. It was his mother, not his father, who had put his life at risk by plotting an escape when he was thirteen. She and Shin’s brother were the ones who had been complicit in starting a chain of events that resulted in his arrest, torture and abuse from other students in secondary school. His father had been another victim.

But his father was alive and attempting a reconciliation with Shin. By the unforgiving calculus of relations between distant fathers and resentful sons, that was reason enough for Shin’s loathing.

They shared a sullen New Year’s supper in a cafeteria at his father’s work site, eating cornmeal and cabbage soup. Shin made no reference to his escape plan. 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. He did not completely trust him.

His father had tried, after the killing of his wife and eldest son, to be more attentive. He had apologized for being a bad parent and for having exposed the boy to the camp’s savagery. He had even encouraged his son, if he ever got the chance, to ‘see what the world is like’. That lukewarm escape endorsement may have been blandly worded because Shin’s father did not completely trust his son either.

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

When they sat together in the cafeteria, neither mentioned the gift, and when Shin left that evening, there was no special goodbye. He expected that when the guards learned of his escape, they would come for his father and take him back to the underground prison. He was almost certain that his father did not know what was coming.

15

Early the next morning, a foreman from the garment factory herded Shin, Park and about twenty-five other prisoners up the mountain. They set to work near the top of a twelve-hundred-foot slope. The sky was clear and the sun shone brightly on a heavy snow pack, but it was cold and the wind was blowing. Some prisoners used small axes to hack the branches off logged trees, while others stacked wood.

The firewood detail was an extraordinary stroke of good luck as it placed Shin and Park within a stone’s throw of the fence that ran along the spine of the mountain. On the far side of that fence, the terrain canted steeply down, but it was not too steep to be traversed by foot. Not far beyond the fence there was tree cover.

A guard tower rose from the fence line about a quarter of a mile to the north of where the prisoners chopped wood. Guards walking two abreast patrolled the inside perimeter of the fence. Shin noticed lengthy intervals between patrols.

The foreman in charge of the work crew was also a prisoner and therefore unarmed. In the intervals between guard patrols, there was no one close who could fire a weapon at Shin and Park. They had decided earlier that they would bide their time until dusk, when it would be more difficult for guards to track their footsteps in the snow.

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. He had been like them until he met Park.

At around four o’clock, with light draining out of the day, Shin and Park sidled towards the fence, trimming trees as they moved. No one seemed to notice.

Shin soon found himself facing the fence, which was about ten feet high. There was a knee-high berm of snow directly in front of him and then a trail where patrolling guards had tramped it down. Beyond that was a groomed strip of sand, which showed footprint tracks if someone stepped on it. And beyond that was the fence itself, which consisted of seven or eight strands of high-voltage barbed wire, spaced about a foot apart, strung between tall poles.

According to Kwon Hyuk, a defector who worked as a manager at Camp 22, the fences that surround some of the labour camps in North Korea include moats with spikes designed to impale anyone who falls in. Shin saw no moat and no spikes.

He and Park had told each other that if they could get through the fence without touching the wires, they would be fine. As to how they might be able to do that, they were not sure. Yet as the hour of the escape drew nearer, Shin surprised himself by not feeling afraid.

Park, though, was distracted.

After guards had passed along the fence as part of their late-afternoon patrol, Shin heard fear in Park’s voice.

‘I don’t know if I can do this,’ he whispered. ‘Can’t we try it some other time?’

‘What are you talking about,’ Shin said. ‘If we don’t do it now, there won’t be another chance.’

Shin feared it would be months, even years, before they would be allowed outside the factory at dusk near a section of fence that could not be seen from a guard tower.

He could not — would not — endure more waiting.

‘Let’s run!’ he yelled.

He grabbed Park’s hand and pulled him towards the fence. For an agonizing second or two, Shin had to drag the man who had inspired his desire to escape. Soon, though, Park began to run.

Their plan had been for Shin to stay in the lead until they got clear of the fence, but he slipped and fell to his knees on the icy patrol trail. As a result, Park was first to the fence. Falling to his knees, he shoved his arms, head and shoulders between the two lowest strands of wire.

Seconds later, Shin saw sparks and smelled burning flesh.

Most electric fences built for security purposes repel trespassers with a painful but exceedingly brief pulse of current. They are not designed to kill, but to frighten animals and people. Lethal electric fences, however, use a continuous current that can make a person lock on to the wire as voltage causes involuntary muscle contractions, paralysis and death.

Before Shin could get to his feet, Park had stopped moving. He may already have been dead. But the weight of his body pulled down the bottom strand of wire, pinning it against the snowy ground and creating a small gap in the fence.

Without hesitation, Shin crawled over his friend’s body, using it as a kind of insulating pad. As he squirmed through the fence, Shin could feel the current. The soles of his feet felt as though needles were stabbing them.

Shin was nearly through the fence when his lower legs slipped off Park’s torso and came into direct contact, through the two pairs of pants he was wearing, with the bottom strand. Voltage from the wire caused severe burns from his ankles to his knees and the wounds bled for weeks, although it would be a couple of hours before Shin noticed how badly he had been injured.

The human body is unpredictable when it comes to conducting electricity. For reasons that are not well understood, the ability of individuals to sustain and survive a high-voltage shock varies widely. It is not a matter of build or fitness. Stout people show no greater resistance than skinny ones.

Human skin can be a relatively good insulator, if it is dry. Cold weather closes skin pores, reducing conductivity. Multiple layers of clothing can also help. Conversely, sweaty hands and wet clothes can easily defeat the skin’s natural resistance to an electric current. Once high-voltage electricity penetrates a body that is well grounded (wet shoes on snowy ground), the liquids and salts in the blood, muscle and bone are excellent conductors. Wet people holding hands have died of electrocution together.

Shin’s success in crawling through an electric fence designed to kill seems to have been a function of luck. His was astoundingly good; Park’s was terrible. If Shin had not slipped in the snow, he would have reached the fence first and probably died.

Shin did not know it, but to pass safely through the fence he needed a device that could shunt the flow of current from the fence to the ground. Park’s body, lying on damp ground on top of the bottom strand of wire, became that device.

When he cleared the fence, Shin had no idea where to go. At the crest of the mountain, the only direction he could comprehend was down. At first, he weaved through a patch of trees. But within minutes, he was out in the open, stumbling across upland fields and pastures that were sporadically lit by a half moon showing through clouds.

He ran for about two hours, always heading downhill, until he entered a mountain valley where there were barns and scattered houses. He heard no alarms, no gunfire, no shouting. As far as he could tell, no one was chasing him.

As the adrenaline of flight began to ebb, Shin noticed that the legs of his pants were sticky. He rolled them up, saw blood oozing out of his legs and began to comprehend the severity of his burns. His feet, too, were bleeding. He had stepped on nails, apparently, when he was close to the camp fence. It was very cold, well below 10 degrees Fahrenheit, and he had no coat.

Park, dead on the fence, had not told him where he might find China.

16

Racing downhill in the early evening darkness through cornfield stubble, Shin came across a farmer’s shed half buried in the hillside. The door was locked. There were no houses nearby, so he broke the lock with an axe handle he found on the ground.

Just inside the door, he discovered three ears of dried corn and devoured them. The corn made him aware of how hungry he was. Helped by the moonlight, he searched the shed for something else to eat. Instead, he spotted an old pair of cotton shoes and a worn military uniform.

Uniforms are everywhere in North Korea, the world’s most militarized society. Conscription is almost universal. Men serve ten years, women seven. With more than a million troops on active duty, about five per cent of the country’s population is in uniform, compared with about half a per cent in the United States. An additional five million people serve in the army reserve for much of their adult lives. The army is ‘the people, the state and the party’, says the government, which no longer describes itself as a communist state. Its guiding principle, according to the constitution, is ‘military first’. Uniformed soldiers dig clams and launch missiles, pick apples and build irrigation canals, market mushrooms and supervise the export of knock-off Nintendo games.

Inevitably, uniforms wind up in barns and sheds.

The military pants and shirt that Shin found were far too big for him, as were the cotton shoes. But finding a change of clothes less than three hours after escaping the camp and before anyone could get a look at him was an extraordinary stroke of luck.

He stepped out of his cold wet shoes and removed both pairs of prison trousers. From the knees down they were stiff with blood and snow. He tried to bandage the burns on his legs with ripped-out pages from a book he found in the shed. The pages stuck to his mangled shins. He put on the ratty, too-big uniform and slipped his feet into the cotton shoes.

No longer instantly recognizable as a runaway prisoner, he had become just another ill-clothed, ill-shod and ill-nourished North Korean. In a country where a third of the population is chronically malnourished, where local markets and train stations are crowded with filthy itinerant traders, and where almost everyone has served in the army, Shin blended in easily.

Outside the shed, he also found a road, and he followed it down into a village at the bottom of the valley. There, to his surprise, he saw the Taedong River.

For all his running, he was only two miles upstream from Camp 14.

News of his escape had not reached the village. The streets were dark and empty. Shin crossed a bridge over the Taedong and headed east on a road parallel to the river. He hid from headlights when a single car drove by, then he climbed up to a railroad track that seemed deserted and kept walking.

By late evening, he had walked about six miles and entered the outskirts of Bukchang, a coal town just south of the river with a population of about ten thousand people. A few pedestrians were out, but Shin did not sense that his presence warranted special attention. With an aluminum factory, coal mines and a large power plant, the town was perhaps accustomed to night-shift workers walking the streets at all hours.

Shin saw a pigpen, a familiar and comforting sight. He crawled over a fence, found some rice straw and dug in for the night.

For the next two days, Shin scavenged around the outskirts of Bukchang, eating whatever he could find on the ground or in garbage heaps. He had no idea what to do or where to go. People in the street seemed to ignore him. His legs hurt and he was hungry and cold, yet he was exhilarated. He felt like an alien fallen to earth.

In the months and years ahead, Shin would discover all things modern: streaming video, blogs and international air travel. Therapists and career counsellors would advise him. Preachers would show him how to pray to Jesus Christ. Friends would teach him how to brush his teeth, use a debit card and fool around with a smartphone. From obsessive reading online, the politics, history and geography of the two Koreas, China, Southeast Asia, Europe and the United States would all become familiar.

None of this, though, did more to change his understanding of how the world works, and how human beings interact with each other, than his first days outside the camp.

It shocked him to see North Koreans going about their daily lives without having to take orders from guards. When they had the temerity to laugh together in the streets, wear brightly coloured clothes or haggle over prices in an open-air market, he expected armed men to step in, knock heads and stop the nonsense.

The word Shin uses again and again to describe those first days is ‘shock’.

It was not meaningful to him that North Korea in the dead of winter is ugly, dirty and dark, or that it is poorer than Sudan, or that, taken as a whole, it is viewed by human rights groups as the world’s largest prison.

His context had been twenty-three years in an open-air cage run by men who hanged his mother, shot his brother, crippled his father, murdered pregnant women, beat children to death, taught him to betray his family and tortured him over a fire.

He felt wonderfully free and, as best he could determine, no one was looking for him.

He was also weak with hunger, and as he wandered the streets, he began searching for an empty house where he could eat and rest. He found one at the end of a small road. Tearing open a rear window made of vinyl, he climbed inside.

In the kitchen, he found three bowls of cooked rice. He guessed that someone who would soon return had prepared it. Afraid to risk eating or sleeping in the house, he emptied the rice into a plastic bag and spooned in some soybean paste he found on a shelf.

Searching the rest of the house, he found a pair of winter-weight trousers draped over a hanger and another pair of shoes. He also found a rucksack and a dark brown winter coat, which was military in style and much warmer than any coat he had ever worn. He opened one last kitchen drawer and found a ten-pound bag of rice, which he stuffed in the rucksack and left.

Near the centre of Bukchang, a market lady shouted at him. She wanted to know what was in his rucksack and if he had anything to sell. Trying to keep calm, Shin said he had some rice. She offered to buy it for four thousand North Korean won, which was worth about four dollars at blackmarket exchange rates.

Shin had first learned about the existence of money from Park. Before the market lady yelled at him, he had watched in wonder as people used small pieces of paper, which he guessed was money, to buy food and other goods.

He had no idea if four thousand won was a fair price for his stolen rice, but he happily sold it and bought some crackers and cookies. He pocketed the remaining money and left town on foot. His destination was China, but he still didn’t know where that might be.

On the road, Shin encountered several shabby-looking men and eavesdropped on their conversations. They were searching for work, scrounging for food, travelling among street markets and trying to steer clear of the police. One or two of them asked Shin where he was from. He said he had grown up in the Bukchang area, which was true enough and seemed to satisfy their curiosity.

Shin soon figured out that most of these men were strangers to each other, but he was afraid to ask too many questions. He did not want to feel an obligation to talk about himself.

According to a survey of more than thirteen hundred North Korean refugees that was conducted in China in late 2004 and 2005,[24] the people wandering around North Korea at that time were mostly unemployed labourers and failed farmers, as well as students, soldiers, technicians and a few former government officials.

The survey suggested they were on the road primarily for economic reasons, hoping to find work or trade in China. Their lives had been exceedingly difficult and their relationship with the government was strained: nearly a quarter of the men and thirty-seven per cent of the women said family members had died of hunger. More than a quarter of them had been arrested in North Korea, and ten per cent said they had been sent to jails, where forced starvation, torture and executions were commonplace. To get out of North Korea, more than half of the refugees said they used cash to bribe officials or buy help from professional smugglers.

Shin fell in with these wanderers, guessing he would be safer in their company than travelling by himself. He tried to copy the behaviour of the men he met on the road. It was not difficult. Like him, they dressed shabbily, looked dirty, smelled bad and were desperate for food.

As a police state, North Korea does not tolerate intercity vagabonds. Laws strictly prohibit citizens from travelling between cities without proper authorization. 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. Police could be bribed; indeed, many lived off bribes. Vagabonds with a bit of cash could travel towards China without attracting attention.

There are no reliable numbers on defections to China, or on the movement of people drifting around inside North Korea. The odds of avoiding arrest and successfully crossing to China seem to change from season to season. 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. The North Korean government has created new labour camps to hold traders and travellers too poor or unlucky to bribe their way north.

One trend, though, is clear. The number of North Koreans seeking asylum in South Korea has increased nearly every year since 1995. Forty-one arrived in 1995. By 2009, the number had jumped to nearly three thousand. More defectors turned up in the South between 2005 and 2011 than fled North Korea over the entire period since the end of the Korean War in 1953.

When Shin began walking towards the border in January 2005, conditions for escape seem to have been relatively good. Numerical evidence can be found in the large number of North Koreans — about forty-five hundred — who arrived in South Korea in 2006 and 2007. It usually takes a year or two for defectors to find their way from China to South Korea.

The permeability of North Korea’s border tends to improve when border guards and local officials can accept bribes without draconian punishment from higher-ups.

‘More than ever, money talks,’ said Chun Ki-won, a minister in Seoul who told me that between 2000 and 2008 he helped more than six hundred North Koreans cross into China and make their way to South Korea.

By the time Shin crawled through the electric fence, there was a well-established human smuggling network with tentacles that reached deep inside North Korea. Chun and several other Seoul-based operatives told me that given enough money they could get virtually any North Korean out of the country.

Using word of mouth, brokers in Seoul offered ‘planned escapes’. A low-budget version cost less than two thousand dollars. It involved months or years of travel through China, via Thailand or Vietnam, to Seoul, and it could require treacherous river crossings, arduous travel on foot and weeks of waiting in an unsanitary Thai refugee camp.

A first-class planned escape, complete with a forged Chinese passport and an air ticket from Beijing to Seoul, sold for ten thousand dollars or more. From start to finish, brokers and defectors said, going first class could take as little as three weeks.

Activist pastors from South Korean churches invented the escape trade in the late 1990s and early 2000s, hiring border operatives who greased the palms of North Korean guards with cash donated by parishioners in Seoul. By the time Shin hit the road, defectors, many of them former North Korean military and police officers, had taken over the trade and were quietly running profitable operations.

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. They sometimes worked on an instalment plan, taking little or no money up front from a defector or his family. When an instalment-plan defector arrived in Seoul, however, and had access to some of the forty thousand dollars or more that the South Korean government gives to new arrivals from the North, brokers usually demanded far more money than their basic fee.

‘My boss is willing to put up all the money to pay bribes to get someone out,’ said a Seoul-based broker and former North Korean military officer who worked for a smuggling operation based in China. ‘But when you get to Seoul, you have to pay double for this service.’

By 2008, many North Korean defectors were so deeply in debt to their smugglers that the South Korean government changed the way it distributed its cash support. Instead of offering lump-sum payments, the money was paid out over time, with incentives for those who found and held jobs. About a quarter of the money also went directly on housing, eliminating any chance that it could be paid to a broker.

Using their personal and institutional contacts in the North, brokers hired guides to escort people from their homes in North Korea to the Chinese border, where they were handed over to Chinese-speaking guides, who drove them to Beijing Airport.

Outside Seoul, I talked to a North Korean defector who had paid twelve thousand dollars to a broker to smuggle out her eleven-year-old son in 2002.

‘I didn’t know it could happen so fast,’ said the mother, who did not want to disclose her name because she and her siblings were paying another broker to smuggle out their mother at the time. ‘It took only five days for my son to be plucked out and taken across the river into China. I was dumbfounded when I got a call from officials at Seoul airport to tell me my son was here.’

At the border and inside the country, the North Korean government has tried to crush these smuggling operations — and periodically it succeeds.

‘A lot of people get caught,’ Lee Jeong Yeon, a former North Korean border officer, told me. ‘The policy is for one hundred per cent execution of those caught helping people to defect. I personally saw several such executions. The successful brokers are experienced people who have good contacts in the military, and they bribe the guards,’ he said. ‘Guards are rotated often, and new people have to be bribed.’

Lee, whose identity was confirmed by South Korean intelligence officials, worked for three years along the China–North Korea border. He supervised undercover agents who pretended to be brokers and guides in order to infiltrate and disrupt the smuggling trade. After his defection to the South, Lee told me he had used his contacts in the North to smuggle out thirty-four people to freedom.

Shin did not have the awareness, the money, or the contacts to use smuggling networks, and he certainly did not have anyone outside the country to engage professionals on his behalf.

But by keeping his mouth shut and his eyes open he entered the slipstream of smuggling, trading and petty bribery that had become North Korea’s post-famine economy.

Traders showed him haystacks where he could sleep, neighbourhoods where he could break into houses and markets where he could trade stolen goods for food. Shin often shared food with them in the evening as they all huddled around roadside fires.

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.

17

Unless he could get far away — and quickly — Shin feared he would soon be caught.

He walked nine miles to a small mountain town called Maengsan, where traders told him that a truck would show up near the central market. For a small fee, it hauled passengers to the train station in Hamhung, the second largest city in North Korea.

Shin had not yet learned enough geography to know where Hamhung was. But he did not care. He was desperate to find a means of transportation other than his aching legs. It had been three days since he crawled through the electric fence, and he was still only about fifteen miles from Camp 14.

After queuing up with traders waiting for the truck, he managed to pile into the back. The road was bad and the sixty-mile journey to Hamhung took all day and into the night. In the back of the truck, a couple of men asked Shin where he had come from and where he was headed. Unsure who they were or why they were asking, Shin feigned confusion and said nothing. The men lost interest and ignored him.

Unknown to him, the timing of Shin’s travel was excellent.

Intercity travel in North Korea had once been impossible without a travel permit, which would be stamped or folded into a ‘citizen’s certificate’, a passport-sized document modelled after the old Soviet identification card. Camp-bred prisoners like Shin were never issued a citizen’s certificate.

For North Koreans who did not have them, travel permits were hard to come by. They were usually issued for work-related reasons or for a family event that could be confirmed by bureaucrats, such as a wedding or a funeral. But systematic police checks of these documents had largely ended by 1997 — with the exception of travellers bound for Pyongyang and other restricted areas[25] — when the rules eased as famine drove people out on the roads in search of food. Since then, bribes from traders have kept police and other security officials from enforcing the law. Put bluntly, the greed of North Korea’s cash-hungry cadre seemed to enable Shin’s trek.

In all probability, the truck he rode in was a military vehicle that had been illegally converted into a for-profit people mover. The system, known as servi-cha or service car, was invented in the late 1990s by government and military elites to milk cash from traders who needed to move themselves and their goods around the country. It was part of an upstart transportation system that the Daily NK, a Seoul-based website with informants in the North, describes as the country’s ‘core transportation tool’ and probably the ‘most decisive influence on the growth’ of private markets.[26]

In North Korea, vehicles are owned not by individuals but by the government, the party and the military. Savvy operators within these organizations diverted trucks and colluded with smugglers to import fleets of secondhand cars, vans and buses from China. After the vehicles were registered in the name of state entities, private drivers were hired and wanderers like Shin were offered low-cost, no-questions-asked transport around much of the country.

Insurgent capitalism frightened the government of North Korea, which fretted publicly about a slippery slope to regime change and catastrophe. But periodic attempts to discipline bribe-takers, restrict market activities, force servi-cha vehicles off the road and confiscate cash were met with widespread resistance. Much of it came from poorly paid state functionaries whose livelihoods depended on using police and administrative authority to extract cash from upstart capitalists.

To force traders to pay, North Korean security forces invented a new twist on labour camps of the sort that Shin was born in. Instead of holding political criminals for life, these camps briefly incarcerated — and occasionally tortured — traders who failed to pay bribes to security officials. Officials periodically descended on the markets and arrested traders under vague laws that criminalize buying and selling. Traders avoided a grisly trip to a labour camp only by paying hard currency bribes.

The existence of these camps, which the government began to build before Shin’s escape, was first disclosed in ‘Repression and Punishment in North Korea’, a 2009 report based on surveys of more than sixteen hundred refugees interviewed in China and South Korea between 2004 and 2008.

Security officials used the camps as ‘a system for shaking people down’, Marcus Noland, a Washington-based economist and co-author of the report, told me. ‘It really looks like the work of a gang, a kind of “Soprano” state.’

About two thirds of those held in these camps were allowed to go home within a month, according to the refugee survey. The compounds were often small, with few guards and not much fencing, but during their brief stays inside, many North Koreans said they routinely witnessed executions and deaths from torture and starvation. The effect of this revolving-door incarceration for economic crimes spread fear among people who made their living by trading.

‘[The North Korean government] orders police to restrict the markets, but they don’t always do what they are told because so many police and other authorities are making money,’ said Jiro Ishimaru, the editor of Rimjin-gang, a Japan-based journal that compiles eyewitness reports, photos and videos smuggled out by anonymous reporters. ‘People on the outside don’t realize it, but North Korea right now is in a drastic state of change.’

Shin arrived at night near the train station in Hamhung, a coastal city of about three quarters of a million people. Most of them worked in factories — or did, before the factories shut down owing to a lack of electricity and manufacturing supplies.

During the 1990s famine, the state distribution system utterly collapsed in Hamhung, leaving workers with no alternative sources of food. As a result, the city was hit harder by famine and starvation than any other population centre in North Korea, according to refugee accounts.[27] Visiting Western journalists noticed in 1997 that hills surrounding the city were covered with fresh graves. One survivor said that ten per cent of the city’s population died, while another estimated that ten per cent had fled the city in search of food.

In 2005, when Shin arrived in Hamhung, most of its factories were still closed, but the bulk of North Korea’s north–south train traffic continued to pass through its rail yards.

Under cover of darkness, Shin went with other traders from the truck to a part of the rail yard where freight trains were assembled and dispatched. He saw a few guards around the station, but they were not checking IDs and they made no effort to keep traders away from the freight trains.

Still following other men, Shin climbed into a boxcar bound for Chongjin, the largest city in the far north of the country and a gateway to rail lines leading to the Chinese border. The train pulled out before dawn on a journey of about a hundred and seventy-four miles. If all went well, it would take a day, maybe two.

Shin soon learned what everyone else in North Korea had known for years: trains go slow, if they go at all.

Over the next three days, he travelled less than a hundred miles. In the boxcar, Shin befriended a young man of about twenty who said he was headed home to Gilju, a city of sixty-five thousand people on the main rail line to Chongjin. The man said he was returning from a failed attempt to find work. He had no food, no money and no winter coat, but he offered to let Shin stay for a few days in his family’s apartment, where he said it would be warm and where there was food to eat.

Shin needed rest. He was exhausted and starving, the food he had purchased in Bukchang was gone and the burns on his legs continued to bleed. He gratefully accepted the young man’s offer.

It was early evening, cold and beginning to snow when they got off the train at Gilju station. At the suggestion of Shin’s new friend, who knew cheap places to eat, they stopped on the way to his apartment and bought hot noodles from a street vendor. Shin paid for the meal with the last of the money he had received for his stolen rice.

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. He asked if Shin would mind loaning him his coat for a few minutes. As soon as he had paid his respects to his family, the young man said, he would return to the noodle stand and take Shin up to the apartment, where they could get warm and sleep.

Since escaping the camp, Shin had been struggling to learn what normal behaviour was for North Koreans. But after only a week, he had not figured out much. Loaning a coat to a friend who needed to save face with his mother and father could be normal, Shin thought, so he handed over the coat and agreed to wait.

Hours passed. Snow continued to fall. His friend did not return. Shin had not thought to follow him and see what apartment building he had disappeared into. Shin started to search the nearby streets, but he found no trace of him. After several hours of confused shivering, he wrapped himself in a dirty plastic tarp he found on the street and waited for morning. He had been betrayed.

For the next twenty days, Shin roamed around Gilju. With no coat, no money, no contacts and no idea of where he should go, it was a formidable task simply to stay alive. The average January temperature in the city is 18 degrees Fahrenheit, well below freezing.

One thing saved him: the company — and larcenous advice — of the city’s homeless, many of whom were teenagers. He found them around the train station, where they begged, gossiped and periodically struck off in packs looking for food.

The crew Shin joined specialized in digging up daikon, which is a large, white, carrot-shaped East Asian radish that is often made into kimchi, the spicy fermented condiment that is Korea’s most famous dish. To keep the fall crop of daikon from freezing during the cold months, North Koreans sometimes bury them in mounds.

During the day Shin followed teams of teenage thieves to the outskirts of the city, looking for isolated houses with tell-tale mounds of dirt in their gardens. After a day of digging up and eating raw daikon, Shin returned to the city centre with as many as he could carry, sold them in markets and bought snacks. When he couldn’t steal daikon, he scavenged through trash.

At night, Shin again followed the homeless to semi-sheltered sleeping places they had found near buildings with central heating systems. He also slept in haystacks and near open fires that the homeless sometimes built.

He made no friends and continued to be careful not to talk about himself.

In Gilju, as across all of North Korea, Shin saw photographs of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung everywhere — in train stations, town squares and the homes he sometimes broke into. But no one, not even vagabonds and homeless teens, dared criticize or poke fun at their leaders. Surveys of recent defectors in China have found that this fear is persistent and almost universal.

For Shin, the biggest struggle remained finding enough to eat. But marauding for food was hardly an exceptional activity in North Korea.

‘Stealing was always a problem,’ Charles Robert Jenkins wrote in his 2008 memoir about forty years of living inside the country. ‘If you didn’t watch your things, someone would always be happy to relieve you of them.’[28]

Jenkins was an ill-educated and deeply unhappy US Army sergeant serving in South Korea in 1965, when he decided the grass would be greener in North Korea. He drank ten beers, stumbled across the world’s most heavily militarized border and surrendered his M14 rifle to startled North Korean soldiers.

‘I was so ignorant,’ he told me. He said he had deserted the army for self-imposed incarceration in ‘a giant, demented prison’.

Yet as an American deserter, Jenkins was much more than a prisoner. The North Korean government turned him into an actor who always played an evil Caucasian face in propaganda movies that demonized the United States.

Security officials also gave him a young Japanese woman and, sickeningly, urged him to rape her. She had been abducted from her hometown in Japan on 12 August 1978, as part of a long-running and long-concealed North Korean operation that snatched young Japanese from coastal communities. Three North Korean agents grabbed her at dusk near a beach, stuffed her into a black body bag and stole her away on a ship.

But the woman, Hitomi Soga, ended up falling in love with Jenkins. They married and raised two daughters, both of whom were enrolled in a Pyongyang school that trained multilingual spies.

The beginning of the end of Jenkins’s strange adventures in North Korea came when Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi flew to Pyongyang for an extraordinary encounter with Kim Jong Il. During that 2002 meeting, Kim admitted to Koizumi that his agents had abducted thirteen Japanese civilians in the 1970s and 1980s, including Jenkins’s wife Hitomi. She was immediately allowed to leave the country on Koizumi’s airplane. After the Japanese prime minister made a second trip to North Korea in 2004, Jenkins and his daughters were also allowed to leave.

When I interviewed Jenkins, he and his family were living on Japan’s remote Sado Island, where his wife was born and where North Korean agents had kidnapped her.

During his decades in the North, Jenkins had a house in the countryside and cultivated a large garden that helped feed his family. He also received a monthly cash payment from the government — enough to make sure they did not starve during the famine. Still, he and his family had to fend off thieving neighbours and roaming soldiers in order to survive.

‘It became routine for us as the corn ripened to pull all-night guard watches because the army would pick us clean,’ he wrote.

Thieving peaked during the 1990s famine, when gangs of homeless youngsters — many of them orphans — began to congregate around train stations in cities like Gilju, Hamhung and Chongjin.

Their behaviour and desperation is described in Nothing to Envy, Barbara Demick’s book about how ordinary North Koreans endured the famine years.

At Chongjin train station, she wrote, children snatched snacks out of travellers’ hands. Working in teams, older ones knocked over food stands and tempted vendors to give chase. Then younger kids moved in to pick up spilled food. Children also used sharp sticks to poke holes in bags of grain on slow-moving trains and trucks.[29]

During the famine, train station cleaning staff made rounds with a wooden handcart, collecting bodies from the station floor, wrote Demick. There were widespread rumours of cannibalism, with claims that some children hanging around the station were drugged, killed and butchered for meat.

Although the practice was not widespread, Demick concluded it did occur.

‘From my interviews with defectors, it does appear that there were at least two cases… in which people were arrested and executed for cannibalism.’

When Shin was stuck in Gilju in January 2005, the food situation was much less dire.

Harvests across North Korea had been relatively good in 2004. South Korea was pumping in food aid and free fertilizer. Food aid from China and the World Food Programme was also flooding into state coffers, and some of it ended up in street markets.

The homeless around the train station were hungry, but Shin, in his time on the streets of Gilju, never saw anyone dying or dead from exposure or hunger.

Markets in the city were booming with abundant supplies of dried, fresh and processed foods, including milled rice, tofu, crackers, cakes and meat. Clothes, kitchenware and electronics were also on sale. When Shin showed up with stolen daikon, he found market women eager to pay cash.

As he scrounged in Gilju, escape to China slipped from Shin’s mind. The homeless, whose ranks he had joined, had other plans. They intended to travel in March to a state-owned farm to plant potatoes, a job that provided regular meals. With nothing else to do and no other contacts, Shin decided to tag along with them. His plan changed again, however, after one exceptionally productive day of thieving.

In the countryside on the outskirts of town, Shin wandered away from his crew, whose members were digging up a vegetable garden. By himself, he went around to the back of a vacant house and broke in through a window.

Inside, he found winter clothes, a military-style woollen hat and a fifteen-pound bag of rice. He changed into the warmer clothes and carried the rice in his backpack to a Gilju merchant, who bought it for six thousand won (about six dollars).

With a new wad of cash for food and bribes, China again seemed possible, so Shin walked to the freight yard at Gilju station and crawled aboard a northbound boxcar.

18

The Tumen River, which forms about a third of the border between North Korea and China, is shallow and narrow. It usually freezes over in winter, and walking across it takes only a few minutes. In most areas, the Chinese bank of the river offers decent cover as it is thick with trees. Chinese border guards are sparse.

Shin learned about the Tumen from traders on the train. But he did not have detailed information about where to cross or what bribes would be acceptable to the North Korean guards who patrol its southern bank, so he travelled by boxcar from Gilju to Chongjin to Gomusan, a rail junction about twenty-five miles from the border, and began asking questions of local people.

‘Hello, isn’t it cold?’ he said to an elderly man crouched on the steps of the Gomusan train station.

Shin offered crackers.

‘Oh, thank you so much,’ the man said. ‘May I ask where you are from?’

Shin had come up with a truthful but vague answer. He said he had run away from home in South Pyongan Province, where Camp 14 is located, because he was hungry and life was hard.

The old man said his life had been much easier when he lived in China, where food and work were easy to find. Eight months earlier, the man said, Chinese police had arrested him and sent him back to North Korea, where he had served a few months in a labour camp. He asked if Shin had considered going there.

‘Can anyone cross over to China?’ Shin said, trying to control his curiosity and excitement.

The old man needed little prompting. He talked about China for more than half a day, explaining where to cross the Tumen and how to behave at the checkpoints near the border. Most of the guards, he said, were eager for bribes. His other instructions were, when guards ask for identification, give them a few cigarettes and a package of crackers, along with small amounts of cash. Tell them you are a soldier. Tell them you are going to visit family members in China.

Early the next morning, Shin hopped aboard a coal train bound for nearby Musan, a mining town on the border. He had been warned that the town was crawling with soldiers, so he jumped from the train as it slowed to enter Musan station and headed southwest on foot. He walked all day — about eighteen miles — looking for a stretch of the Tumen that was shallow and easy to cross.

With no identification papers, Shin knew he would be arrested if border guards did their job. At the first checkpoint, a guard asked for his papers. Trying to hide his fear, Shin said he was a soldier returning home. It helped that his clothing and woollen hat, stolen back in Gilju, were the dark green of army uniforms.

‘Here, smoke this,’ Shin said, handing the guard two packs of cigarettes.

The guard took the cigarettes and gestured for Shin to pass.

At a second checkpoint, another guard asked Shin for identification. Again he proffered cigarettes and a bag of crackers. Walking on, he met a third border guard and a fourth. They were young, scrawny and hungry. Before Shin could say a word, they asked him for cigarettes and food but, crucially, not for any identification.

Shin could not have escaped North Korea without an abundance of luck, especially at the border. As he bribed his way towards China in late January 2005, a window happened to be open, allowing relatively low-risk illegal passage across the border.

The North Korean government had been forced — by catastrophic famine in the mid-1990s and the importance of Chinese foodstuffs in feeding the population — to tolerate a porous border with China. That tolerance became semi-official 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. Also, by 2000, traders had begun to move back and forth across the border in their thousands, supplying food and goods for markets that had all but replaced the government’s public distribution system.

Following Kim’s decree, arrested border crossers were released after a few days of questioning or, at most, a few months in a labour camp, unless interrogators determined that they’d had contact in China with South Koreans or missionaries.[30] The North Korean government also began to recognize and enable the role of traders in feeding the population. After six months of paperwork and a background check, government officials — especially if they had received bribes — would sometimes issue certificates to traders that allowed them to cross back and forth into China legally.[31]

A porous border changed lives. Regular travellers to rural parts of North Korea noticed that far more people seemed to be wearing warm winter coats and that private markets were selling used Chinese television sets and video players, along with pirate video tapes and video CDs. (Video CDs offer much lower resolution than DVDs, but CD players were cheaper than DVD players and more affordable to North Koreans.)

North Korean defectors arriving in Seoul said that Chinese-made transistor radios had allowed them to listen to Chinese and South Korean stations, as well as to Radio Free Asia and Voice of America. Many told stories of how they had become addicted to Hollywood movies and South Korean soap operas.

‘We closed the drapes and turned the volume down low whenever we watched the James Bond videos,’ a forty-year-old housewife from North Korea told me in Seoul. She fled her fishing village in a boat with her husband and son. ‘Those movies were how I started to learn what is going on in the world, how people learned the government of Kim Jong Il is not really for their own good.’

Her son told me he fell in love with the United States, where he hoped to live one day, by watching blurry videos of Charlie’s Angels.

As the trickle of foreign videos turned into a flood, North Korean police became alarmed and came up with new tactics to arrest people who watched them. They cut electricity to specific apartment blocks and then raided every apartment to see what tapes and disks were stuck inside the players.

Around the time that Shin and Park were formulating their escape plan, the North Korean government concluded that the border had become far too porous and posed a threat to internal security. Pyongyang was particularly enraged by South Korean and American initiatives that made it easier for North Korean defectors who’d crossed into China to travel even further and settle in the West. In the summer of 2004, in the largest single mass defection, South Korea flew four hundred and sixty-eight North Koreans from Vietnam to Seoul. 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.

For these reasons, border rules began to change in late 2004. North Korea announced a new policy of harsh punishment for illegal border crossings, with prison terms of up to five years. In 2006, Amnesty International interviewed sixteen border crossers who said that the new rules were in effect and that authorities in the North were circulating warnings that even first-time crossers would be sent to prison for at least a year. To enforce its rules, North Korea began a substantial buildup of electronic and photographic surveillance along the border. It extended barbed wire and built new concrete barriers.[32] China, too, increased border security to discourage North Koreans from entering the country in the run-up to the 2008 Summer Olympics.

At the end of January 2005, when Shin went walking towards China with cigarettes and snacks, the window on low-risk passage across the border was almost certainly beginning to close. But he was lucky: orders from on high had not yet changed the bribe-hungry behaviour of the four bedraggled soldiers Shin met at guard stations along the Tumen River.

‘I’m dying of hunger here,’ said the last soldier Shin bribed on his way out of North Korea. He looked to be about sixteen. ‘Don’t you have anything to eat?’

His guard post was near a bridge that crossed into China. Shin gave him bean-curd sausage, cigarettes and a bag of candy.

‘Do a lot of people cross into China?’ Shin asked.

‘Of course,’ the guard replied. ‘They cross with the army’s blessing and return after making good money.’

In Camp 14, Shin had often discussed with Park what they would do after they crossed the border. They had planned to stay with Park’s uncle, and that uncle now came into Shin’s mind.

‘Would it be possible for me to visit my uncle who lives in the village across the river?’ Shin asked, although he had no idea where Park’s uncle actually lived. ‘When I return, I’ll treat you.’

‘Sure, go ahead,’ the guard replied. ‘But I am only on duty until seven tonight, so come back before then, all right?’

The guard led Shin through a forest to the river, where he said the crossing would be safe. It was late afternoon, but Shin promised to be back in plenty of time with food for the guard.

‘Is the river frozen?’ Shin asked. ‘Will I be OK?’

The guard assured him that the river was frozen, and that even if he broke through, the water was only ankle-deep.

‘You should be fine,’ he said.

The river was about a hundred yards wide. Shin walked slowly out onto the ice. Halfway across, he broke through and icy water soaked his shoes. He jumped backwards onto firm ice and crawled the rest of the way to China.

19

Shin scurried up the riverbank and hid briefly in the woods, where his wet feet began to freeze. It was getting dark and he was exhausted from a long day in the cold. Having reserved his limited cash for the cigarettes and snacks he gave to the border guards, he had eaten little in recent days.

To warm up and get away from the river, he climbed a hill and followed a road through fields blanketed in snow. In the near distance, beyond the fields, he could see a cluster of houses.

Between Shin and the houses, there were two men on the road. They had flashlights and wore vests with Chinese lettering printed across the back. He later learned they were Chinese border patrol soldiers. Since 2002, when hundreds of North Korean asylum seekers embarrassed China by rushing into foreign embassies, soldiers had begun rounding up illegal border crossers and forcibly repatriating tens of thousands of them.[33] The soldiers Shin saw were gazing up at the sky. He guessed they were counting stars. In any case, Shin’s presence did not seem to interest them, so he hurried on towards the houses.

His plan for surviving in China was as half-baked as his plan for escaping North Korea. He did not know where to go or whom to contact. He simply wanted to get as far from the border as possible. He had walked into a poor, mountainous and sparsely populated part of China’s Jilin Province. The nearest town of any size was Helong, which is about thirty miles north of where he had crossed the river. His one hope was the gossip he had picked up from itinerant traders in North Korea: that ethnic Koreans living in the Chinese border region might be willing to offer him shelter, food and maybe a job.

Entering a yard outside one of the houses, Shin set off a mad eruption of barking dogs. 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.[34]

When the front door opened Shin pleaded for something to eat and a place to sleep. A Korean Chinese man told him to go away. He said police had warned him that very morning not to help North Koreans. Shin moved on to a nearby brick house, where he asked another Korean Chinese man for help. Again, he was told to move on. This time rudely.

Shin was desperately cold as he left the yard. He saw the remains of a fire in an outdoor cooking pit. After digging out three smouldering logs, he carried them into a nearby larch forest, scraped away the snow from the ground, found some kindling and managed to start a campfire. He took off his wet shoes and socks so they could dry near the fire, then without intending to, he fell asleep.

At dawn, the fire was dead and Shin’s face was covered in frost. Cold to the bone, he put on his shoes and socks, which were still wet. He walked all morning, following back roads, which he hoped led away from the border. Around noon, he saw a police checkpoint in the distance, left the road, found another house and knocked on the door.

‘Could I get some help, please?’ he begged.

A Korean Chinese man refused to let him in the house, saying his wife was mentally ill. But he gave Shin two apples.

To avoid checkpoints and get further away from the border, Shin followed a winding footpath up into the mountains, where he walked for most of the day. (Shin is not sure where he walked that first day in China; Google Earth images of the region near the border show forested mountains and a few scattered houses.) At dusk, he tried another farmhouse, which was newly built of cinder blocks and surrounded by pigpens. Five dogs barked as Shin entered the yard.

A middle-aged man poked his pudgy face out the front door.

‘Are you from North Korea?’ the man asked.

Shin nodded wearily.

The man, a Chinese farmer who spoke some Korean, invited Shin inside and ordered a young woman to cook rice. The farmer said he had once employed two North Korean defectors and that they had been useful workers. He offered Shin food, lodging and five yuan a day — about sixty cents — to tend the pigs.

Before he had eaten his first hot meal in China, Shin had a job and a place to sleep. He had been a prisoner, a snitch, a fugitive and a thief, but never an employee. The job was a new beginning and a colossal relief, ending a fearful, freezing month on the run. A lifetime of slavery shifted suddenly into the past tense.

In the pig farmer’s kitchen over the next month, Shin found plenty to eat. He filled his stomach three times a day with the roasted meat that he and Park had fantasized about in Camp 14. He bathed with soap and hot water. He got rid of the lice he had lived with since birth.

The farmer bought Shin antibiotics for the burns on his legs, along with warm winter clothes and work boots. Shin soon threw away the stolen, ill-fitting clothes that identified him as a North Korean.

He had a room of his own, where he slept on the floor with several blankets. He was able to sleep as much as ten hours a night, an unimaginable luxury. The young woman in the house — Shin found out she was the farmer’s mistress — cooked for him and taught him rudimentary Chinese.

He worked from dawn until seven or eight at night for his sixty cents a day. Besides tending pigs, he hunted with the farmer for wild boar in the surrounding mountains. After the farmer shot them, Shin lugged their carcasses out of the woods for slaughter and commercial sale.

While the work was often exhausting, no one slapped, kicked, punched or threatened Shin. Fear began to ebb away as abundant food and sleep made it possible for him to regain his strength. When police visited the farm, the farmer told Shin to pretend to be a mute. The farmer vouched for his good character, and the police went away.

The capacity of the Chinese borderlands to absorb North Koreans is significant — and significantly underappreciated outside of Northeast Asia. The area is not all that foreign or unwelcoming to Korean-speaking migrants.

When defectors cross into China, the first ‘foreigners’ they encounter are usually ethnic Koreans who speak the same language, eat similar food and share some of the same cultural values. With a bit of luck, they can, like Shin, find work, shelter and a measure of safety.

This has been going on since the late 1860s, when famine struck North Korea and starving farmers fled across the Tumen and Yalu Rivers into northeast China. Later, China’s imperial government recruited Korean farmers to create a buffer against Russian expansion, and Korea’s Choson Dynasty allowed them to depart legally. Before World War II, the Japanese who occupied the Korean Peninsula and northeast China pushed tens of thousands of Korean farmers across the border to weaken China’s hold on the region.

Nearly two million ethnic Koreans now live in China’s three northeast provinces, with the highest concentration in Jilin, which Shin entered when he crawled across the frozen river. Inside Jilin Province, China created the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, where forty per cent of the population is ethnic Korean and where the government subsidizes Korean-language schools and publications.

Korean speakers living in northeast China have also been an unsung force for cultural change inside North Korea. They have affected this change by watching South Korean soap operas on home satellite dishes, recording low-quality video CDs and smuggling hundreds of thousands of them across the border into North Korea, where they sell for as little as fifteen cents, according to Rimjin-gang magazine.

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. But they have developed a huge following in Pyongyang and other cities, where police officers assigned to confiscate the videos are reportedly watching them and where teenagers imitate the silky intonations of the Korean language as it’s spoken by upper-crust stars in Seoul.[35]

These TV programmes have demolished decades of North Korean propaganda, which claims that the South is a poor, repressed and unhappy place, and that South Koreans long for unification under the fatherly hand of the Kim dynasty.

However, in the past half century, the governments of China and North Korea have cooperatively used their security forces to make sure that the intermittent seepage of Koreans across the border never turns into a flood. A secret agreement on border security was signed between the two countries in the early 1960s, according to the South Korean government, and a second agreement in 1986 committed China to sending North Korean defectors back home, where they often face arrest, torture and months or years of forced labour.

By imprisoning its citizens inside the country, North Korea defies an international agreement it has pledged to uphold. The 1966 agreement says, ‘Everyone shall be free to leave any country, including his own.’[36]

By defining all North Korean defectors as ‘economic refugees’ and sending them home to be persecuted, China defies its obligations as a signatory to a 1951 international refugee convention. Beijing refuses to allow defectors to make claims for asylum and prevents the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees from working along the border with North Korea.

International law, in effect, has been trumped by the strategic interests of North Korea and China. 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. The risk of such an exodus increases as China’s economy soars, North Korea’s sinks and word spreads that life is better in China.

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.[37] Many of them have told researchers that listening to foreign radio provided an important motivation for leaving the country.[38]

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 journey 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.