Escape from Camp 14

21

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

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

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

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

Initially, Shin seemed to be adjusting better than most.

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

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

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

Since Shin had been taught next to nothing in Camp 14, a radically revised history of the Korean Peninsula was not meaningful to him. He was far more interested in classes that taught him how to use a computer and find information on the Internet.

But towards the end of his first month at Hanawon, just as he had begun to feel comfortable there, Shin started to experience disturbing dreams. He saw his mother hanged and Park’s body on the fence, and visualized the torture he believed his father had been subjected to after his escape. As the nightmares continued, he dropped out of a course in automobile repair. He did not take his driving test. He stopped eating. He struggled to sleep. He was all but paralysed by guilt.

Nearly all defectors arrive at Hanawon showing clinical symptoms of paranoia. They whisper and get in fistfights. They are afraid to disclose their names, ages or places of birth. Their manners often offend South Koreans. They tend not to say ‘thank you’ or ‘sorry’.

Questions from South Korean bank tellers, whom they meet on field trips to open bank accounts, often terrify defectors. They doubt the motives of nearly all people in positions of authority. They feel guilty about those they left behind. They fret, sometimes to the point of panic, about their educational and financial inferiority to South Koreans. They are ashamed of the way they dress, talk and even wear their hair.

‘In North Korea, paranoia was a rational response to real conditions and it helped these people survive,’ said Kim Heekyung, a clinical psychologist who spoke to me in her office at Hanawon. ‘But it keeps them from understanding what is going on in South Korea. It is a real obstacle to assimilation.’

Teenagers from the North spend two months to two years at Hangyoreh Middle-High School, a government-funded remedial boarding school affiliated with Hanawon. It was built in 2006 to help newly arrived youngsters from the North, most of whom are not fit to attend public school in South Korea.

Nearly all of them struggle with basic reading and maths. Some are cognitively impaired, apparently from acute malnourishment as infants. Even among the brightest youngsters, their knowledge of world history essentially comprises the mythical personal stories of their Great Leader, Kim Il Sung, and his Dear Son, Kim Jong Il.

‘Education in North Korea is useless for life in South Korea,’ Gwak Jong-moon, principal of Hangyoreh, told me. ‘When you are too hungry, you don’t go to learn and teachers don’t go to teach. Many of our students have been hiding in China for years with no access to schools. As young children in North Korea, they grew up eating bark off trees and thinking it was normal.’

During field trips to the movies, young defectors often panic when the lights go down, afraid that someone might kidnap them. They are bewildered by the Korean spoken in South Korea, where the language has been infected with Americanisms such as syop’ing (shopping) and k’akt’eil (cocktail). They find it incredible that money is stored in plastic k’uredit k’adus.

Pizza, hot dogs and hamburgers — staples of South Korean teen cuisine — give them indigestion. So does too much rice, a one-time staple that has become a food for the rich in post-famine North Korea.

One teenage girl at Hangyoreh School gargled with liquid fabric softener, mistaking it for mouthwash. Another used laundry detergent as baking flour. Many are terrified when they first hear the noise of an electric washing machine.

In addition to being paranoid, confused and intermittently technophobic, defectors tend to suffer from preventable diseases and conditions that are all but nonexistent in South Korea. The head nurse at Hanawon for the past decade, Chun Jung-hee, told me that a high percentage of women from the North have chronic gynecological infections and cysts. She said many defectors arrive infected with tuberculosis that has never been treated with antibiotics. They also commonly arrive with chronic indigestion and hepatitis B.

Routine medical ailments are often difficult to diagnose, the nurse said, because defectors are unaccustomed to and suspicious of doctors who ask personal questions and prescribe medications. Men, women and children have serious dental problems resulting from malnutrition and a lack of calcium in their diets. Half the money spent annually on medical care at Hanawon goes on prosthetic dental treatment.

Many, if not most, defectors arriving at Hanawon escaped North Korea with the help of brokers based in South Korea. The brokers wait eagerly for defectors to graduate from the settlement centre and begin receiving monthly stipends from the government. Then they demand their money. Anxiety about debt torments defectors inside Hanawon, the head nurse told me.

Shin did not have to worry about brokers, and his physical health was relatively good after half a year of rest and regular meals in the consulate in Shanghai.

But his nightmares would not go away.

They became more frequent and more upsetting. He found his comfortable, well-nourished life impossible to reconcile with the grisly images from Camp 14 that played inside his head.

As his mental health deteriorated, Hanawon’s medical staff realized he needed special care and transferred him to the psychiatric ward of a nearby hospital, where he spent two and a half months, some of it in isolation and most of it on medication that allowed him to sleep and eat.

He had started keeping a diary in the South Korean Consulate in Shanghai, and doctors in the hospital’s psychiatric ward encouraged him to keep writing it as part of his treatment for what they diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder.

Shin remembers little of his time in the hospital, except that the nightmares slowly diminished.

After his discharge, he moved into a small apartment purchased for him by the Ministry of Unification. It was located in Hwaseong, a city of about five hundred thousand people in the low plains of the central Korean Peninsula, near the Yellow Sea and about thirty miles south of Seoul.

For the first month, Shin rarely went outdoors, watching South Korean life unfold from the windows of his apartment. Eventually, he ventured out onto the streets. Shin compares his emergence to the slow growth of a fingernail. He cannot explain how it happened or why. It just did.

After he began to venture into the city, he took driving lessons. Owing to his limited vocabulary, he twice flunked the written driver’s licence test. Shin found it difficult to find a job that interested him or to keep a job he was offered. He collected scrap metal, made clay pots and worked in a convenience store.

Career counsellors at Hanawon say most North Koreans have similar experiences of exile. They often depend on the South Korean government to solve their problems and fail to take personal responsibility for poor work habits or for showing up late on the job. Defectors frequently quit jobs found for them by the government and start businesses that fail. Some newcomers are disgusted by what they see as the decadence and inequality of life in the South. So to find employers who will put up with the prickliness of newcomers from the North, the Ministry of Unification pays companies up to eighteen hundred dollars a year if they risk hiring a defector.

Shin spent long hours by himself, feeling desperately lonely in his one-room apartment. He tried to locate his oldest uncle, Shin Tae Sub, whose flight to South Korea after the Korean War was the crime for which Shin’s father and his entire family had been sent to Camp 14. But Shin had only a name, and the South Korean government told him it had no information on that name. The Unification Ministry said it could search only for people who had registered to be reunited with lost family members, so Shin gave up the search.

One of the psychiatrists who had treated Shin in the hospital put him in touch with a counsellor from the Database Center for North Korean Human Rights, a non-government organization in Seoul that gathers, analyses and publishes information about abuses in the North.

The counsellor encouraged Shin to turn his therapeutic diary into a memoir, which the Database Center published in Korean in 2007. While working on the book, Shin began spending nearly all his time at the office of the Database Center in Seoul, where he was given a place to sleep and made friends with his editors and other staff.

As word spread in Seoul of his birth in and escape from a no-exit labour camp, he began to meet many of the South’s leading human rights activists and heads of defector organizations. His story was vetted and scrutinized by former prisoners and guards from the camps, as well as by human rights lawyers, South Korean journalists and other experts with extensive knowledge of the camps. His understanding of how the camps operate, his scarred body and the haunted look in his eyes were persuasive, and he was widely acknowledged to be the first North Korean to come south after escaping from a political prison.

An Myeong Chul, a guard and driver at four camps in the North, told the International Herald Tribune that he had no doubt Shin had lived in a complete control zone. When they met, An said he noticed telltale signs: avoidance of eye contact and arms bowed by childhood labour.[39]

‘At first, I could not believe Shin because no one ever before succeeded in the escape,’ Kim Tae Jin told me in 2008.[40] He is president of the Democracy Network Against North Korean Gulag and a defector who spent a decade in Camp 15 before he was released.

But Kim, like others with first-hand knowledge of the camps, concluded after meeting Shin that his story was as solid as it was extraordinary.

Outside South Korea, specialists in human rights began to take note of Shin. In the spring of 2008 he was invited to tour Japan and the United States. He appeared at the University of California, Berkeley, and Columbia University, and spoke to employees at Google.

As he made friends with people who understood and appreciated what he had endured, he gained confidence and began to fill the gaping holes in his understanding of his homeland. He devoured news about North Korea, on the Internet and in South Korean newspapers. He read about the history of the Korean Peninsula, the reputation of the Kim family dictatorship and his country’s status as an international pariah.

At the Database Center, where staff members had been working with North Koreans for years, Shin was viewed as a kind of rough-hewn prodigy.

‘Compared to other defectors, he was a fast learner and highly adaptable to culture shock,’ said Lee Yong-koo, a team leader there.

Tagging along with his new friends, Shin began going to church on Sunday mornings, though he did not understand the concept of a loving and forgiving God.

As a matter of instinct, Shin was reluctant to ask for anything. The teachers in the labour camp had punished children who asked questions. In Seoul, even when he was surrounded by solicitous and well-informed friends, Shin found it all but impossible to ask for help. He read voraciously, but would not use a dictionary to look up words he did not know or ask a friend to explain something he did not understand. Because he blinkered out what he could not immediately comprehend, his travels to Tokyo, New York and California did little to awake a sense of wonder and excitement. Shin knew he was undermining his ability to adapt to his new life, but he also knew that he could not force himself to change.

22

The only birthdays that mattered in Camp 14 were those of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung. They are national holidays in North Korea, and even in a no-exit labour camp, prisoners get the day off.

As for Shin’s birthday, no one paid any attention when he was growing up, including Shin.

That changed when he turned twenty-six in South Korea and four of his friends threw him a surprise party at T.G.I. Friday’s in downtown Seoul.

‘I was very moved,’ he told me when we met for the first time in December 2008, a few days after his birthday.

Such occasions were rare, though, and the birthday party notwithstanding, Shin was not happy in South Korea. He had recently quit a part-time job serving beer in a Seoul pub. He did not know how he would pay the rent on the tiny three-hundred-dollar-a-month room he occupied in a group apartment downtown and his monthly stipend of eight hundred dollars from the Ministry of Unification had run out. He had emptied his bank account. He worried out loud that he might have to join the homeless at the central train station in Seoul.

Nor was his social life in great shape. He shared the occasional meal with roommates in his group apartment, but he did not have a girlfriend or a best friend. He declined to socialize or work with other North Koreans who had been released from labour camps. In this respect, he was like many North Korean defectors. Studies have found that they are slow to socialize and often avoid contact with others for two to three years after arriving in the South.[41]

His memoir had flopped, about five hundred copies sold from a printing of three thousand. Shin said he made no money from the book.

‘People are not so interested,’ Kim Sang-hun, director of the Database Center, told the Christian Science Monitor after his organization published the book. ‘The indifference of South Korean society to the issue of North Korean rights is so awful.’[42]

Shin was by no means the first camp survivor from the North to be greeted with a collective yawn by the South Korean public. Kang Chol-hwan spent a decade with his family in Camp 15 before they were pronounced ‘redeemable’ and released in 1987. But his wrenching story, written with journalist Pierre Rigoulot and first published in French in 2000, also received scant attention in South Korea until after it had been translated into English as The Aquariums of Pyongyang and a copy found its way onto the desk of President George W. Bush. He invited Kang to the White House to discuss North Korea, and later described Aquariums as ‘one of the most influential books I read during my presidency’.[43]

‘I don’t want to be critical of this country,’ Shin told me on the day we met, ‘but I would say that out of the total population of South Korea, only .001 per cent has any real interest in North Korea. Their way of living does not allow them to think about things beyond their borders. There is nothing in it for them.’

Shin exaggerated the South’s lack of concern about the North, but he had a valid point. It’s a blind spot that baffles local and international human rights groups. Overwhelming evidence of continuing atrocities inside the North’s labour camps has done little to rouse the South Korean public. As the Korean Bar Association has noted, ‘South Koreans, who publicly cherish the virtue of brotherly love, have been inexplicably stuck in a deep quagmire of indifference.’[44]

When South Korean President Lee Myung-bak was elected in 2007, just three per cent of voters named North Korea as a primary concern. They told pollsters that their primary interest was in making higher salaries.

When it comes to making money, North Korea is an utter waste of time. South Korea’s economy is thirty-eight times larger than the North’s; its international trade volume is two hundred and twenty-four times larger.[45]

North Korea’s periodic belligerence, however, does trigger eruptions of anger in the South. This was especially true in 2010, when North Korea launched a sneak submarine attack that killed forty-six South Korean sailors and sank the Cheonan, a warship sailing in South Korean territorial waters. The North also rained artillery shells on a small South Korean island, killing four people. But the South’s taste for vengeance tends to fade quickly.

After international investigators confirmed that a North Korean torpedo sank the Cheonan, voters in the South refused to rally around President Lee, who had said the North Korean government should ‘pay a price’. There was no South Korean version of the ‘9/11’ effect that propelled the United States into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Instead, Lee’s party was routed in a midterm election that showed South Koreans were more interested in preserving peace and protecting living standards than in teaching the North a lesson.

‘There is no winner if war breaks out, hot or cold,’ Lim Seung-youl, a twenty-seven-year-old Seoul clothing distributor, told me. ‘Our nation is richer and smarter than North Korea. We have to use reason over confrontation.’

South Koreans have spent decades refining what this reason means in response to a next-door dictatorship that has moved about eighty per cent of its total military firepower to within sixty miles of the Demilitarized Zone, the heavily guarded border strip that separates the two Koreas, and has repeatedly threatened to turn Seoul (located just thirty-five miles from the border) into a ‘sea of fire’. Bloody surprise attacks from the North have a way of recurring every ten to fifteen years, from the 1968 raid by a hit squad that tried to assassinate a South Korean president, to the 1987 bombing of a Korean Air passenger jet and the failed 1996 submarine infiltration by special forces commandos, to the 2010 sinking of the warship and the shelling of the island.

The attacks have killed hundreds of South Koreans, but they have yet to provoke the electorate into demanding that their government launch a major counterattack. Nor have they stopped the average South Korean from getting richer, better educated and better housed in what has become the fourth largest economy in Asia and the eleventh largest in the world.

South Koreans have paid close attention to the price tag of German unification. The proportional burden on South Korea, some studies have found, would be two and a half times greater than on West Germany after it absorbed the former East Germany. Studies have found that it could cost more than two trillion dollars over thirty years, raise taxes for six decades and require that ten per cent of the South’s gross domestic product be spent in the North for the foreseeable future.

South Koreans want reunification with the North, but they do not want it right away. Many do not want it during their lifetimes, largely because the cost would be unacceptably high.

Shin and many other North Korean defectors complain, with considerable justification, that South Koreans view them as ill-educated, badly spoken and poorly dressed bumpkins whose mess of a country is more trouble than it’s worth.

There is ample evidence that South Korean society makes it hard for defectors to fit in. The unemployment rate of North Koreans in the South is four times the national average, while the suicide rate for defectors is more than two and a half times as high as the rate for South Koreans.

Even South Koreans themselves struggle mightily to fit into their own success-obsessed, status-conscious, education-crazed culture. Shin was attempting to find his way in a society that is singularly overworked, insecure and stressed out. South Koreans work more, sleep less and kill themselves at a higher rate than citizens of any other developed country, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a group that supports sustainable economic growth in thirty-four wealthy countries.

They also view each other with a witheringly critical eye. Self-worth tends to be narrowly defined by admission to a few highly selective universities and prestigious, high-paying jobs at conglomerates like Samsung, Hyundai and LG.

‘This society is unforgiving, relentless and the competition is constant,’ Andrew Eungi Kim, a sociology professor at Korea University, one of the country’s most elite schools, told me. ‘If young people do not obtain the right credentials — they call it the “right spec” — they become very pessimistic. They believe they cannot get started in life. The pressure to do well in school begins to build at grade four, believe it or not, and it becomes everything to students by grade seven.’

The pursuit of the “right spec” has supercharged spending on schooling. Among wealthy countries, South Korea ranks first in per capita spending on private education, which includes home tutors, cramming sessions and English-language courses at home and abroad. Four out of five students from elementary age to high school attend after-school cramming courses. About six per cent of the country’s gross domestic product is spent on education, more than double the percentage of comparable spending in the United States, Japan or Britain.

South Korea’s obsession with achievement has paid astonishing dividends. International economists often describe South Korea as the single most impressive example of what free markets, democratic government and elbow grease can do to transform a small agrarian backwater into a global powerhouse.

But the human cost of sudden affluence has also been astonishing.

Although the suicide rate in most other wealthy countries peaked in the early 1980s, it continues to climb in South Korea, doubling since 2000. The suicide rate in 2008 was two and half times higher than in the United States and significantly higher than in nearby Japan, where suicide is deeply embedded in the culture. It seems to have spread as a kind of infectious disease, exacerbated by the strains of ambition, affluence, family disintegration and loneliness.

‘We are unwilling to seek help for depression. We are very afraid of being seen as crazy,’ Ha Kyoo-seob, a psychiatrist at Seoul National University College of Medicine and head of the Korean Association for Suicide Prevention, told me. ‘This is the dark aspect of our rapid development.’

Although the stresses of affluence go a long way towards explaining South Korea’s indifference to defectors like Shin, there is another important factor: a schism in public opinion about how to manage the risks of living next to North Korea.

Depending on which way the political winds are blowing, the public and the government in Seoul swing between blinkered conciliation and careful confrontation.

After coming into office in 2008, President Lee and his ruling party stiffened the government’s attitude towards North Korea, cutting nearly all aid and applying conditions for cooperation on progress in nuclear disarmament and human rights. The policy has led to several jittery years of missile launches, frozen economic deals, border shootings and periodic threats from the North of ‘total war’.

Before Lee, South Korea took almost exactly the opposite approach. As part of its Sunshine Policy, Presidents Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun attended summits with Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang, approved massive shipments of food and fertilizer and agreed to generous economic deals. The policy all but ignored the existence of the labour camps and made no attempt to monitor who in North Korea benefited from the aid, but it won Kim Dae-jung the Nobel Peace Prize.

The South’s schizophrenia over how to deal with the North is occasionally acted out in a kind of Kabuki theatre on the border between the two Koreas. There, defectors launch balloons bound for their homeland with messages intended to offend Kim Jong Il. The leaflets describe him as a drinker of pricey imported wine, a seducer of other men’s wives, a murderer, a slaveholder and ‘the devil’.

I attended one of these balloon launches and watched police from Lee’s government struggle to protect a North Korean defector named Park Sang Hak from angry unionists and university intellectuals, who insisted that non-threatening engagement with North Korea’s government was the only permissible policy.

Before it was over, Park kicked one of the counter-protesters squarely in the head — a blow that sounded like a bat whacking a baseball — and spat on several others. He pulled a tear-gas revolver from his jacket and fired it into the air before police grabbed it. He failed to stop his opponents from ripping apart most of the bags containing anti-North Korean leaflets.

In the end, Park’s group managed to launch just one of its ten balloons and tens of thousands of leaflets were spilled onto the ground.

Shin and I met for the first time on the day after that balloon debacle. He had not attended. Street confrontation was not his style. He had been watching old films of the Allied liberation of Nazi concentration camps, footage that included scenes of bulldozers unearthing corpses that Adolf Hitler’s collapsing Third Reich had tried to hide.

‘It is just a matter of time,’ Shin told me, before North Korea decides to destroy the camps. ‘I hope that the United States, through pressure and persuasion, can convince [the North Korean government] not to murder all those people in the camps.’

Shin had not figured out how to pay his bills, make a living, or find a girlfriend in South Korea, but he had decided what he wanted to do with the rest of his life: he would be a human rights activist and raise international awareness about the existence of the labour camps.

To that end, he intended to leave South Korea and move to the United States. He had accepted an offer from Liberty in North Korea, the non-profit organization that sponsored his first American trip. He was moving to Southern California.

23

On a cool late-summer evening in an oceanside suburb of Los Angeles, Shin stood in front of a small audience of Korean American teenagers. Dressed in a red T-shirt, jeans and sandals, he looked relaxed and smiled sweetly at the attentive kids seated in stackable chairs. He was the featured speaker at the Torrance First Presbyterian Church. His topic, as always in public appearances, was life in Camp 14.

For more than a year, his sponsors at LiNK had been sending him to this kind of event and nagging him to prepare appropriate remarks. They wanted him to deliver a crisply organized, emotionally powerful speech, preferably in English, which would use his unique story to shake up American audiences, motivate volunteers and perhaps raise money for the cause of North Korean human rights. As one of LiNK’s executives told me, ‘Shin could be an incredible asset for us and this movement. “You could be the face of North Korea,” we tell him.’

Shin wasn’t so sure.

On that night in Torrance, he had not prepared anything. After he was introduced by a LiNK staffer, he said hello to the students in Korean and asked, through a translator, if they had any questions. When a girl in the audience asked him to explain how he escaped, he looked pained.

‘This is really private and sensitive,’ he said. ‘I try to avoid talking about it as much as I can.’

Reluctantly, he told a story about his escape that was short, sketchy, sanitized and largely incomprehensible to someone who wasn’t steeped in the details of his life.

‘My story can be very heartbreaking,’ he said, wrapping up the session after about fifteen minutes. ‘I don’t want you to be depressed.’

He had bored and baffled his audience. One boy — clearly confused about who Shin was and what he had done in North Korea — asked a final question. What had it been like to serve in the North Korean military? Shin corrected the boy, saying he had not served in the Korean People’s Army. ‘I was not worthy,’ he said.

After watching his appearance in the church, I pressed Shin to explain what was going on: why do you want to be a human rights witness when it seems so difficult for you to talk in public about what happened in the camp? Why do you leave out the parts of your story that could rile up an audience?

‘The things I went through were mine alone,’ he replied without looking me in the eye. ‘I believe most people will find it nearly impossible to know what I am talking about.’

Nightmares — images of his mother’s hanging — continued to haunt his sleep. His screams woke up roommates in the group house he shared in Torrance with LiNK volunteers. He refused free counselling from Los Angeles-based, Korean-speaking psychotherapists and declined to enrol in courses that could give him a high-school equivalency degree. He also refused to consider college.

Several times during our long weeks of interviews, he mentioned a ‘dead space’ inside him, which he said made it difficult for him to feel much of anything. Sometimes he pretended to be happy, he said, to see how other people reacted to him. Often he did not make any effort.

Shin’s adjustment to life in the United States had not been easy.

Shortly after arriving in California in the spring of 2009, Shin began having severe and recurring headaches. His colleagues at LiNK worried that he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, but it turned out the headaches were a symptom of runaway tooth decay. A dentist performed root canal surgery and the headaches went away.

That instant cure was the exception.

There is — there will be — no quick, easy way for Shin to adapt to life outside the fence, whether in the United States or in South Korea. His friends told me as much, and so did he.

‘Shin is still a prisoner,’ said Andy Kim, a young Korean American who helped run LiNK and who, for a time, was Shin’s closest confidant. ‘He cannot enjoy his life when there are people suffering in the camps. He sees happiness as selfishness.’

Andy and Shin are about the same age and they often ate lunch together at Los Chilaquiles, a cheap Mexican joint in a strip mall not far from LiNK’s office in a Torrance industrial park. Shin was passionate about food and did his best talking in Korean and Mexican restaurants. For several months, Andy met Shin once a week for an hour to discuss how his life was shaping up in the United States.

There were a number of good things going on. Shin had become chatty and playful in the office. He stunned Andy and others at LiNK by popping into their offices and telling them that he ‘loved’ them. But he often did not respond well to advice from these same people, and had trouble distinguishing between constructive criticism and personal betrayal. Shin made little progress in learning how to manage money, sometimes spending more than he could afford on dinners and airline tickets for friends. In tearful conversations with Andy he would describe himself as ‘worthless garbage’.

‘Sometimes Shin sees himself through the eyes of his new self, and sometimes he sees himself through the eyes of the guards in the camp,’ said Andy. ‘He is kind of here and kind of there.’

When I asked Shin if this were true, he nodded yes.

‘I am evolving from being an animal,’ he said. ‘But it is going very, very slowly. Sometime I try to cry and laugh like other people, just to see if it feels like anything. Yet tears don’t come. Laughter doesn’t come.’

His behaviour was consistent with a pattern that researchers have found among concentration camp survivors the world over. They often move through life with what Harvard psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman calls a ‘contaminated identity’.

‘They suffer not only from a classic post-traumatic syndrome but also from profound alterations in their relations with God, with other people, and with themselves,’ Herman wrote in her book, Trauma and Recovery, an examination of the psychological consequences of political terror. Most survivors are ‘preoccupied with shame, self-loathing, and a sense of failure’.[46]

Soon after Shin arrived in California, Kyung Soon Chung, a pastor’s wife born in Seoul, began cooking for him, mothering him and monitoring his adjustment to American life. When he first showed up at her home for dinner, she ran to him and tried to give him a hug. He would not have it. He felt uncomfortable being touched.

He kept coming to dinner, though, in part because he loved Kyung’s cooking. He also became friends with Kyung’s twenty-something children: Eunice, a human rights activist he had met in Seoul, and her younger brother, David, a recent Yale graduate who was also interested in human rights. The family, which has befriended a number of North Korean immigrants, lives in Riverside, a city sixty miles east of Torrance. Kyung and her husband, Jung Kun Kim, head a small Christian ministry called the Ivy Global Mission.

In them, Shin discovered a Korean family that was open, welcoming and loving. He was envious and a bit overwhelmed by the intensity with which they cared for each other — and for him. For nearly two years, he spent every other Saturday evening at Kyung’s dinner table, sleeping over in a guest room and attending church with the family on Sunday.

Kyung, who doesn’t speak much English, began calling Shin her eldest son. He tolerated, and then returned, her hugs. He learned that she loved frozen yogurt, and before coming to dinner he would stop at a supermarket and buy her some. She teased him, saying, ‘When are you going to bring me a daughter-in-law?’ He flattered her, telling her that she was losing weight and looking younger. They talked for hours, just the two of them.

‘Why are you so nice to me?’ Shin once asked her, his mood darkening. ‘Don’t you know what I have done?’

He told Kyung that he ‘disgusts’ himself, that he cannot escape dreams of his mother’s death, that he cannot forgive himself for leaving his father behind in the camp and that he hates himself for crawling over Park’s body. He said, too, that he was ashamed of stealing rice and clothing from poor North Koreans during his flight out of the country.

There will be no end to Shin’s guilt, Kyung believes, but she often told him he had a powerful conscience and a good heart. She also said he had an advantage over other North Koreans: he had not been contaminated by propaganda or the cult of personality that surrounds the Kim dynasty.

‘With Shin, there is a certain purity,’ she said. ‘He has never been brainwashed.’

Her children saw striking changes in Shin’s confidence and social skills after a couple of years in California: he was less shy, quicker to smile and became something of a hugger. Before and after some of my interviews with him in California, he hugged me too.

‘He used to be embarrassed meeting my church friends,’ said Eunice. ‘Now he knows how to make jokes. He laughs out loud.’

David agreed. ‘Shin shows real empathy for others. This thing called love — he may have quite a lot of love in there.’

Shin’s self-assessment was less sanguine.

‘Because I am surrounded by good people, I try to do what good people do,’ he told me. ‘But it is very difficult. It does not flow from me naturally.’

In California, Shin began giving God all the credit for his escape from Camp 14 and for his good fortune in finding a way out of North Korea and China. His emerging Christian faith, though, did not square with the timeline of his life. He did not hear about God until it was too late for his mother, his brother and Park. He doubted, too, that God had protected his father from the vengeance of the guards.

Similarly, guilt had not been an issue for Shin inside Camp 14. As an adolescent, he was furious with his mother for beating him, for risking escape, for causing his torture. He did not grieve when she was hanged. But as an adult survivor, as his emotional distance from the camp increases, his fury has given way to guilt and self-loathing. ‘These are emotions that slowly started to come out from within me,’ he said. Having seen first-hand how loving families behave, he cannot bear the memory of the kind of son he once was.

Shin had come to Torrance with the understanding that he would help LiNK by working with its volunteers and speaking at its events. In return, LiNK provided him with free housing and a living stipend, but no salary. With LiNK’s help, he obtained a ten-year multiple-entry visa that allowed him to stay in the United States for up to six months at a time.

US immigration law grants special consideration to North Korean refugees, and Shin’s unique status as a born and bred victim of a political prison camp gave him an excellent chance of obtaining permanent residency in the United States. Despite this, he did not apply for a green card as he couldn’t decide where he wanted to live.

Committing to anything was difficult. He enrolled in an English language course in Torrance, but dropped out after three months. He spent most of his time in LiNK’s office, where he read North Korean news on the Web and chatted with Korean-speaking staff. He was sometimes content to sweep floors, sort boxes and carry furniture. He told Hannah Song, the executive director, that he should be treated no differently to any other staff member. But he also pouted about work assignments and succumbed to fits of anger. Every six months his work was interrupted when he travelled back to South Korea for several weeks at a time.

LiNK pushes the North Koreans it helps bring to the United States to make a ‘life plan’ soon after they arrive. It is a list of practical, achievable goals that can help a newcomer build a stable, productive life; it usually includes English fluency, job training, counselling and lessons in money management.

Shin refused to make a life plan, and Song said she and others at LiNK allowed him to get away with it.

‘His story is so powerful,’ said Song. ‘He felt entitled to be an exception and we enabled him. He just floated around Torrance. He feels a need to make sense of why he survived that camp. I don’t think he has figured it out yet.’

Outside of the Korean Peninsula, there’s no place easier than greater Los Angeles for a Korean to float around without learning another language. More than three hundred thousand Korean Americans have settled in and around the city.

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.