Escape from Camp 14: Chapter 20–Appendix

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.

It was a legacy of the Korean War, a decades-old protocol that gave American intelligence a firsthand chance to find out what defectors knew about the North.

It is a government-run resettlement center perched in verdant hill country about forty miles south of Seoul, a sprawling megalopolis of more than twenty million people.

He also attended classes that explained the many government benefits and programs 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.

“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.

She said many defectors arrive infected with tuberculosis that has never been treated with antibiotics.

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.

Some newcomers are disgusted by what they see as the decadence and inequality of life in the South.

His understanding of how the camps operate, his scarred body, and the haunted look in his eyes were persuasive—and he was widely acknowledged as the first North Korean to come south after escaping from a political prison.

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.

In Seoul, even when he was surrounded by solicitous and well-informed friends, Shin found it all but impossible to ask for help.

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 to the desk of President George W. Bush.

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.”

South Koreans have spent decades refining what reason means in response to a next-door dictatorship that has moved about eighty percent 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.

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.

If young people do not obtain the right credentials—they call it the ‘right spec’—they become very pessimistic.

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.

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.

Although the stresses of affluence go a long way toward 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.

The South’s schizophrenia over how to deal with the North is occasionally acted out in a kind of Kabuki theater on the border between the two Koreas.

He had been watching old films of the Allied liberation of Nazi concentration camps, which included scenes of bulldozers unearthing corpses that Adolf Hitler’s collapsing Third Reich had tried to hide.

“Shin shows real empathy for others. This thing called love—he may have quite a lot of love in there.”

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, counseling, and lessons in money management.

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 an easy twenty-minute commute through Torrance, a sun-soaked, industrial-suburban, multicultural mishmash of a place.

Harim, who is bilingual, had traveled back to South Korea to work briefly as a translator for an NGO, or nongovernmental organization, that focused on North Korea.

Compared to the diffident, incoherent speaker I had seen six months earlier in Southern California, he was unrecognizable.

Shin had noticed that his meandering question-and-answer sessions were putting people to sleep.

Wearing hip glasses that gave him the look of an avant-garde academic, Shin became the cohost of InsideNK, episodes of which were posted on YouTube with English subtitles.

The show was not about him, but his occasional personal comments had political bite; on one program he said that the way for the dictators of North Korea “to save their lives is to acknowledge to the world the brutalities they have committed and to apologize with bowed heads.”

The Economist chided the world—and itself—-for failing to take North Korea seriously.

Certainly it is easier to lampoon the regime as ruled by extraterrestrial freaks than to grapple with the suffering it inflicts

“The army and people of [North Korea] will never allow the U.S. to bring down the inviolable socialist system under the pretence of 'human rights issue,’” the official Korean Central News Agency declared.

Then it issued a threat, saying that it would retaliate against defectors and human rights activists: “Those who dare hurt the dignity of the supreme leadership of [North Korea] will not be safe no matter where they are and they will not be able to escape merciless punishment.”

Anyone who fails to demonstrate total compliance with a guard’s instructions will be shot immediately.