Escape from Camp 14: Chapters 5–12

Then she cooked, using her daily ration of seven hundred grams of corn meal to make porridge in the one pot she owned.

Outside the camp, too, chronic shortages have removed rice from the daily diets of many North Koreans, especially those in the hostile classes.

On the floor of his mother’s bedroom, as the aggrieved thirteen-year-old struggled to contain his fear, Shin’s camp-bred instincts took over: he had to tell a guard.

The unforgivable crime Shin’s father had committed was being the brother of two young men who had fled south during a fratricidal war that razed much of the Korean Peninsula and divided hundreds of thousands of families.

One of the guards grabbed a gaff hook from the wall and pierced the boy in the lower abdomen, holding him over the fire until he lost consciousness.

He had a sense that Uncle had done this kind of work before, judging from his competence and calm.

But his caustic tone confused Shin. He sounded as if he knew his son’s first instinct was to inform.

It was a nondisclosure form stipulating that father and son would not tell anyone what had gone on inside the prison.

A makeshift gallows had been constructed and a wooden pole had been driven into the ground.

He hated his mother and brother with the savage clarity of a wronged and wounded adolescent.

Shin tried again and again to push the cart, but it was too heavy for the emaciated boy to budge.

As Shin fell to his knees to beg for forgiveness (a ritual abasement that he performed as a matter of instinct), his teacher hit him in the head with his walking stick and shouted for the rest of the class to help punish the scavenger.

He blamed her, too, for the abuse and humiliation dished out by his teacher and classmates.

Suicide is a powerful temptation for North Koreans plucked out of ordinary lives and subjected to the labor camps’ regime of hard labor, hunger, beatings, and sleep deprivation.

A perverse benefit of birth in the camp was a complete absence of expectations.

He also assigned him less arduous work and made certain that Shin had a warm place to sleep on the floor of the student dormitory.

It is also possible that senior guards in the camp had found out that a disgruntled teacher was mistreating a reliable snitch.

Besides staving off economic collapse, the dams are ideologically beguiling to the family that runs the country.

North Korea would have lost the Korean War and disappeared as a state without the help of the Chinese, who fought the United States and other Western forces to a stalemate.

Until the 1990s, North Korea’s economy was largely held together by subsidies from the Soviet Union.

Reality notwithstanding, North Korea champions self-reliance as the sine qua non of the country’s much-advertised goal of becoming “a great, prosperous and powerful nation” by 2012, the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Kim II Sung.

The success of these hortatory campaigns has been mixed, at best, especially when it comes to the government’s highly unpopular efforts to lure city-bred people into back-breaking farm labor.

Labor on the dam—which satellite photographs show to be a substantial concrete structure spanning a wide river, with turbines and spillways hugging the northern bank—went on around the clock.

When Hong Joo Hyun discovered a naked classmate amid the post-flood debris, he removed his own clothes and covered the body.

Shin remembers that when one of his classmates, Byun Soon Ho, complained about a fever and feeling unwell, a guard gave him a lesson in the benefits of stoicism.

The decision about who went where was made by Shin’s teacher, the man who two years earlier had saved Shin’s life by providing him with extra food and halting abuse from his classmates.

The smell of roasting pork on the farm would alert guards, leading to beatings and weeks of half rations, so they ate purloined pork raw.

As a panicked response to hunger and starvation, barter trade ran wild and private markets exploded in number and importance.

Shin did not yet know this, but grassroots capitalism, vagabond trading, and rampant corruption were creating cracks in the police state that surrounded Camp 14.

Food aid from the United States, Japan, South Korea, and other donors mitigated the worst of the famine by the late 1990s.

But in an indirect and accidental way, it also energized the market ladies and traveling entrepreneurs who would give Shin sustenance, cover, and guidance in his escape to China.

The lucrative theft of international food aid whetted the appetite of higher-ups for easy money as it helped transform private markets into the country’s primary economic engine.

Private markets, which today supply most of the food North Koreans eat, have become the fundamental reason why most outside experts say a catastrophic 1990s-style famine is unlikely to happen again.

They also appear to have increased inequity, creating a chasm between those who have figured out how to trade and those who have not.

International nutrition surveys have also found a pervasive pattern of geographic inequity.

Private farming on small plots of land was legalized in 2002. This allowed more private farm-to-market trade, which increased the power of traders and the autonomy of productive farmers.

As part of the “military first” era that Kim’s government officially proclaimed in 1999, the Korean People’s Army, with more than a million soldiers to feed three times a day, moved aggressively to confiscate a substantial slice of all food grown on cooperative farms.

For reasons never explained, Shin was transferred to the camp’s garment factory, a crowded, chaotic, stressful work site where two thousand women and five hundred men made military uniforms.

Experienced seamstresses could keep their machines in working order, but those who were new, inept, or very ill could not.

During his first year in the factory, he proved it to himself and to his coworkers in a confrontation with another sewing machine repairman.