Escape from Camp 14 (11 page)

On the pig farm, that passive blankness returned. Shin uses the word ‘relaxing’ to describe his time on the camp farm, which lasted from 1999 to 2003.

Outside the camp during those years, however, life in North Korea was anything but relaxing.

Famine and floods in the mid-1990s all but destroyed the centrally planned economy. The government’s Public Distribution System, which had fed most North Koreans since the 1950s,
collapsed. As a panicked response to hunger and starvation, bartering trade ran wild and private markets exploded in number and importance. Nine out of ten households traded to
survive.
¹
More and more North Koreans sneaked across the border into China for food, work, trade and flight to South Korea. Neither China nor North
Korea released figures, but estimates of these economic migrants ranged from tens of thousands to four hundred thousand.

Kim Jong Il tried to control the chaos. His government created a new network of detention centres for traders who travelled without authorization. But with crackers and cigarettes they could
often buy their freedom from hungry police and soldiers. Rail stations, open-air markets and back alleys in major towns became crowded with starving drifters. The many orphaned children found in
these places became known as ‘wandering sparrows’.

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 travelling entrepreneurs who would give Shin sustenance, cover and guidance in his escape to China.

Unlike any other aid recipient in the world, North Korea’s government insisted on sole authority for transporting donated food. The demand angered the United States, the
country’s largest aid donor, and frustrated the monitoring techniques that the UN World Food Programme had developed around the world to track aid and make sure it reached the intended
recipients. But since the need was so urgent and the death toll so high, the West swallowed its disgust and delivered more than one billion dollars’ worth of food to North Korea between 1995
and 2003.

During these years, refugees from North Korea arrived in the South and told government officials that they had seen donated rice, wheat, corn, vegetable oil, non-fat dried milk, fertilizer,
medicine, winter clothing, blankets, bicycles and other aid items on sale in private markets. Pictures and videos taken in the markets showed bags of grain marked as ‘A Gift from the American
People’.

Bureaucrats, party officials, army officers and other well-placed government elites ended up stealing about thirty per cent of the aid, according to estimates by outside scholars and
international aid agencies. They sold it to private traders, often for dollars or euros, and delivered the goods using government vehicles.

Without intending to do so, wealthy donor countries injected a kind of adrenaline rush into the grubby world of North Korean street trading. 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. The markets, though, have not come close to eliminating hunger or malnutrition. They also appear to have increased inequity, creating a chasm between those who have figured out how to trade
and those who have not.

In late 1998, a few months before Shin was assigned to the pig farm, the World Food Programme conducted a nutrition survey of children, which covered seventy per cent of North Korea. It found
that about two thirds of those surveyed were stunted or underweight. The numbers were double that of Angola, then at the end of a long civil war, and the North Korean government became furious when
they were released to the public.

Ten years later, when private markets in the North were well established and selling everything from imported fruit to Chinese-made CD players, nutrition in state-run institutions for children
and the elderly had barely improved, according to a World Food Programme nutrition survey that was tolerated by the government as a condition of receiving aid.

‘The children looked very sad, very emaciated, very pathetic,’ a nutritionist who worked on the 2008 food survey told me. She had participated in previous nutrition surveys dating
back to the late 1990s and concluded that chronic hunger and severe malnutrition had persisted in much of North Korea despite the spread of markets.

International nutrition surveys have also found a pervasive pattern of geographic inequity. Hunger, stunting and wasting diseases are three to four times more prevalent in remote provinces of
North Korea – home to the hostile classes – than they are in and around Pyongyang.

As Shin found in the labour camp, the most secure place for powerless North Koreans to live amid chronic hunger is a farm. By all indications, farmers – excepting those whose land was
ruined by floods – weathered the famine far better than city dwellers. Even though they worked on cooperative farms, where crops belonged to the state, they were in a position to hide and
hoard food, as well as selling it for cash or trading it for clothing and other necessities.

The government had little choice – after the famine, the collapse of its food-distribution system and the rise of private markets – but to offer farmers higher prices and increase
incentives to grow more food. 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.

Kim Jong Il, however, never warmed to market reform and his government called it ‘honey-coated poison’.

‘It is important to decisively frustrate capitalist and non-socialist elements in their bud,’ according to the
Rodong Sinmun
, the party newspaper in Pyongyang. ‘Once the
imperialist ideological and cultural poisoning is tolerated, even the faith unshakable before the threat of a bayonet will be bound to give in like a wet mud-wall.’

The capitalism that bloomed in the cities and small towns of North Korea weakened the government’s iron grip on everyday life and did little to enrich the state. Kim Jong Il grumbled
publicly, saying, ‘Frankly the state has no money, but individuals have two years’ budget worth.’
²

His government counter-attacked.

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.

‘At harvest time, soldiers bring their own trucks to the farms and just take,’ Kwon Tae-jin, a specialist on North Korean agriculture at the Korea Rural Economic Institute, which is
funded by the South Korean government, told me in Seoul.

In the far north, where food supplies are historically lean and farmers are regarded as politically hostile, the military takes a quarter of total grain production, Kwon said. In other areas of
the country, it takes five to seven per cent. To make sure that workers at state farms do not short change the military, the army stations soldiers at all three thousand of the farms throughout the
harvest season. When tens of thousands of city dwellers are brought to the farms to assist with the fall harvest, soldiers monitor them to make sure they do not steal food.

The permanent deployment of soldiers on farms has spawned corruption. Kwon said that farm managers pay off soldiers, who then turn a blind eye to large-scale theft of food that is later sold in
private markets. Disputes among groups of corrupt soldiers periodically lead to fistfights and shootouts, according to a number of defectors and reports by aid groups. Good Friends, the Buddhist
aid group with informants in the North, reported in 2009 that one soldier on a state farm was stabbed with a sickle during a fight over corn.

Sealed away on the pig farm, Shin heard nothing about the street trading, corruption and extralegal intercity travel that would, in less than two years’ time, help him
escape.

Holed up on a mountaintop that was a kind of camp within the camp, he drifted uneventfully through the last of his teenage years, keeping his head down, his mind blank and his energies focused
on stealing food. His most vivid memory of those years was getting busted for barbecuing stolen pig intestines. He was beaten, deprived of food for five days, and his cafeteria rations were cut in
half for three months.

Turning twenty on the farm, he believed he had found the place where he would grow old and die.

But the pig farm interlude ended abruptly in March 2003. 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.

At the factory, Shin’s life again became complicated. There was relentless pressure to meet production quotas, as well as renewed pressure to snitch. Guards scavenged for sex among the
factory’s seamstresses.

There was also a newcomer, an educated prisoner from Pyongyang. He had been schooled in Europe and had lived in China. He was to tell Shin about what he was missing.

A thousand women stitched together military uniforms during twelve-hour shifts, and when their temperamental foot-powered sewing machines broke down, Shin fixed them.

He was responsible for about fifty machines and the seam-stresses who operated them. If the machines did not spew out their daily quota of army uniforms, Shin and the seamstresses were forced to
perform ‘bitter humiliation work’, which meant two extra hours on the floor of the factory, usually from ten to midnight.

Experienced seamstresses could keep their machines in working order, but those who were new, inept, or very ill could not. To fix a broken machine, which was forged out of cast iron at a foundry
inside Camp 14, Shin and the other repairmen had to haul it on their backs to a repair shop upstairs.

The extra labour incensed many of the repairmen, who took their anger out on the seamstresses by grabbing their hair, slamming their heads against walls and kicking them in the face. Foremen in
the factory, who were prisoners chosen by guards for their toughness, generally looked the other way when seamstresses were beaten. They told Shin that fear encouraged production.

Although he was still short and skinny, Shin was no longer a passive, malnourished, torture-traumatized child. During his first year in the factory, he proved this to himself and to his
coworkers in a confrontation with another sewing-machine repairman.

Gong Jin Soo was a hot head. Shin had watched him go into a rage when one of the seamstresses in Gong’s stable broke the axle of her sewing machine. Gong kicked the woman in the face until
she collapsed to the floor.

When Gong demanded a feed dog – a crucial part of a sewing machine that controls stitch size by regulating the speed of fabric moving to the needle – from a seamstress who worked
with Shin, she curtly refused.

As Shin watched, Gong punched her in the face and bloodied her nose.

Astonishing himself and his seamstresses, Shin lost his composure. He grabbed a large wrench and swung it as hard as he could, trying to crack open Gong’s skull. The wrench crunched into
his forearm, which Gong raised just in time to protect his head.

Gong yowled and fell to the floor. The shift foreman who had trained Shin rushed over. He found Shin, wild-eyed and wrench in hand, standing over Gong, whose bloody arm had a lump on it the size
of an egg. The foreman slapped Shin’s face and took his wrench, the seamstresses returned to sewing and from then on, Gong kept his distance.

The garment factory is a sprawling cluster of seven large buildings, all of which are visible on satellite photographs. Located near the Taedong River, its grounds lie at the
entrance to Valley 2, not far from the hydroelectric dam and factories that make glassware and porcelain.

During Shin’s time at the garment factory, there were dormitories on the grounds for the seamstresses and the men who worked in sewing-machine repair, garment design, plant maintenance and
shipping. The factory superintendent was the only Bowiwon on the site. All the other foremen, including the
chongbanjang
, or head foreman, were prisoners.

Working in the factory put Shin in close daily contact with several hundred women in their teens, twenties and thirties. Some were strikingly attractive, and their sexuality created tension on
the factory floor. Part of this was due to their ill-fitting uniforms and the fact that they had no bras and few wore underwear. Sanitary napkins were not available.

As a twenty-year-old virgin, Shin was nervous around these women. They interested him, but he worried about the camp rule that prescribed death for prisoners who had sexual relations without
prior approval. Shin said he was careful not to get involved with any of the women, but the prohibition on sex meant nothing to the factory superintendent and the handful of favoured prisoners who
served as foremen.

The superintendent, a guard in his thirties, wandered among the seamstresses like a buyer at a cattle auction. Shin watched him choose a different girl every few days, ordering her to come and
clean his room, which was located inside the factory. Seamstresses not cleaning the superintendent’s room were fair game for the chief foreman and other prisoners with supervisory jobs in the
factory.

Women had no choice but to comply. There was also something in it for them, at least in the short term. If they pleased the superintendent or one of the foremen, they could expect less work and
more food. If they broke a sewing machine, they were not beaten.