Escape from Camp 14 (22 page)

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.

In February 2011, days after his break with LiNK, Shin flew up the West Coast to Washington State. He moved in with Harim and her parents in Sammamish, a Seattle suburb in the
western foothills of the Cascade Mountains.

His sudden relocation surprised me. I was also worried, like his friends in Los Angeles, that he was being impulsive and burning bridges without good reason, but his move certainly simplified
the logistics of spending time with him. I happen to be from the state of Washington, and after leaving Tokyo and the
Washington Post
, I had moved back to Seattle to work on this book. When
Shin telephoned me at home and told me in broken English that he had become my neighbour, I invited him over for tea.

Our work together was nearly done and Shin had kept his word. He had allowed me to move around in the darkest corners of his past. But I needed a bit more: a better sense of what he wanted in
the future. As he sat with Harim on the couch in my living room, I asked if I could visit their home. I wanted to meet Harim’s parents.

Shin and Harim were too polite to say no. Instead, they said the house was too messy. They would have to check on a good time. They would get back to me. Without saying so, they made it clear
that they would prefer that my long interrogation come to an end – and soon.

He and Harim had formed a two-person NGO called North Korea Freedom Plexus. To fund it, they hoped to raise money from donations and Shin intended to give a lot of speeches. Their ambitious
mission was to open asylum shelters for defectors who crossed into China and to smuggle anti-regime pamphlets into North Korea. To that end, Shin said he had twice travelled to border areas inside
China and planned to do so again. When I asked if he was afraid of being abducted or arrested in China, where North Korean agents are known to hunt down and kidnap defectors, he said he has the
protection of a South Korean passport and that he is always careful. But this was not an answer that satisfied his friends, who warned him to stay out of China.

Lowell and Linda Dye, the Columbus couple who read my first story about Shin in 2008 and helped pay for his travel to the United States, were disappointed and worried when they heard he had quit
LiNK and moved to Seattle. The Dyes and the Kim family in Riverside, California, have told Shin that creating a new NGO is a risky idea and that he would be more effective if he continued to work
with a well-established and well-funded organization.

Shin has become close to the Dyes. He calls them his ‘parents’ and takes their concerns seriously. After he moved to Seattle, he accepted an invitation to travel to Columbus and stay
with them for a couple of weeks, while Harim stayed at home in Seattle.

The Dyes wanted to help Shin make a plan for managing his future. Lowell, a management consultant, believes he needs an agent, a money manager and a lawyer. But in Columbus, he and Shin did not
have a serious talk, in part because Shin kept Seattle hours, sleeping in until late morning and staying up at night to talk to Harim on Skype.

‘He told us he really loves Harim,’ Lowell said. ‘That is the way he is going. She makes him happy.’

When Shin returned to Seattle, I met with him and Harim again. Their house was still too messy for me to visit, they said, so we had coffee at Starbucks. When I asked how their relationship was
going, Harim blushed, smiled and looked lovingly at Shin.