He could not – would not – endure more waiting.
‘Let’s run!’ he yelled.
He grabbed Park’s hand and pulled him towards the fence. For an agonizing second or two, Shin had to drag the man who had inspired his desire to escape. Soon, though, Park began to run.
Their plan had been for Shin to stay in the lead until they got clear of the fence, but he slipped and fell to his knees on the icy patrol trail. As a result, Park was first to the fence. Falling to his knees, he shoved his arms, head and shoulders between the two lowest strands of wire.
Seconds later, Shin saw sparks and smelled burning flesh.
Most electric fences built for security purposes repel trespassers with a painful but exceedingly brief pulse of current. They are not designed to kill, but to frighten animals and people. Lethal electric fences, however, use a continuous current that can make a person lock on to the wire as voltage causes involuntary muscle contractions, paralysis and death.
Before Shin could get to his feet, Park had stopped moving. He may already have been dead. But the weight of his body pulled down the bottom strand of wire, pinning it against the snowy ground and creating a small gap in the fence.
Without hesitation, Shin crawled over his friend’s body, using it as a kind of insulating pad. As he squirmed through the fence, Shin could feel the current. The soles of his feet felt as though needles were stabbing them.
Shin was nearly through the fence when his lower legs slipped off Park’s torso and came into direct contact, through the two pairs of pants he was wearing, with the bottom strand. Voltage from the wire caused severe burns from his ankles to his knees and the wounds bled for weeks, although it would be a couple of hours before Shin noticed how badly he had been injured.
The human body is unpredictable when it comes to conducting electricity. For reasons that are not well understood, the ability of individuals to sustain and survive a high-voltage shock varies widely. It is not a matter of build or fitness. Stout people show no greater resistance than skinny ones.
Human skin can be a relatively good insulator, if it is dry. Cold weather closes skin pores, reducing conductivity. Multiple layers of clothing can also help. Conversely, sweaty hands and wet clothes can easily defeat the skin’s natural resistance to an electric current. Once high-voltage electricity penetrates a body that is well grounded (wet shoes on snowy ground), the liquids and salts in the blood, muscle and bone are excellent conductors. Wet people holding hands have died of electrocution together.
Shin’s success in crawling through an electric fence designed to kill seems to have been a function of luck. His was astoundingly good; Park’s was terrible. If Shin had not slipped in the snow, he would have reached the fence first and probably died.
Shin did not know it, but to pass safely through the fence he needed a device that could shunt the flow of current from the fence to the ground. Park’s body, lying on damp ground on top of the bottom strand of wire, became that device.
When he cleared the fence, Shin had no idea where to go. At the crest of the mountain, the only direction he could comprehend was down. At first, he weaved through a patch of trees. But within minutes, he was out in the open, stumbling across upland fields and pastures that were sporadically lit by a half moon showing through clouds.
He ran for about two hours, always heading downhill, until he entered a mountain valley where there were barns and scattered houses. He heard no alarms, no gunfire, no shouting. As far as he could tell, no one was chasing him.
As the adrenaline of flight began to ebb, Shin noticed that the legs of his pants were sticky. He rolled them up, saw blood oozing out of his legs and began to comprehend the severity of his burns. His feet, too, were bleeding. He had stepped on nails, apparently, when he was close to the camp fence. It was very cold, well below 10 degrees Fahrenheit, and he had no coat.
Park, dead on the fence, had not told him where he might find China.
16
Racing downhill in the early evening darkness through cornfield stubble, Shin came across a farmer’s shed half buried in the hillside. The door was locked. There were no houses nearby, so he broke the lock with an axe handle he found on the ground.
Just inside the door, he discovered three ears of dried corn and devoured them. The corn made him aware of how hungry he was. Helped by the moonlight, he searched the shed for something else to eat. Instead, he spotted an old pair of cotton shoes and a worn military uniform.
Uniforms are everywhere in North Korea, the world’s most militarized society. Conscription is almost universal. Men serve ten years, women seven. With more than a million troops on active duty, about five per cent of the country’s population is in uniform, compared with about half a per cent in the United States. An additional five million people serve in the army reserve for much of their adult lives. The army is ‘the people, the state and the party’, says the government, which no longer describes itself as a communist state. Its guiding principle, according to the constitution, is ‘military first’. Uniformed soldiers dig clams and launch missiles, pick apples and build irrigation canals, market mushrooms and supervise the export of knock-off Nintendo games.
Inevitably, uniforms wind up in barns and sheds.
The military pants and shirt that Shin found were far too big for him, as were the cotton shoes. But finding a change of clothes less than three hours after escaping the camp and before anyone could get a look at him was an extraordinary stroke of luck.
He stepped out of his cold wet shoes and removed both pairs of prison trousers. From the knees down they were stiff with blood and snow. He tried to bandage the burns on his legs with ripped-out pages from a book he found in the shed. The pages stuck to his mangled shins. He put on the ratty, too-big uniform and slipped his feet into the cotton shoes.
No longer instantly recognizable as a runaway prisoner, he had become just another ill-clothed, ill-shod and ill-nourished North Korean. In a country where a third of the population is chronically malnourished, where local markets and train stations are crowded with filthy itinerant traders, and where almost everyone has served in the army, Shin blended in easily.
Outside the shed, he also found a road, and he followed it down into a village at the bottom of the valley. There, to his surprise, he saw the Taedong River.
For all his running, he was only two miles upstream from Camp 14.
News of his escape had not reached the village. The streets were dark and empty. Shin crossed a bridge over the Taedong and headed east on a road parallel to the river. He hid from headlights when a single car drove by, then he climbed up to a railroad track that seemed deserted and kept walking.
By late evening, he had walked about six miles and entered the outskirts of Bukchang, a coal town just south of the river with a population of about ten thousand people. A few pedestrians were out, but Shin did not sense that his presence warranted special attention. With an aluminum factory, coal mines and a large power plant, the town was perhaps accustomed to night-shift workers walking the streets at all hours.
Shin saw a pigpen, a familiar and comforting sight. He crawled over a fence, found some rice straw and dug in for the night.
For the next two days, Shin scavenged around the outskirts of Bukchang, eating whatever he could find on the ground or in garbage heaps. He had no idea what to do or where to go. People in the street seemed to ignore him. His legs hurt and he was hungry and cold, yet he was exhilarated. He felt like an alien fallen to earth.
In the months and years ahead, Shin would discover all things modern: streaming video, blogs and international air travel. Therapists and career counsellors would advise him. Preachers would show him how to pray to Jesus Christ. Friends would teach him how to brush his teeth, use a debit card and fool around with a smartphone. From obsessive reading online, the politics, history and geography of the two Koreas, China, Southeast Asia, Europe and the United States would all become familiar.
None of this, though, did mo
re to change his understanding of how the world works, and how human beings interact with each other, than his first days outside the camp.
It shocked him to see North Koreans going about their daily lives without having to take orders from guards. When they had the temerity to laugh together in the streets, wear brightly coloured clothes or haggle over prices in an open-air market, he expected armed men to step in, knock heads and stop the nonsense.
The word Shin uses again and again to describe those first days is ‘shock’.
It was not meaningful to him that North Korea in the dead of winter is ugly, dirty and dark, or that it is poorer than Sudan, or that, taken as a whole, it is viewed by human rights groups as the world’s largest prison.
His context had been twenty-three years in an open-air cage run by men who hanged his mother, shot his brother, crippled his father, murdered pregnant women, beat children to death, taught him to betray his family and tortured him over a fire.
He felt wonderfully free and, as best he could determine, no one was looking for him.
He was also weak with hunger, and as he wandered the streets, he began searching for an empty house where he could eat and rest. He found one at the end of a small road. Tearing open a rear window made of vinyl, he climbed inside.
In the kitchen, he found three bowls of cooked rice. He guessed that someone who would soon return had prepared it. Afraid to risk eating or sleeping in the house, he emptied the rice into a plastic bag and spooned in some soybean paste he found on a shelf.
Searching the rest of the house, he found a pair of winter-weight trousers draped over a hanger and another pair of shoes. He also found a rucksack and a dark brown winter coat, which was military in style and much warmer than any coat he had ever worn. He opened one last kitchen drawer and found a ten-pound bag of rice, which he stuffed in the rucksack and left.
Near the centre of Bukchang, a market lady shouted at him. She wanted to know what was in his rucksack and if he had anything to sell. Trying to keep calm, Shin said he had some rice. She offered to buy it for four thousand North Korean won, which was worth about four dollars at blackmarket exchange rates.
Shin had first learned about the existence of money from Park. Before the market lady yelled at him, he had watched in wonder as people used small pieces of paper, which he guessed was money, to buy food and other goods.
He had no idea if four thousand won was a fair price for his stolen rice, but he happily sold it and bought some crackers and cookies. He pocketed the remaining money and left town on foot. His destination was China, but he still didn’t know where that might be.
On the road, Shin encountered several shabby-looking men and eavesdropped on their conversations. They were searching for work, scrounging for food, travelling among street markets and trying to steer clear of the police. One or two of them asked Shin where he was from. He said he had grown up in the Bukchang area, which was true enough and seemed to satisfy their curiosity.
Shin soon figured out that most of these men were strangers to each other, but he was afraid to ask too many questions. He did not want to feel an obligation to talk about himself.
According to a survey of more than thirteen hundred North Korean refugees that was conducted in China in late 2004 and 2005,1 the people wandering around North Korea at that time were mostly unemployed labourers and failed farmers, as well as students, soldiers, technicians and a few former government officials.
The survey suggested they were on the road primarily for economic reasons, hoping to find work or trade in China. Their lives had been exceedingly difficult and their relationship with the government was strained: nearly a quarter of the men and thirty-seven per cent of the women said family members had died of hunger. More than a quarter of them had been arrested in North Korea, and ten per cent said they had been sent to jails, where forced starvation, torture and executions were commonplace. To get out of North Korea, more than half of the refugees said they used cash to bribe officials or buy help from professional smugglers.
Shin fell in with these wanderers, guessing he would be safer in their company than travelling by himself. He tried to copy the behaviour of the men he met on the road. It was not difficult. Like him, they dressed shabbily, looked dirty, smelled bad and were desperate for food.
As a police state, North Korea does not tolerate intercity vagabonds. Laws strictly prohibit citizens from travelling between cities without proper authorization. But in the aftermath of the famine – with the collapse of the state-run economy, the rise of private markets and the near ubiquity of traders hustling around the country with goods smuggled from China – laws were often ignored. Police could be bribed; indeed, many lived off bribes. Vagabonds with a bit of cash could travel towards China without attracting attention.
There are no reliable numbers on defections to China, or on the movement of people drifting around inside North Korea. The odds of avoiding arrest and successfully crossing to China seem to change from season to season. It depends on how recently the North Korean government has ordered a security crackdown, how vigilant Chinese authorities are in repatriating defectors, how willing border guards are to take bribes and how desperate North Koreans are to cross the border. The North Korean government has created new labour camps to hold traders and travellers too poor or unlucky to bribe their way north.
One trend, though, is clear. The number of North Koreans seeking asylum in South Korea has increased nearly every year since 1995. Forty-one arrived in 1995. By 2009, the number had jumped to nearly three thousand. More defectors turned up in the South between 2005 and 2011 than fled North Korea over the entire period since the end of the Korean War in 1953.
When Shin began walking towards the border in January 2005, conditions for escape seem to have been relatively good. Numerical evidence can be found in the large number of North Koreans – about forty-five hundred – who arrived in South Korea in 2006 and 2007. It usually takes a year or two for defectors to find their way from China to South Korea.
The permeability of North Korea’s border tends to improve when border guards and local officials can accept bribes without draconian punishment from higher-ups.
‘More than ever, money talks,’ said Chun Ki-won, a minister in Seoul who told me that between 2000 and 2008 he helped more than six hundred North Koreans cross into China and make their way to South Korea.
By the time Shin crawled through the electric fence, there was a well-established human smuggling network with tentacles that reached deep inside North Korea. Chun and several other Seoul-based operatives told me that given enough money they could get virtually any North Korean out of the country.
Using word of mouth, brokers in Seoul offered ‘planned escapes’. A low-budget version cost less than two thousand dollars. It involved months or years of travel through China, via Thailand or Vietnam, to Seoul, and it could require treacherous river crossings, arduous travel on foot and weeks of waiting in an unsanitary Thai refugee camp.
A first-class planned escape, complete with a forged Chinese passport and an air ticket from Beijing to Seoul, sold for ten thousand dollars or more. From start to finish, brokers and defectors said, going first class could take as little as three weeks.
Activist pastors from South Korean churches invented the escape trade in the late 1990s and early 2000s, hiring border operatives who greased the palms of North Korean guards with cash donated by parishioners in Seoul. By the time Shin hit the road, defectors, many of them former North Korean military and police officers, had taken over the trade and were quietly running profitable operations.
This new breed of brokers would often receive advance payment in cash from affluent or middle-income South Korean families seeking the release of a relative. They sometimes worked on an instalment plan, taking little or no money up front from a defector or his family. When an instalment-plan defector arrived in Seoul, however, and had access to some of the forty thousand dollars or more that the South Korean government gives to
new arrivals from the North, brokers usually demanded far more money than their basic fee.
‘My boss is willing to put up all the money to pay bribes to get someone out,’ said a Seoul-based broker and former North Korean military officer who worked for a smuggling operation based in China. ‘But when you get to Seoul, you have to pay double for this service.’
By 2008, many North Korean defectors were so deeply in debt to their smugglers that the South Korean government changed the way it distributed its cash support. Instead of offering lump-sum payments, the money was paid out over time, with incentives for those who found and held jobs. About a quarter of the money also went directly on housing, eliminating any chance that it could be paid to a broker.
Using their personal and institutional contacts in the North, brokers hired guides to escort people from their homes in North Korea to the Chinese border, where they were handed over to Chinese-speaking guides, who drove them to Beijing Airport.
Outside Seoul, I talked to a North Korean defector who had paid twelve thousand dollars to a broker to smuggle out her eleven-year-old son in 2002.
‘I didn’t know it could happen so fast,’ said the mother, who did not want to disclose her name because she and her siblings were paying another broker to smuggle out their mother at the time. ‘It took only five days for my son to be plucked out and taken across the river into China. I was dumbfounded when I got a call from officials at Seoul airport to tell me my son was here.’
At the border and inside the country, the North Korean government has tried to crush these smuggling operations – and periodically it succeeds.
‘A lot of people get caught,’ Lee Jeong Yeon, a former North Korean border officer, told me. ‘The policy is for one hundred per cent execution of those caught helping people to defect. I personally saw several such executions. The successful brokers are experienced people who have good contacts in the military, and they bribe the guards,’ he said. ‘Guards are rotated often, and new people have to be bribed.’