Lee, whose identity was confirmed by South Korean intelligence officials, worked for three years along the China–North Korea border. He supervised undercover agents who pretended to be brokers and guides in order to infiltrate and disrupt the smuggling trade. After his defection to the South, Lee told me he had used his contacts in the North to smuggle out thirty-four people to freedom.
Shin did not have the awareness, the money, or the contacts to use smuggling networks, and he certainly did not have anyone outside the country to engage professionals on his behalf.
But by keeping his mouth shut and his eyes open he entered the slipstream of smuggling, trading and petty bribery that had become North Korea’s post-famine economy.
Traders showed him haystacks where he could sleep, neighbourhoods where he could break into houses and markets where he could trade stolen goods for food. Shin often shared food with them in the evening as they all huddled around roadside fires.
As he walked out of Bukchang that day, wearing his newly stolen coat and carrying a small cache of cookies, Shin joined a small group of traders that, by chance, was going north.
17
Unless he could get far away – and quickly – Shin feared he would soon be caught.
He walked nine miles to a small mountain town called Maengsan, where traders told him that a truck would show up near the central market. For a small fee, it hauled passengers to the train station in Hamhung, the second largest city in North Korea.
Shin had not yet learned enough geography to know where Hamhung was. But he did not care. He was desperate to find a means of transportation other than his aching legs. It had been three days since he crawled through the electric fence, and he was still only about fifteen miles from Camp 14.
After queuing up with traders waiting for the truck, he managed to pile into the back. The road was bad and the sixty-mile journey to Hamhung took all day and into the night. In the back of the truck, a couple of men asked Shin where he had come from and where he was headed. Unsure who they were or why they were asking, Shin feigned confusion and said nothing. The men lost interest and ignored him.
Unknown to him, the timing of Shin’s travel was excellent.
Intercity travel in North Korea had once been impossible without a travel permit, which would be stamped or folded into a ‘citizen’s certificate’, a passport-sized document modelled after the old Soviet identification card. Camp-bred prisoners like Shin were never issued a citizen’s certificate.
For North Koreans who did not have them, travel permits were hard to come by. They were usually issued for work-related reasons or for a family event that could be confirmed by bureaucrats, such as a wedding or a funeral. But systematic police checks of these documents had largely ended by 1997 – with the exception of travellers bound for Pyongyang and other restricted areas1 – when the rules eased as famine drove people out on the roads in search of food. Since then, bribes from traders have kept police and other security officials from enforcing the law. Put bluntly, the greed of North Korea’s cash-hungry cadre seemed to enable Shin’s trek.
In all probability, the truck he rode in was a military vehicle that had been illegally converted into a for-profit people mover. The system, known as servi-cha or service car, was invented in the late 1990s by government and military elites to milk cash from traders who needed to move themselves and their goods around the country. It was part of an upstart transportation system that the Daily NK, a Seoul-based website with informants in the North, describes as the country’s ‘core transportation tool’ and probably the ‘most decisive influence on the growth’ of private markets.2
In North Korea, vehicles are owned not by individuals but by the government, the party and the military. Savvy operators within these organizations diverted trucks and colluded with smugglers to import fleets of secondhand cars, vans and buses from China. After the vehicles were registered in the name of state entities, private drivers were hired and wanderers like Shin were offered low-cost, no-questions-asked transport around much of the country.
Insurgent capitalism frightened the government of North Korea, which fretted publicly about a slippery slope to regime change and catastrophe. But periodic attempts to discipline bribe-takers, restrict market activities, force servi-cha vehicles off the road and confiscate cash were met with widespread resistance. Much of it came from poorly paid state functionaries whose livelihoods depended on using police and administrative authority to extract cash from upstart capitalists.
To force traders to pay, North Korean security forces invented a new twist on labour camps of the sort that Shin was born in. Instead of holding political criminals for life, these camps briefly incarcerated – and occasionally tortured – traders who failed to pay bribes to security officials. Officials periodically descended on the markets and arrested traders under vague laws that criminalize buying and selling. Traders avoided a grisly trip to a labour camp only by paying hard currency bribes.
The existence of these camps, which the government began to build before Shin’s escape, was first disclosed in ‘Repression and Punishment in North Korea’, a 2009 report based on surveys of more than sixteen hundred refugees interviewed in China and South Korea between 2004 and 2008.
Security officials used the camps as ‘a system for shaking people down’, Marcus Noland, a Washington-based economist and co-author of the report, told me. ‘It really looks like the work of a gang, a kind of “Soprano” state.’
About two thirds of those held in these camps were allowed to go home within a month, according to the refugee survey. The compounds were often small, with few guards and not much fencing, but during their brief stays inside, many North Koreans said they routinely witnessed executions and deaths from torture and starvation. The effect of this revolving-door incarceration for economic crimes spread fear among people who made their living by trading.
‘[The North Korean government] orders police to restrict the markets, but they don’t always do what they are told because so many police and other authorities are making money,’ said Jiro Ishimaru, the editor of Rimjin-gang, a Japan-based journal that compiles eyewitness reports, photos and videos smuggled out by anonymous reporters. ‘People on the outside don’t realize it, but North Korea right now is in a drastic state of change.’
Shin arrived at night near the train station in Hamhung, a coastal city of about three quarters of a million people. Most of them worked in factories – or did, before the factories shut down owing to a lack of electricity and manufacturing supplies.
During the 1990s famine, the state distribution system utterly collapsed in Hamhung, leaving workers with no alternative sources of food. As a result, the city was hit harder by famine and starvation than any other population centre in North Korea, according to refugee accounts.3 Visiting Western journalists noticed in 1997 that hills surrounding the city were covered with fresh graves. One survivor said that ten per cent of the city’s population died, while another estimated that ten per cent had fled the city in search of food.
In 2005, when Shin arrived in Hamhung, most of its factories were still closed, but the bulk of North Korea’s north–south train traffic continued to pass through its rail yards.
Under cover of darkness, Shin went with other traders from the truck to a part of the rail yard where freight trains were assembled and dispatched. He saw a few guards around the station, but they were not checking IDs and they made no effort to keep traders away from the freight trains.
Still following other men, Shin climbed into a boxcar bound for Chongjin, the largest city in the far north of the country and a gateway to rail lines leading to the Chinese border. The train pulled out before dawn on a journey of about a hundred and seventy-four miles. If all went well, it would take a day, maybe two.
Shin soon learned what everyone else in North Korea had known for years: trains go slow, if they go at all.
Over the next three days, he travelled less than a hundred miles. In the boxcar, Shin b
efriended a young man of about twenty who said he was headed home to Gilju, a city of sixty-five thousand people on the main rail line to Chongjin. The man said he was returning from a failed attempt to find work. He had no food, no money and no winter coat, but he offered to let Shin stay for a few days in his family’s apartment, where he said it would be warm and where there was food to eat.
Shin needed rest. He was exhausted and starving, the food he had purchased in Bukchang was gone and the burns on his legs continued to bleed. He gratefully accepted the young man’s offer.
It was early evening, cold and beginning to snow when they got off the train at Gilju station. At the suggestion of Shin’s new friend, who knew cheap places to eat, they stopped on the way to his apartment and bought hot noodles from a street vendor. Shin paid for the meal with the last of the money he had received for his stolen rice.
When they finished their noodles, the young man said his family’s apartment was just around the corner, but that he was embarrassed to greet his parents wearing threadbare clothes. He asked if Shin would mind loaning him his coat for a few minutes. As soon as he had paid his respects to his family, the young man said, he would return to the noodle stand and take Shin up to the apartment, where they could get warm and sleep.
Since escaping the camp, Shin had been struggling to learn what normal behaviour was for North Koreans. But after only a week, he had not figured out much. Loaning a coat to a friend who needed to save face with his mother and father could be normal, Shin thought, so he handed over the coat and agreed to wait.
Hours passed. Snow continued to fall. His friend did not return. Shin had not thought to follow him and see what apartment building he had disappeared into. Shin started to search the nearby streets, but he found no trace of him. After several hours of confused shivering, he wrapped himself in a dirty plastic tarp he found on the street and waited for morning. He had been betrayed.
For the next twenty days, Shin roamed around Gilju. With no coat, no money, no contacts and no idea of where he should go, it was a formidable task simply to stay alive. The average January temperature in the city is 18 degrees Fahrenheit, well below freezing.
One thing saved him: the company – and larcenous advice – of the city’s homeless, many of whom were teenagers. He found them around the train station, where they begged, gossiped and periodically struck off in packs looking for food.
The crew Shin joined specialized in digging up daikon, which is a large, white, carrot-shaped East Asian radish that is often made into kimchi, the spicy fermented condiment that is Korea’s most famous dish. To keep the fall crop of daikon from freezing during the cold months, North Koreans sometimes bury them in mounds.
During the day Shin followed teams of teenage thieves to the outskirts of the city, looking for isolated houses with tell-tale mounds of dirt in their gardens. After a day of digging up and eating raw daikon, Shin returned to the city centre with as many as he could carry, sold them in markets and bought snacks. When he couldn’t steal daikon, he scavenged through trash.
At night, Shin again followed the homeless to semi-sheltered sleeping places they had found near buildings with central heating systems. He also slept in haystacks and near open fires that the homeless sometimes built.
He made no friends and continued to be careful not to talk about himself.
In Gilju, as across all of North Korea, Shin saw photographs of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung everywhere – in train stations, town squares and the homes he sometimes broke into. But no one, not even vagabonds and homeless teens, dared criticize or poke fun at their leaders. Surveys of recent defectors in China have found that this fear is persistent and almost universal.
For Shin, the biggest struggle remained finding enough to eat. But marauding for food was hardly an exceptional activity in North Korea.
‘Stealing was always a problem,’ Charles Robert Jenkins wrote in his 2008 memoir about forty years of living inside the country. ‘If you didn’t watch your things, someone would always be happy to relieve you of them.’4
Jenkins was an ill-educated and deeply unhappy US Army sergeant serving in South Korea in 1965, when he decided the grass would be greener in North Korea. He drank ten beers, stumbled across the world’s most heavily militarized border and surrendered his M14 rifle to startled North Korean soldiers.
‘I was so ignorant,’ he told me. He said he had deserted the army for self-imposed incarceration in ‘a giant, demented prison’.
Yet as an American deserter, Jenkins was much more than a prisoner. The North Korean government turned him into an actor who always played an evil Caucasian face in propaganda movies that demonized the United States.
Security officials also gave him a young Japanese woman and, sickeningly, urged him to rape her. She had been abducted from her hometown in Japan on 12 August 1978, as part of a long-running and long-concealed North Korean operation that snatched young Japanese from coastal communities. Three North Korean agents grabbed her at dusk near a beach, stuffed her into a black body bag and stole her away on a ship.
But the woman, Hitomi Soga, ended up falling in love with Jenkins. They married and raised two daughters, both of whom were enrolled in a Pyongyang school that trained multilingual spies.
The beginning of the end of Jenkins’s strange adventures in North Korea came when Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi flew to Pyongyang for an extraordinary encounter with Kim Jong Il. During that 2002 meeting, Kim admitted to Koizumi that his agents had abducted thirteen Japanese civilians in the 1970s and 1980s, including Jenkins’s wife Hitomi. She was immediately allowed to leave the country on Koizumi’s airplane. After the Japanese prime minister made a second trip to North Korea in 2004, Jenkins and his daughters were also allowed to leave.
When I interviewed Jenkins, he and his family were living on Japan’s remote Sado Island, where his wife was born and where North Korean agents had kidnapped her.
During his decades in the North, Jenkins had a house in the countryside and cultivated a large garden that helped feed his family. He also received a monthly cash payment from the government – enough to make sure they did not starve during the famine. Still, he and his family had to fend off thieving neighbours and roaming soldiers in order to survive.
‘It became routine for us as the corn ripened to pull all-night guard watches because the army would pick us clean,’ he wrote.
Thieving peaked during the 1990s famine, when gangs of homeless youngsters – many of them orphans – began to congregate around train stations in cities like Gilju, Hamhung and Chongjin.
Their behaviour and desperation is described in Nothing to Envy, Barbara Demick’s book about how ordinary North Koreans endured the famine years.
At Chongjin train station, she wrote, children snatched snacks out of travellers’ hands. Working in teams, older ones knocked over food stands and tempted vendors to give chase. Then younger kids moved in to pick up spilled food. Children also used sharp sticks to poke holes in bags of grain on slow-moving trains and trucks.5
During the famine, train station cleaning staff made rounds with a wooden handcart, collecting bodies from the station floor, wrote Demick. There were widespread rumours of cannibalism, with claims that some children hanging around the station were drugged, killed and butchered for meat.
Although the practice was not widespread, Demick concluded it did occur.
‘From my interviews with defectors, it does appear that there were at least two cases . . . in which people were arrested and executed for cannibalism.’
When Shin was stuck in Gilju in January 2005, the food situation was much less dire.
Harvests across North Korea had been relatively good in 2004. South Korea was pumping in food aid and free fertilizer. Food aid from China and the World Food Programme was also flooding into state coffers, and some of it ended up in street markets.
The homeless around the train station were hungry, but Shin, in his time on the streets of Gilju, never saw an
yone dying or dead from exposure or hunger.
Markets in the city were booming with abundant supplies of dried, fresh and processed foods, including milled rice, tofu, crackers, cakes and meat. Clothes, kitchenware and electronics were also on sale. When Shin showed up with stolen daikon, he found market women eager to pay cash.
As he scrounged in Gilju, escape to China slipped from Shin’s mind. The homeless, whose ranks he had joined, had other plans. They intended to travel in March to a state-owned farm to plant potatoes, a job that provided regular meals. With nothing else to do and no other contacts, Shin decided to tag along with them. His plan changed again, however, after one exceptionally productive day of thieving.
In the countryside on the outskirts of town, Shin wandered away from his crew, whose members were digging up a vegetable garden. By himself, he went around to the back of a vacant house and broke in through a window.
Inside, he found winter clothes, a military-style woollen hat and a fifteen-pound bag of rice. He changed into the warmer clothes and carried the rice in his backpack to a Gilju merchant, who bought it for six thousand won (about six dollars).
With a new wad of cash for food and bribes, China again seemed possible, so Shin walked to the freight yard at Gilju station and crawled aboard a northbound boxcar.
18
The Tumen River, which forms about a third of the border between North Korea and China, is shallow and narrow. It usually freezes over in winter, and walking across it takes only a few minutes. In most areas, the Chinese bank of the river offers decent cover as it is thick with trees. Chinese border guards are sparse.
Shin learned about the Tumen from traders on the train. But he did not have detailed information about where to cross or what bribes would be acceptable to the North Korean guards who patrol its southern bank, so he travelled by boxcar from Gilju to Chongjin to Gomusan, a rail junction about twenty-five miles from the border, and began asking questions of local people.