Even South Koreans themselves struggle mightily to fit into their own success-obsessed, status-conscious, education-crazed culture. Shin was attempting to find his way in a society that is singularly overworked, insecure and stressed out. South Koreans work more, sleep less and kill themselves at a higher rate than citizens of any other developed country, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a group that supports sustainable economic growth in thirty-four wealthy countries.
They also view each other with a witheringly critical eye. Self-worth tends to be narrowly defined by admission to a few highly selective universities and prestigious, high-paying jobs at conglomerates like Samsung, Hyundai and LG.
‘This society is unforgiving, relentless and the competition is constant,’ Andrew Eungi Kim, a sociology professor at Korea University, one of the country’s most elite schools, told me. ‘If young people do not obtain the right credentials – they call it the “right spec” – they become very pessimistic. They believe they cannot get started in life. The pressure to do well in school begins to build at grade four, believe it or not, and it becomes everything to students by grade seven.’
The pursuit of the “right spec” has supercharged spending on schooling. Among wealthy countries, South Korea ranks first in per capita spending on private education, which includes home tutors, cramming sessions and English-language courses at home and abroad. Four out of five students from elementary age to high school attend after-school cramming courses. About six per cent of the country’s gross domestic product is spent on education, more than double the percentage of comparable spending in the United States, Japan or Britain.
South Korea’s obsession with achievement has paid astonishing dividends. International economists often describe South Korea as the single most impressive example of what free markets, democratic government and elbow grease can do to transform a small agrarian backwater into a global powerhouse.
But the human cost of sudden affluence has also been astonishing.
Although the suicide rate in most other wealthy countries peaked in the early 1980s, it continues to climb in South Korea, doubling since 2000. The suicide rate in 2008 was two and half times higher than in the United States and significantly higher than in nearby Japan, where suicide is deeply embedded in the culture. It seems to have spread as a kind of infectious disease, exacerbated by the strains of ambition, affluence, family disintegration and loneliness.
‘We are unwilling to seek help for depression. We are very afraid of being seen as crazy,’ Ha Kyoo-seob, a psychiatrist at Seoul National University College of Medicine and head of the Korean Association for Suicide Prevention, told me. ‘This is the dark aspect of our rapid development.’
Although the stresses of affluence go a long way towards explaining South Korea’s indifference to defectors like Shin, there is another important factor: a schism in public opinion about how to manage the risks of living next to North Korea.
Depending on which way the political winds are blowing, the public and the government in Seoul swing between blinkered conciliation and careful confrontation.
After coming into office in 2008, President Lee and his ruling party stiffened the government’s attitude towards North Korea, cutting nearly all aid and applying conditions for cooperation on progress in nuclear disarmament and human rights. The policy has led to several jittery years of missile launches, frozen economic deals, border shootings and periodic threats from the North of ‘total war’.
Before Lee, South Korea took almost exactly the opposite approach. As part of its Sunshine Policy, Presidents Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun attended summits with Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang, approved massive shipments of food and fertilizer and agreed to generous economic deals. The policy all but ignored the existence of the labour camps and made no attempt to monitor who in North Korea benefited from the aid, but it won Kim Dae-jung the Nobel Peace Prize.
The South’s schizophrenia over how to deal with the North is occasionally acted out in a kind of Kabuki theatre on the border between the two Koreas. There, defectors launch balloons bound for their homeland with messages intended to offend Kim Jong Il. The leaflets describe him as a drinker of pricey imported wine, a seducer of other men’s wives, a murderer, a slaveholder and ‘the devil’.
I attended one of these balloon launches and watched police from Lee’s government struggle to protect a North Korean defector named Park Sang Hak from angry unionists and university intellectuals, who insisted that non-threatening engagement with North Korea’s government was the only permissible policy.
Before it was over, Park kicked one of the counter-protesters squarely in the head – a blow that sounded like a bat whacking a baseball – and spat on several others. He pulled a tear-gas revolver from his jacket and fired it into the air before police grabbed it. He failed to stop his opponents from ripping apart most of the bags containing anti-North Korean leaflets.
In the end, Park’s group managed to launch just one of its ten balloons and tens of thousands of leaflets were spilled onto the ground.
Shin and I met for the first time on the day after that balloon debacle. He had not attended. Street confrontation was not his style. He had been watching old films of the Allied liberation of Nazi concentration camps, footage that included scenes of bulldozers unearthing corpses that Adolf Hitler’s collapsing Third Reich had tried to hide.
‘It is just a matter of time,’ Shin told me, before North Korea decides to destroy the camps. ‘I hope that the United States, through pressure and persuasion, can convince [the North Korean government] not to murder all those people in the camps.’
Shin had not figured out how to pay his bills, make a living, or find a girlfriend in South Korea, but he had decided what he wanted to do with the rest of his life: he would be a human rights activist and raise international awareness about the existence of the labour camps.
To that end, he intended to leave South Korea and move to the United States. He had accepted an offer from Liberty in North Korea, the non-profit organization that sponsored his first American trip. He was moving to Southern California.
23
On a cool late-summer evening in an oceanside suburb of Los Angeles, Shin stood in front of a small audience of Korean American teenagers. Dressed in a red T-shirt, jeans and sandals, he looked relaxed and smiled sweetly at the attentive kids seated in stackable chairs. He was the featured speaker at the Torrance First Presbyterian Church. His topic, as always in public appearances, was life in Camp 14.
For more than a year, his sponsors at LiNK had been sending him to this kind of event and nagging him to prepare appropriate remarks. They wanted him to deliver a crisply organized, emotionally powerful speech, preferably in English, which would use his unique story to shake up American audiences, motivate volunteers and perhaps raise money for the cause of North Korean human rights. As one of LiNK’s executives told me, ‘Shin could be an incredible asset for us and this movement. “You could be the face of North Korea,” we tell him.’
Shin wasn’t so sure.
On that night in Torrance, he had not prepared anything. After he was introduced by a LiNK staffer, he said hello to the students in Korean and asked, through a translator, if they had any questions. When a girl in the audience asked him to explain how he escaped, he looked pained.
‘This is really private and sensitive,’ he said. ‘I try to avoid talking about it as much as I can.’
Reluctantly, he told a story about his escape that was short, sketchy, sanitized and largely incomprehensible to someone who wasn’t steeped in the details of his life.
‘My story can be very heartbreaking,’ he said, wrapping up the session after about fifteen minutes. ‘I don’t want you to be depressed.’
He had bored and baffled his audience. One boy – clearly confused about who Shin was and what he had done in North Korea – asked a final question. What had it been like to serve in the North Korean military? Shin corre
cted the boy, saying he had not served in the Korean People’s Army. ‘I was not worthy,’ he said.
After watching his appearance in the church, I pressed Shin to explain what was going on: why do you want to be a human rights witness when it seems so difficult for you to talk in public about what happened in the camp? Why do you leave out the parts of your story that could rile up an audience?
‘The things I went through were mine alone,’ he replied without looking me in the eye. ‘I believe most people will find it nearly impossible to know what I am talking about.’
Nightmares – images of his mother’s hanging – continued to haunt his sleep. His screams woke up roommates in the group house he shared in Torrance with LiNK volunteers. He refused free counselling from Los Angeles-based, Korean-speaking psychotherapists and declined to enrol in courses that could give him a high-school equivalency degree. He also refused to consider college.
Several times during our long weeks of interviews, he mentioned a ‘dead space’ inside him, which he said made it difficult for him to feel much of anything. Sometimes he pretended to be happy, he said, to see how other people reacted to him. Often he did not make any effort.
Shin’s adjustment to life in the United States had not been easy.
Shortly after arriving in California in the spring of 2009, Shin began having severe and recurring headaches. His colleagues at LiNK worried that he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, but it turned out the headaches were a symptom of runaway tooth decay. A dentist performed root canal surgery and the headaches went away.
That instant cure was the exception.
There is – there will be – no quick, easy way for Shin to adapt to life outside the fence, whether in the United States or in South Korea. His friends told me as much, and so did he.
‘Shin is still a prisoner,’ said Andy Kim, a young Korean American who helped run LiNK and who, for a time, was Shin’s closest confidant. ‘He cannot enjoy his life when there are people suffering in the camps. He sees happiness as selfishness.’
Andy and Shin are about the same age and they often ate lunch together at Los Chilaquiles, a cheap Mexican joint in a strip mall not far from LiNK’s office in a Torrance industrial park. Shin was passionate about food and did his best talking in Korean and Mexican restaurants. For several months, Andy met Shin once a week for an hour to discuss how his life was shaping up in the United States.
There were a number of good things going on. Shin had become chatty and playful in the office. He stunned Andy and others at LiNK by popping into their offices and telling them that he ‘loved’ them. But he often did not respond well to advice from these same people, and had trouble distinguishing between constructive criticism and personal betrayal. Shin made little progress in learning how to manage money, sometimes spending more than he could afford on dinners and airline tickets for friends. In tearful conversations with Andy he would describe himself as ‘worthless garbage’.
‘Sometimes Shin sees himself through the eyes of his new self, and sometimes he sees himself through the eyes of the guards in the camp,’ said Andy. ‘He is kind of here and kind of there.’
When I asked Shin if this were true, he nodded yes.
‘I am evolving from being an animal,’ he said. ‘But it is going very, very slowly. Sometime I try to cry and laugh like other people, just to see if it feels like anything. Yet tears don’t come. Laughter doesn’t come.’
His behaviour was consistent with a pattern that researchers have found among concentration camp survivors the world over. They often move through life with what Harvard psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman calls a ‘contaminated identity’.
‘They suffer not only from a classic post-traumatic syndrome but also from profound alterations in their relations with God, with other people, and with themselves,’ Herman wrote in her book, Trauma and Recovery, an examination of the psychological consequences of political terror. Most survivors are ‘preoccupied with shame, self-loathing, and a sense of failure’.1
Soon after Shin arrived in California, Kyung Soon Chung, a pastor’s wife born in Seoul, began cooking for him, mothering him and monitoring his adjustment to American life. When he first showed up at her home for dinner, she ran to him and tried to give him a hug. He would not have it. He felt uncomfortable being touched.
He kept coming to dinner, though, in part because he loved Kyung’s cooking. He also became friends with Kyung’s twenty-something children: Eunice, a human rights activist he had met in Seoul, and her younger brother, David, a recent Yale graduate who was also interested in human rights. The family, which has befriended a number of North Korean immigrants, lives in Riverside, a city sixty miles east of Torrance. Kyung and her husband, Jung Kun Kim, head a small Christian ministry called the Ivy Global Mission.
In them, Shin discovered a Korean family that was open, welcoming and loving. He was envious and a bit overwhelmed by the intensity with which they cared for each other – and for him. For nearly two years, he spent every other Saturday evening at Kyung’s dinner table, sleeping over in a guest room and attending church with the family on Sunday.
Kyung, who doesn’t speak much English, began calling Shin her eldest son. He tolerated, and then returned, her hugs. He learned that she loved frozen yogurt, and before coming to dinner he would stop at a supermarket and buy her some. She teased him, saying, ‘When are you going to bring me a daughter-in-law?’ He flattered her, telling her that she was losing weight and looking younger. They talked for hours, just the two of them.
‘Why are you so nice to me?’ Shin once asked her, his mood darkening. ‘Don’t you know what I have done?’
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 Torr
ance 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.