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.
One seamstress who regularly cleaned the superintendent’s room was Park Choon Young, whom Shin knew from secondary school and who operated a sewing machine that he maintained. She was twenty-two and exceptionally pretty. Four months after she began spending afternoons in the superintendent’s room, Shin heard from another former schoolfriend that she was pregnant.
Her condition was kept secret until her belly began to poke through her uniform, then she disappeared.
Shin learned how to tell from a sewing machine’s sound what was wrong with it, but he was less adept at lugging the bulky machines to the repair shop. In the summer of 2004, while carrying one up a flight of stairs on his back, it slipped from his grasp. The sewing machine tumbled down the stairwell, broken beyond repair.
His immediate superior, the foreman who had been patient with Shin as he learned the ropes in the factory, slapped Shin a few times when he saw the ruined machine and reported the damage up the factory’s chain of command. Sewing machines were considered more valuable than prisoners, and ruining one was regarded as a grave offence.
A few minutes after he dropped the sewing machine, Shin was called into the office of the plant superintendent, along with the chief foreman and the floor foreman who had reported the incident.
‘What were you thinking?’ the superintendent shouted at Shin. ‘Do you want to die? How could you be so weak that you lost your grip? You’re always stuffing your face with food.’
‘Even if you die, the sewing machine can’t be brought back,’ the superintendent added. ‘Your hand is the problem. Cut his finger off!’
The chief foreman grabbed Shin’s right hand and held it down on a table in the superintendent’s office. With a kitchen knife, he hacked Shin’s middle finger off just above the first knuckle.
Shin’s foreman helped him leave the superintendent’s office and escorted him back to the factory floor. Later that night, the foreman took Shin to the camp’s health centre, where a prisoner who worked as a nurse soaked his finger in salt water, stitched it up and wrapped it in cloth.
That did not keep it from getting infected. But from his time in the underground cell, Shin remembered how Uncle had rubbed salted cabbage soup into his wounds. At mealtimes, Shin soaked his finger in soup. The infection did not spread into the bone and within three months new skin healed over the stumpy finger.
For the first two days after the injury, Shin’s foreman filled in on the factory floor. It was an unexpected gesture of concern that allowed Shin to recover. The kind foreman did not last long on the job. He disappeared, along with his wife, a few months after Shin dropped the sewing machine. Shin heard from other repairmen that the foreman’s wife, while out working in the woods, had stumbled upon a secret execution in a mountain gorge.
Before the foreman disappeared, he brought Shin a gift.
‘It’s rice flour, and your father wants you to have it,’ the foreman said.
At the mention of his father’s name, Shin became angry. Although he had tried to repress it, the resentment he felt towards his mother and brother had grown since their deaths, poisoning his feelings for his father. Shin wanted nothing to do with him.
‘You eat it,’ Shin said.
‘Your father intended it for you,’ the foreman replied, looking puzzled. ‘Shouldn’t you eat it?’
Despite his hunger, Shin refused.
With so many prisoners working so close together, the factory was a petri dish for snitching.
A co-worker betrayed Shin a few weeks after he dropped the sewing machine. His shift had failed to meet the day’s production quota and was required to do bitter humiliation work. Along with three other repairmen, Shin did not get back to his dormitory room until after midnight.
They were all wildly hungry and one suggested they raid the factory’s vegetable garden, where there were cabbages, lettuce, cucumbers, eggplant and radishes. It was raining and there was no moonlight, so they figured the chances of being caught were low. They snuck outside, filled their arms with vegetables and brought them back to their room, where they ate and fell asleep.
In the morning, the four were called to the superintendent’s office. Someone had reported their midnight meal. The superintendent whacked each of them on the head with a stick. He then told one repairman, Kang Man Bok, to leave the room. A snitch can smell a snitch, and Shin instinctively knew Kang had informed.
The superintendent ordered that rations for the three remaining men be cut in half for two weeks, and he clubbed them on the head a few more times. Returning to the factory, Shin noticed that Kang would not meet his eye.
Soon, Shin was asked to spy on his fellow workers. The superintendent called him to his office and said that to wash away the sins of his mother and brother, he had to report w
rong-doers. It took Shin two months before he found one.
Lying sleepless on the floor one night, he watched as a roommate, a transport worker named Kang Chul Min, who was in his late twenties, got up and began mending his work trousers. He used a swatch of military uniform cloth to cover a hole in his pants. Apparently he had stolen the cloth from the factory floor.
The following morning, Shin went to the superintendent.
‘Teacher, I saw a stolen piece of cloth.’
‘Really? Who had it?
‘It was Kang Chul Min, in my room.’
Shin worked late that night in the factory and was among the last of the sewing-machine repairmen to walk into a ten o’clock meeting of ideological struggle, a mandatory session of self-criticism.
As he entered the room, he saw Kang Chul Min. He was on his knees and bound in chains. His bare back was covered with welts from a whip. His secret girlfriend, a seamstress whom Shin had heard rumours about, knelt beside him. She, too, was in chains. They remained kneeling in silence throughout the ninety-minute meeting. When it ended, the superintendent ordered each worker to slap Kang and his girlfriend in the face before leaving the room. Shin slapped them both.
He heard that they were then dragged outside and forced to kneel on a concrete floor for several more hours. The two never figured out who had reported the stolen cloth. Shin did his best to avoid their eyes.
13
The superintendent had another job for Shin.
Park Yong Chul, short and stout, with a shock of white hair, was an important new prisoner. He had lived abroad, his wife was well-connected and he knew senior people in the North Korean government.
The superintendent ordered Shin to teach Park how to fix sewing machines and to become his friend. Shin was to report back on everything Park said about his past, his politics and his family.
‘Park needs to confess,’ the superintendent said. ‘He’s holding out on us.’
In October 2004, Shin and Park began spending fourteen hours a day together in the garment factory. Park paid polite attention to Shin’s instructions on sewing-machine maintenance. Just as politely, he avoided questions about his past. Shin learned little.
Then, after four weeks of near silence, Park surprised Shin with a personal question.
‘Sir, where is your home?’
‘My home?’ Shin said. ‘My home is here.’
‘I am from Pyongyang, sir,’ Park said.
Park addressed Shin using honorific nouns and verb endings. In the Korean language, they signified the seniority and superiority of Shin the teacher over Park the apprentice. Park was a dignified man in his mid-forties, but the linguistic fussiness annoyed and embarrassed Shin.
‘I’m younger than you,’ Shin said. ‘Please drop the honorific with me.’
‘I will,’ said Park.
‘By the way,’ asked Shin, ‘where is Pyongyang?’
Shin’s question stunned Park.
The older man, though, did not laugh or make light of Shin’s ignorance. He seemed intrigued by it. He carefully explained that Pyongyang, located about fifty miles south of Camp 14, was the capital of North Korea, the city where all the country’s powerful people lived.
The ice had been broken by Shin’s naïveté. Park began to talk about himself. He said he had grown up in a large, comfortable apartment in Pyongyang and had followed the privileged educational trajectory of North Korea’s elites, studying in East Germany and the Soviet Union. After returning home, he had become chief of a tae kwon do training centre in Pyongyang. In that high-profile job, Park said, he had met many of the men who ruled North Korea.
Touching his oil-stained right hand to a sewing machine, Park said, ‘With this hand, I shook Kim Jong Il’s hand.’
Park looked like an athlete. His hands were large and meaty. He was impressively strong, if a bit thick around the middle. But what impressed Shin was Park’s decency. He did not make Shin feel stupid. He patiently attempted to explain what life was like outside Camp 14 – and outside North Korea.
So began a month-long one-on-one seminar that would change Shin’s life for ever.
As they walked the factory floor, Park told Shin that the giant country next door to Korea was called China. Its people were rapidly getting rich. He said that in the south there was another Korea. In South Korea, he said, everyone was already rich. Park explained the concept of money. He told Shin about the existence of television, computers and mobile phones. He explained that the world was round.
Much of what Park talked about, especially at the beginning, was difficult for Shin to understand, believe, or care about. Shin wasn’t especially interested in how the world worked. What delighted him – what he kept begging Park for – were stories about food and eating, particularly when the main course was grilled meat.
These were the stories that kept Shin up at night fantasizing about a better life. Partly it was the grinding exhaustion of work in the factory – meals were skimpy, the hours were endless and Shin was always hungry – but there was something more, something buried in Shin’s memory from when he was thirteen and struggling to recover from his burns in the underground prison. His aging cellmate had inflamed his imagination with tales of hearty meals. Uncle had dared Shin to dream about one day getting out of the camp and eating whatever he wanted. Freedom, in Shin’s mind, was just another word for grilled meat.
While the old man in the underground prison had eaten well in North Korea, Park’s gustatory adventures were global. He described the enchantments of chicken, pork and beef in China, Hong Kong, Germany, England and the former Soviet Union. The more Shin listened to these stories, the more he wanted out of the camp. He ached for a world where an insignificant person like himself could walk into a restaurant and fill his stomach with rice and meat. He fantasized about escaping with Park because he wanted to eat like Park.
Intoxicated by what he heard from the prisoner he was supposed to betray, Shin made perhaps the first free decision of his life. He chose not to snitch.
It marked a major shift in his calculations about how to survive. Based on Shin’s experience, snitching paid. It saved him from the executioners who killed his mother and brother. After the execution, it may have been the reason his second secondary school teacher made sure he had food, put a stop to the abuse Shin suffered at the hands of his fellow students and assigned him to an easy job on the pig farm.
Shin’s decision to honour Park’s confidences did not signify new insight into the nature of right and wrong. Looking back, Shin views his behaviour as fundamentally selfish. If he informed on Park, he could have earned an extra serving of cabbage, but Park’s stories were much more valuable to Shin. They became an essential and energizing addiction, changing his expectations about the future and giving him the will to plan for it. He believed he would go mad without hearing more.
In his reports to the superintendent, Shin found himself telling a wonderfully liberating lie. Park, he said, had nothing to say.
A decade earlier in the underground prison, Shin’s aging cellmate had dared to talk about food outside the camp. But Uncle had never talked about himself or his politics. He was careful, suspicious and withholding. He guessed Shin was an informer and he did not trust him. Shin took no offence. He saw it as normal. Trust was a good way to get shot.
But after Park’s initial reticence, he was not suspicious. In the apparent belief that Shin was as trustworthy as he was ignorant, Park told his life story.
Park told Shin he lost his position as head of tae kwon do training in Pyongyang in 2002, after squabbling with a mid-level apparatchik who apparently snitched on him to higher-ups in the government. Without a job, Park travelled north to the border with his wife, where they crossed illegally into China and stayed with his uncle for eighteen months. They intended to return to Pyongyang, where they had left behind a teenage child who lived with Park’s parents.
While in China, Park listened daily to radio broadcasts from South Korea. He paid
close attention to coverage of Hwang Jang Yop, a principal architect of North Korea’s ideology and the highest-ranking official ever to defect. Hwang, who fled in 1997, had become a celebrity in Seoul.
As Shin and Park did their rounds in the garment factory, Park explained that Hwang had criticized Kim Jong Il for turning North Korea into a corrupt feudal state. Kim’s government dispatched agents in 2010 to try to assassinate Hwang. The agents, however, were arrested in Seoul, and Hwang died of natural causes that year at eighty-seven.
Park left China and returned to North Korea in the summer of 2003, along with his wife and a baby son born in China. He wanted to get back to Pyongyang in time to vote in the August election for the Supreme People’s Assembly, the rubber-stamp parliament of North Korea.
Elections in North Korea are empty rituals. Candidates are chosen by the Korean Workers’ Party and run without opposition. But Park feared that if he missed the vote, the government would notice his absence, declare him to be a traitor and send his family to a labour camp. Voting in North Korea is not mandatory, but the government keeps close track of those who do not show up.
At the border, North Korean authorities detained Park and his family. He tried to convince them that he wasn’t a defector and had merely been visiting family in China and was coming home to vote, but the authorities did not buy it. They accused him of being a convert to Christianity and a spy for South Korea. After several rounds of interrogation, Park and his wife and son were sent to Camp 14. Park was assigned to the camp’s textile factory in the autumn of 2004.
When Shin met him, Park was furious with himself for returning to North Korea. His foolishness had cost him his freedom and, as he told Shin, it would soon cost him his wife, who was divorcing him. She came from a prominent family in Pyongyang with strong party connections, Park said, and she was trying to convince camp guards that she had been a loyal and submissive wife while her husband was a political criminal.