Escape From Camp 14 Book Review
Danel Potvin
Later, in his teenage years, Shin himself would be directly responsible for at least two more deaths. His mother and older brother sat one night, eating a meager meal of rice, and conspired to escape. Shin eavesdropped, told a prison guard, and his mother and brother were later arrested. Shin himself was arrested and held in an underground prison for months. In the underground prison, Shin was tortured. From shackles attached at his wrists and ankles, Shin was suspended from a low ceiling, with his back exposed to hot coals. One of the guards pierced him through the abdomen with a hook to prevent him from squirming away from the heat. When Shin finally revealed he had been the one to turn his mother and brother into the guard, and the guard had corroborated his story, Shin was finally released. Upon his release, the prison community, included his father, turned out to witness the hanging of his mother, and the firing squad execution of his brother.
Shin In Geun, who now goes by the name Shin Dong-hyuk, was born in Prison Camp 14, in North Korea. He, and hundreds of children like him, have known no other life, only growing up in a prison camp. The children have done nothing to deserve a life in a prison camp. They are simply the offspring of a parent, or parents, found guilty by the North Korean government of crimes against the State.
North Korea suffers famine upon famine. South Korea, Japan, and the United States typically partner to provide food assistance to the North Korean government. When I read the food aid generally ends up in the hands of the North Korean elite and faithful, and not in the hands of the vast majority of North Koreans, I became angry. North Korea allows little, if any, oversight of humanitarian aid. We simply set the food down at the door and walk away. On the other hand, prison camps are nearly self-sufficient. Prisoners primary jobs are to tend crops, spread fertilizer (made mostly from human feces), weed, sew, and make concrete. Later, amid yet another famine, international food aid became the catalyst which might ultimately be the undoing of the North Korean regime.
The famine experience in the early 2000s was as desperate as any in North Korea. Millions of people took to the countryside. People left cities to scavenge for food. When international aid arrived, a black market, a capitalist underground economy emerged nearly overnight. Military officers, civil servants, to back-alley merchants cropped up to buy-and-sell food aid. The North Korean government unable to control a rapidly developing capitalist underground economy, turned a blind eye.
Within the United States, Liberty in North Korea (LiNK) assists those who have successfully found their way from North Korea. In South Korea, the Korean Bar Association helps provide legal assistance to North Korean and is an important vetting organization. The North Korean government is known to send assassins aboard to kill defectors who speak out against the Dear Leader Kim Jong-il, even though Kim died in 2010.
For what I offer is worth, I forgive Shin Dong-hyuk for all of his choices and actions. While forgiveness is not truly mine to give, I do not hold him responsible in any way. His life growing up within Camp 14 was neither his choice, nor were his choices while living within Camp 14 anything other than those which were normal and appropriate and which he had been raised to believe were true and proper.
I've always been told that my birthday is July 27, and it is on that day I celebrate. But as an adoptee of American and Korean parentage, I sometimes wonder if I really was born on the very same date of the signing of the armistice agreement between North and South Korea. Perhaps it's a neat coincidence that I was born on that anniversary, or perhaps there are scores of American-Korean adoptees who eat birthday cake on that day.
While writing a novel on adoption, I found my birth country of Korea to be the perfect metaphor for the split identity of an adoptee: one half a well-adjusted, modern, westernized success story, the other a dark and unknown territory ruled by fantasies both light and dark.
Mr. Shin recently confessed that his story, as told in Escape from Camp 14, is not factually accurate. Instead of spending his whole life in Camp 14, which is basically a concentration camp, he was transferred to another camp, where the inmates were not as brutalized.
He now claims to have escaped twice from that camp, which was the reason he was tortured as graphically described in the memoir, not for failure to report his mother and brother were planning to escape as was originally reported. That he bears scars of torture is confirmed by Blaine Harden, who explained in the book that there was no way to fact-check Shin's story, as North Korea is a black hole of information from which almost no reliable facts escape.
Humans are hard-wired to stretch the truth to make a better, more teachable story. Some truths and details are inconvenient. A story can find a wider audience or make a greater impact if the facts are bent. Jesus was probably not born on December 25; presidential scholars say it is unlikely that George Washington chopped down a cherry tree; Christopher Columbus definitely did not discover the New World.
But the church found it convenient to piggy-back off existing pagan holidays; parents taught their children morality through a simple, patriotic fable; and Europeans glibly justified the exploitation and slaughter of indigenous people. Facts are the playthings of the victors of history.
Even the most meticulously researched biographies and histories can never capture the truth. New facts pop up; silences are broken; segments of humanity whose viewpoint was not deemed relevant finally get a voice; technological advances contradict previous scientific analyses. Stories are forever unraveling, changing, mutating. As anyone who has read The Sound and the Fury can attest, the exact same event can be experienced and remembered in radically different ways by those who were there.
Sometimes writers fiddle with the facts for acclaim, as Janet Cooke did with "Jimmy's World." (I can still see the article, taking up most of the front page of the Washington Post's Style section, illustrated with a drawing of a waifish little boy wearing an Izod shirt. Does my memory bear some resemblance to reality, or has the faulty wiring of my memory failed me once again?)
Sometimes it is for fame, as was the case with James Frey, who initially tried to sell A Million Little Pieces as a novel, but could only get it published when he removed the "based on" from the "true story."
Shin Dong-hyuk was possibly motivated by all those factors, but unlike the aforementioned, he is a survivor of the most repressive government on Earth, raised in labor camps where the only education was self-taught survival skills, regarding his own mother as a rival for food. However he stretched the details, he afforded a rare glimpse inside North Korea's gulags, and has since been an outspoken activist against the human rights abuses perpetrated by the Kim regime.
Shin is barely educated, except to be indoctrinated into the harsh rules of a slave camp; barely fed, except to be worked nearly to death; and barely loved, except to be manipulated and controlled. His father is tortured, his mother and brother are executed while he watches, and he is also tortured, all at the whim of the guards who exercise total and brutal authority over the camp. His only rewards come from turning in other prisoners for breaking the camp rules.
The forced building of a hydroelectric dam, even through the frigid winter, leads to hundreds of prisoners dying. When strict work quotas are not met, harsh beatings, additional work hours, and reduced food rations are standard procedures. Prisoners are also expected to relentlessly criticize themselves and one another in group meetings. The slaves are constantly told that hard work is the only way of redemption available to them.
According to the best estimates of this closed state, about 24 million people live in North Korea. The human rights violations they endure on a daily basis has been carefully documented (see here and here). Clearly, the North Korean government is completely illegitimate, guilty of crimes against humanity. Though replacing the current government would be tremendously challenging, and rebuilding North Korea would be incredibly complicated and expensive, the current cost in human lives is simply immeasurable and unacceptable.
I encourage you to take action. There are two organizations mentioned in the book. Shin has been involved with LiNK. You can learn more about them here. His own NGO, less developed, is called North Korea Freedom Plexus.
Ignorance. It's a form of bliss that younger gamers have at their disposal that prevents them from realizing a game like Bart Simpson's Escape from Camp Deadly is a banal platformer. I played this game as a youngster and gobbled up every minute of its underwhelming antics. But adulthood kills that rosy sheen. Standards improve and memories are betraying, and games like Camp Deadly take their rightful place amongst the other gaming misfits.
It's here we witness the evolution of Bart Simpson from a burgeoning platformer star into a burnt out has-been. I seem to remember the kid's movements being swift and easy to handle. His performance in Bart vs. the World was decent even despite the buggy platform collision detection that hampered the experience. Two years pass and it feels like Bart has let himself go. Where we know that Mario worked his legs out between games, Bart seemed to be drinking away his salary without honing his skill. Where this vibrant youth could tangle with the best of them before, he now moves like he's mired in oatmeal. Movement in the game is slow, almost delayed, and the slo-mo jumping is a hypnotic experience that should not be witnessed by the inebriated.
Let's put Bart's new anti-talents the test!
The once peaceful forest is now the arena of a survivalistic struggle. Bart and Lisa must escape the clutches of Ironfist Burns and his army of Wayne Campbell clones. It's in this camp that Bart will leap with an elephant's grace over creeks made of TV static and throw boomerangs at monstrous mosquitoes. It's a land of monotony where the same situations present themselves without new dressing. The same leaps, same enemies, same problems reappear without added difficulty, and it's something that even a physically impeded platformer star like Bart can handle.
Escaping the woods to the mess hall offers no solace. There the platforming is nixed and an all out food fight ensues. While this sounds like an exciting battle royale involving food and foolery, it's merely a scene of straightforward side-scrolling with the occasional press of the B button. Leave it up to Imagineering to make murdering someone with a hamburger or piece of broccoli feel tedious.
Withdraw from the violent buffet and it's....back into the forest! The madness never ends as the same levels are recycled as often as the situations. From the forest to the sewers back to the forest only to return to the mess hall... The greatest challenge I ever faced in this outing was staying interested. Even within the Simpsons franchise, there are far better experiences and challenges to be had.
But in my younger years I still hadn't developed the ability to recognize a poor gaming experinece. I didn't realize that the sound emanating from the speakers was really Danny Elfman being murdered in 8-bit, nor did I care to notice the warning that the developers placed in the beginning--the first item you grab, a tiny flag flapping in the wind, nets you exactly 666 points. It's like someone at Imagineering wanted you to know this game is of the devil.
And poor Bart's gaming career continued the downward spiral. It's pretty consistent that as long as he is the sole focus of a game's premise, it will blow. His further escapades in climbing a beanstalk, having a nightmare, and donning a virtual reality visor were no more exciting than this no-so-great escape. But I'm sure you already knew that. It's not as though the lackluster quality in early Simpsons games is an uncommon appraisal.