Escape from Camp 14: Chapter 17 Summary & Analysis

Shin knows that he needs to move quickly or risk being executed. He walks nine miles to the town of Maengsan, where he learns about a truck that can take him to Hamhung, the second largest city in the country. By coincidence, Shin’s “Travel time was excellent.” Intercity travel had been almost impossible a few years before, but now, there are so many travel permits for sale on the black market that almost anyone can travel around the country—for a fee. The government doesn’t like the culture of bribery, but it isn’t powerful enough to stop it—its own military and police forces depend on bribes to survive. By the early 2000s, North Korea is a “Soprano state,” with the police using the threat of arrest to “shake down” black market traders.

Shin arrives at the train station in Hamhung, a coastal factory city. There, he climbs into a boxcar headed for the Chinese border. The train is extremely slow, however, and for the next three days he sits in the boxcar with a young man who claims to be headed back to his home in the city of Gilju. He offers to let Shin stay with him for a couple days, where there is food and warmth. Shin accepts. In Gilju, Shin spends the last of his money on noodles. However, the young man convinces Shin to lend him his coat, so that he cam impress his family. Shin, still naïve about the way the world worked, lends the man his coat, confident that he’ll come back to the noodle shop for him. Hours pass, and the young man doesn’t return. Shin is now trapped in a strange city without money or a coat.

Shin spends the next twenty days in Gilju with no coat, money, or sense of direction. The weather is brutally cold, but he is able to survive by latching onto the city’s huge homeless population. A gang of teenaged thieves lead him to the city outskirts, where they dig up daikon (a kind of radish that North Koreans often bury in mounds during cold months). It is during this time that Shin first sees pictures of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung.

At the time, “marauding for food” was nothing special in North Korea—for many, it was the only means of survival. The American soldier Charles Robert Jenkins, who decided to defect to North Korea during his time in the U.S. army, was imprisoned by the North Koreans and forced to participate in propaganda videos. He married a Japanese prisoner and was only allowed to leave North Korea when the Japanese prime minister organized a prisoner trade in 2002. Harden later interviewed Jenkins, who claimed that during his time in North Korea he always had to contend with thieves and soldiers who tried to steal his food supply.

The food situation in Gilju in 2005 wasn’t remotely as bad as it had once been—2004 had been a good harvest year for the country, and few people were actually dying of starvation (even though many were hungry). As Shin spends more time with the gang of teenaged thieves, he realizes that they have no interest in leaving North Korea. One night, he breaks into a house and finds rice and warm winter clothes. He sells the rice and, armed with warm clothes and money, boards a train northward toward China.