國立臺灣師範大學英語系
碩 士 論 文
Master’s Thesis Department of English National Taiwan Normal University
見證《逃出第十四號勞改營》中的隱形傷口：
脫北者的創傷記憶再現
To Witness the Invisible Wound in Escape from Camp 14: Representing the Traumatic Memories of North Korean Defectors
指導教授: 黃 涵 榆
Advisor: Dr. Han-Yu Huang
研究生: 廖 翊 鈞
中華民國 106 年 7 月
July 2017
摘要
本文以《逃出第十四號勞改營》為主要文本，旨在探討脫北者之創傷記憶再
現與讀者閱讀其證言的過程。脫北者所承受的國家暴力不僅摧殘身心，也摧毀了
紀錄暴力記憶的結構。語言做為一種結構性的表達，亦無法完整容納創傷，必定
有溢出於文字之外且不可言說的片斷經驗，因此《逃出第十四號勞改營》的作者
布雷恩．哈登（Blain Harden）整合了文字、照片與圖片，甚至是以脫北者申東
赫的身體傷疤作為呈現記憶的媒介，試圖以不可磨滅的感官記憶與身心遺跡拼湊
創傷記憶。脫北者的證言往往受創傷記憶的延遲影響，造成細節流失與扭曲，他
們飄忽反覆的生命故事，正好引出創傷與見證間的弔詭關係：證言因為創傷而不
完整，但卻也因此倍顯真實。
在資訊流通快速且形式多元的｢見證世代｣(the era of witness)，證言可以記錄、
更可以建構創傷。藉由探討構築脫北者證言的三大要素―見證者、媒介、讀者，
本文共可分為三章節。第一章作為本文背景知識探討與往後章節的基礎，主要涵
蓋北韓自韓戰後的簡史與其人民的集體記憶，並探究脫北者在國際間的複雜身分。
第二章分析《逃出第十四號勞改營》中再現申東赫創傷記憶的方法和媒介，以其
訪談內容和手繪圖像作為主要討論對象，並特別關注脫北者記憶之於全球化時代
所遇到的困境。第三章探討讀者之於閱讀脫北者創傷證言時所面對的特殊責任，
在承受二次見證與二次創傷之餘，讀者能否辨認並填補創傷證言間的空白和沉默，
開展出只有讀者才辦得到的證言補述，與見證者一同淡化傷疤。
關鍵字：脫北者、證言、見證、創傷記憶
Abstract
Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to
Freedom in the West (2012), authored by Blaine Harden, is a wide circulated North
Korean gulag testimony featuring the life story of Shin Dong-Hyuk, a North Korean defector who miraculous escapes from Kaechon internment camp in 2005 and currently lives in South Korea. This book integrates Shin’s Korean-language diary and the content of multiple private interviews between Shin and Harden. It is not only a rare representation of North Korean gulag memories but also an honest record of a traumatic victim’s struggle for his reconnection to the world.
Motivated by the uniqueness of Shin’s testimony and its controversial revision, this thesis aims to explore the questions embedded in the process of reconstructing
North Korean defector’s traumatic memories. From the angles of the witness of a traumatic event, the medium conveying the memories, and the reader of a testimony, this thesis argues that similar to Elie Weisel’s concept of “trusted silence” in the
Holocaust literature, there are also many silent moments and invisible wounds yet to be uncovered and interpreted in the North Korean defection testimony. These silent moments are the essential sites for the reader to witness the defectors’ trauma; only when these invisible wounds are revealed and witnessed can the healing process begins, and the cycle of memory transference completes.
Moving across the stances of the witness (writer), the medium, and the reader of
North Korean defection testimony, this thesis can be mainly divided into three chapters. To prepare the ensuing discussion of defection testimony, the first chapter introduces North Korea’s brief history after the Korean War and the common ideologies shared by North Koreans including the collective memories of the country’s heavy historical revisionism, Kim’s cult of personality, and the famine of
the 1990s. In the second chapter, the narrative strategies of representing North Korean defectors’ gulag memories in Escape from Camp 14 will be the focus. Particularly, this chapter deals with inherent problems that occur during the representation of a local memory in a global context. The final chapter centers on the discussion of the reader/listener’s ethical responsibility in receiving North Korean gulag memories, highlighting the possible overlapping role between a listener and a therapist.
Keywords: North Korean defectors, testimony, witness, traumatic memory
Acknowledgement
I would first like to express my sincere gratitude to my adviser, Professor Han-yu
Huang, for his professional guidance and heartfelt encouragement throughout my journey of writing this thesis. Prof. Huang teaches me so much more than how to conduct a literature research. I would always remember Prof. Huang’s wonderful lectures which help me define and refine the person that I have become. He is truly an honorable scholar and a mentor of a lifetime. Also, I deeply appreciate the valuable advice from Professor Yuh-chuan Shao and Yen-bin Chiou. Thanks to their insightful suggestions, I have the inspiration to carry on my writing. It is really my pleasure to discuss my thesis with these supportive professors.
Second, my thankfulness goes to my dear classmates and friends. I would like to thank my fellow classmates Charmin Cheng, Lily Chang, Gary Chen, Angel Hsieh,
Annie Shao, Kristy Fan, Vivian Lee, White Pak, and Susan Su, for their warm companionship. Thanks to these amazing classmates, my journey of NTNU MA program is full of unforgettable episodes and unprecedented joy. I am so blessed to be in the same class with these good-natured friends. In addition, I would like to give special thanks to Iris Pang, who makes my RA part-time job abundant with beautiful and enjoyable moments. My appreciation also goes to Lily Lee, May Lu, and Tracey
Wang, my three bosom friends ever since NTNU BA freshmen year. Thank you for being kind and understanding whenever I am stressful during the journey of writing.
Third, I deliver my genuine gratefulness with love to my family. Without the endless cheer and unconditional support given by my beloved family, it is impossible for me to finish this expedition of pursuing knowledge. I owe my deepest gratitude to my parents for giving me enough time and room to finish my prolonged explore; and I would like to give my most grateful love to my sister, for she cheers me up whenever
I am in doubt of myself and gives me hope and courage to overcome every obstacle.
Last but not least, I hope this thesis can be a humble form of remembrance of my friend Angela Wu, to always remember her as a hardworking and earnest individual in quest of inner peace.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
I. Background and Motivation 1
II. Literature Review 7
III. Methodology 13
IV. Outline of Chapters 17
V. Expected Findings 19
Chapter One: North Korean Collective Memories 20
I. The Reshaping of North Korean Memories 20
II. Arduous March: The Famine of the 1990s 25
III. After the Great Escape: Defectors’ Complicated Identities 28
Chapter Two: The Analysis of North Korean Defectors’ 33 Traumatic Memories Representation
I. Textual Representation of North Korean Gulag Memories in a 34
Global Context
II. Reconstructing North Korean Gulag Memories beyond Words 40
A. Drawings 41
B. Body and Mental Scars 44
Chapter Three: The Reader’s Joint Responsibility for Reconstructing 47 North Korean Defection Testimony
I. The Therapeutic Listener: The “Drilling” Process 49
II. Vicarious Trauma: Shin Dong-Hyuk’s Two Speeches 56
Conclusion 59
Works Cited 62 Liao 1
Introduction
Convicted that this period in history would be judged one day, I knew that I
must bear witness. I also knew that, while I had many things to say, I did not
have the words to say them. Painfully aware of my limitations, I watched
helplessly as language became an obstacle. It became clear that it would be
necessary to invent a new language.
- Elie Wiesel, Night (ix)
I have regret. Is there anyone who wants to be famous by revealing their
own scars? I feel that no one wants to be famous by revealing their privacy
and past in this way. Sometimes I imagine what I would be like if I was
born in America or some other foreign country. It’s only because I was born
in the camp that it has become my destiny to reveal my past to people
around the world. […]It’s both my fortune and my misfortune.
- Shin Dong-Hyuk, 10 Magazine Korea
I. Background and Motivation
Annett Wieviorka regards twentieth century as “the era of witness” due to the booming of countless testimonies in the wake of two devastating World Wars and hundreds of minor but murderous conflicts. Atomic bombings, concentration camps, and many other man-made misfortunes have destroyed humanity on a large-scale, but the survivors of these atrocities still manage to pull through suffering and bear their physical and mental scars to tell the world what they have witnessed. Survivors’ urge to tell their stories, to remember their past is a unique means to withstand death in an Liao 2
era when death is omnipresent; and only through giving testimonies can the dead be rescued from nothingness and oblivion, and the silenced cries of victims be spoken out by “a new language.”
Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate, writes his Holocaust memoir under a moral obligation to “prevent the enemy from enjoying one last victory by allowing his crimes to be erased from human memory” (Night viii). He says “if the Greeks invented tragedy, the Romans the epistle, and the Renaissance the sonnet, our generation invented a new literature, that of testimony” (Dimensions of the
Holocaust 9). Testimony as a new literary genre brings in the inherent doubt of accurately reconstructing traumatic experiences and the necessity to invent a new language, a new medium, to speak the unspeakable trauma. In the preface of Night,
Wiesel points out the hazardous triangular relationship among the witness, the reader, and the medium to tell the story, such as verbal and written languages. The witness needs an agency to carry and transfer his testimony, but he is also aware that the agency cannot be fully trusted since every medium has its own limits and some traumatic experiences are bound to be inexpressible and uncontainable by any form of literary structures. Even if a way is figured out to convey the memory, the witness also wonders if the reader is ready to comprehend the atrocity despite the inescapable gaps between experience and expression. Likewise, when the reader engages in the discourse of the witness’ traumatic past, he is risking himself receiving a distorted or even a counterfeit testimony. However, it is worth considering why survivors of trauma might provide inconsistent or incorrect testimony, and what makes a testimony meaningful even if it can no longer convey objective truth.
Wiesel’s concern about the possible failure of capturing factual truth in an account of traumatic experience does not mean to limit the testimony to simply providing facts, but, rather, it spotlights the complexity of reconstructing a valid testimony beyond Liao 3
empirical verification. Wiesel’s words thus become a convenient parallel and the point of departure of this thesis to explore the testimonies given by North Korean defectors, a group of North Koreans who seek refuge outside of their country since the division of Korea after World War II and Korean War (1950-1953).
As South Korean Ministry of Unification1 has revealed to the world, during the end of the Korean War in 1953 to 2014, over 27,000 North Korean refugees and defectors have entered the South to seek official protection, and a few of others establish new homes in Japan, the United States and European countries under the humanitarian assistance of the U.N.. To stop the violation of human rights in North
Korea, human rights organizations necessitate the experiences and memories of refugees and defectors about starvation, totalitarianism, and prison camp torture as evidence. Despite the worldwide need of defectors’ testimonies, only a small number of North Korean defectors are willing to make their traumatic memories known to the public, let alone to get involved in any human rights related movements. North
Korean defectors are constantly in fear that “their friends and families back home may be punished by the state” (PSCORE 8-9) and their own lives are also under the death threat from North Korean assassins2. As for those defectors who determined to make a difference to their homeland by providing memoirs and testimonies, they often cannot accurately recall the specific details of the incidents of human rights abuse because throughout their lives, “their human rights have been breached to the point that human rights violations were accepted as a natural and insignificant part of their daily lives”
(PSCORE 9); and it is difficult for the defectors to fully convince the world of the
1 The Korean Ministry of Unification highlights that the total number of North Korean refugees may be different from the actual numbers because the counts are made only when individual refugees were granted government protection. The specific statistics of North Korean refugees can be found at “Major Statistics in Inter-Korean Relations: Humanitarian Projects” Ministry of Unification. 2016. Web. 8 Apr. 2016.
truth of their testimonies since the severe suffering and privation they have gone through are just beyond cognition and too outlandish to believe. Or sometimes, affected by their survivor experiences, defectors are “preoccupied with shame, self-loathing, and sense of failure” and constantly aware of their “contaminated identity” (Herman 94-95); they just do not feel secure and confident enough to unburden themselves of the terrible pasts. North Korean defectors are the silent minority who witnessed the impossible abuse of human rights and made the impossible testimonies.
Shin Dong-Hyuk, a North Korean defector currently living in South Korea, has tried to reorient his derailed life and reconstruct his painful yet unique memories in the Kaechon internment camp, a Total Control Zone3, since his miraculous escape in
2005. Shin’s reconstruction of his life and memories lead to the publication of Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the
West (2012), authored by Blaine Harden, an experienced American journalist for
Public Broadcasting Service and contributor to The Economist magazine. This book is based on Shin’s diary4 and the content of multiple private interviews between Shin and Harden. In addition to Shin’s life story, Harden also presents the process of how he induced Shin to explore deeper into his memories and even to “correct” some of his previous recollections, making the book even more complicated but also more realistic in portraying Shin’s disturbed mind.
Escape from Camp 14 is unquestionably a hit all over the world, because it is not only a rare testimony about North Korean political camps but also an extremely
3 There are two types of North Korean Gulag: 1) Revolutionizing Zones, from which prisoners are released after a fixed period of time; 2) Total Control Zones, from which no one is to be released after entering (Hawk 23). In particularly, there was no conclusive evidence regarding Total Control Zones until 2005, when Dong-hyuk Shin came to Seoul, South Korea. 4 Shin began keeping a diary as part of his writing therapy in early 2006, a year after his escape from North Korea, and this diary became the foundation of his Korean-language memoir, Escape to the Outside World (2007), published only in Seoul, South Korea. Liao 5
influential book that humanizes the issue of the violation of human rights by highlighting the representative victims. With the publication of Escape from Camp 14,
“[Shin has] become the face of the North Korean gulag5” (Harden 195), calling for the international attention to North Korea government’s egregious cruelty against its own citizens.
Up to the present time, Shin’s testimony circulates so widely that Escape from
Camp 14 is translated into 27 languages worldwide and adapted for the documentary film Camp 14: Total Control Zone (2012) by Marc Wiese. His North Korean gulag experience has caused a global phenomenon that the international media are rushing out to cover more North Korean defectors’ sensational life stories. The publisher of the book, Penguin Books USA, even issues a teacher’s guide6 to Escape from Camp
14, addressing Shin’s story as a globalized experience. However, early in 2015, nearly after three years since the publication of the book, Shin suddenly changes his story.
Shin admits that his account of North Korean gulag experiences differs substantially from what he has been telling government officials, human rights activists, and journalists, including Blaine Harden, the author of Escape from Camp 14. His abrupt changes of dates, places and circumstances cause a great disturbance, and also make the world ponder what makes a testimony count beside “truth.”
Motivated by Shin’s unique testimony and its controversial revision, this thesis aims to explore the questions embedded in the process of reconstructing North Korean defectors’ traumatic memories. First of all, regarding the topic of the witness’ self-doubt, when conducting memoirs, the survivor often doubts his own reasoning
5 The North Korean gulags, although their existence are denied by the North Korean government, are the classic Stalinist model of limited food and sleep, endless labor and brainwashing, and predicable early death, and as the term “gulag” suggests, North Korean forced labor camps are often seen as the Soviet counterparts (Hollander 573). Similar to the slogan of Nazi concentration camps – “work will liberate you” (arbeit machts frei), North Korean gulags highlight that hardworking is the only way to redemption. 6 The teacher’s guide to Escape from 14 can be found on the official website of Penguin Books USA. Liao 6
and memory, and, in some cases, hesitates and even resists recalling all the details since recalling equals to reliving the suffering of the past all over again. The process of recollecting and reconstructing traumatic memories thus becomes a site of rupture where the witness recognizes that a part of his self was forever lost in the moment of trauma. What does this self-doubt mean in a testimony? In what ways do (or do not) the doubt and “the loss of self” delimit the representation of trauma?
The second question is about the insufficiency of language in reconstructing North
Korean defectors’ memories. As Elie Wiesel said in the preface of Night, “while [he] had many to say, [he] did not have the words to say them” (ix). Therefore, Wiesel
“trusted the silence that envelops and transcends words” (x), hoping the “trusted silence” can compensate for the insufficiency of language. Similarly, in Shin
Dong-Hyuk’s and many other defectors’ case, languages, both Korean and English, have their limits to fully describe what they have seen. Why does this insufficiency happen? And how do they make up for this insufficiency?
And eventually, this thesis will explore the reader’s role in a testimony. When a testimony is addressed to an intended reader, the reader is placed as a secondary witness upon reading it. As Cathy Caruth suggests that “to listen to the crisis of a trauma, that is, is not only to listen for the event, but to hear in the testimony the survivor’s departure from it; the challenge of the therapeutic listener, in other words, is how to listen to departure” (Unclaimed 10). Hence, rather than seeking the truth directly from the words of a testimony, the reader is supposed to read beyond the text and form a special relationship with both the text and the witness. What is the reader’s responsibility in reading and interpreting a testimony? In what ways does the reader’s ethical reading of the text make the process of reconstructing North Korean defector’s experience even more complete?
These three questions are the overall exploring map for this thesis, guiding the Liao 7
discussion of the reconstruction of North Korean defectors’ traumatic memories from the witness’ stance to the reader’s transaction with the texts.
II. Literature Review
North Korean defection testimonies are getting more international attention in recent years. The booming of related autobiographies, documentaries, TV interviews, variety shows7, comics books, and various magazine and news coverage, all attempt to remind the world that the cause of their trauma, the origin of their nightmares, and the abuse of state power, still exist and function smoothly without any obvious hindrance.
To tackle the questions raised in this thesis, besides the book Escape from Camp
14 and the film Camp 14: Total Control Zone, I review the following related researches and other defectors’ testimonies, which provide valuable insights and grounds for further development. Since North Korean defection testimonies are not in the focus of recent academic studies yet, I select the witness-related and testimony-related scholarly works to enlarge the research scope of this thesis.
Responding to my questions of the self-doubt of the author and the intricate role of the reader in the testimony, Gao Xing-Jian’s opinions of “truthfulness” and the double role of the author supply an unique perspective for this thesis. Gao expresses in “Testimony in Literature: Aspired for Truthfulness (文學的見證－對真實的追求)” that the ultimate principle of composing testimony literature is to render the “truth” to the reader, but Gao ‘s concept of truth, similar to the argument of this thesis, is not
7 The most notable variety show is Now on My Way to Meet You (이제 만나러 갑니다) since 2011, in South Korea. It is an award-winning Korean talk show starring North Korean female defectors (as the show addresses them as “North Korean Beauties”) to share their North Korea experiences and personal stories. Liao 8
limit ed to factual truth. It is a truth that cannot be affected by politics and ideologies from the outside, and cannot be misled by the author’s self-exaggeration from the inside. In other words, to provide a self-reflected version of the truth while writing a testimony as a literary genre, the author must observe both the world and his self and evade any theoretical frames to return to his true emotions in the present moment.
Gao’s statement sheds light on the possible overlapping role between the author and reader in conducting the testimony, which means an author must distance himself from the original traumatic event to understand his own emotions and observe himself like an outsider to reconstruct the “truth.” To write about traumatic experiences, the author must be the first reader to understand and interpret his trauma.
Huang Hsinya’s “Writing Hiroshima, Writing Trauma: Catastrophe-
Trauma-Memory-Testimony (廣島的創傷：災難、記憶與文學的見證)” sports a rounded theoretical frames on the topic of trauma. Departing from the stance of psychoanalysis and supplying with the theories of Caruth, LaCapra, Casey, and
Herman, Huang notes the Hiroshima trauma is actually more like a “taboo” (not allowed to be expressed) and a “denial” (refuse to express). The exact traumatic moment is lost, and ironically captured, in the white blast of the atomic bomb explosion which is similar to the flashlight of a camera (a camera that is meant to record a certain important moment). Originating from Lifton’s reading of Hiroshima trauma memories, the analogy between explosion and the flashlight of a camera brings forth the concept of “mark of absence” (88) in which an important memory is denied, suppressed and finally forgotten under the effect of trauma. The tension among remembrance, understanding and oblivion of the traumatic events echoes the belated traumatic impact experienced by most North Korean defectors. Huang’s intensive exploration on trauma-related theories supports this thesis to examine the remembrance of a traumatic event in a specific way: if an event is scorched into a Liao 9
witness’ deepest memories and thus becomes part of the witness, there is no remembrance at all. It is an extreme form of remembrance that the witness becomes the remnant of the event and an essential part of its aftermath. Even if the witness fails or refuses to remember the event correctly, the event is already recorded by the witness’ presence. In this case, when the witness embodies the event itself, he does not need any evidence to prove his testimony. In sum, Huang’s research highlights the possibility for the witness to successfully represent a devastating event by not giving a factually valid testimony at all, which also provides a just inspiration for this thesis to focus on the impossible witnessing experienced by North Korean defectors.
In Witness: Memory, Representation, and the Media in Questions (2008), a remarkable book dedicated to the topic of witness from the aspect of visual representation, Ulrik Ekman points out the idea of “impossible witness” based on
Derrida’s concept of absolute hospitality. As Ekman remarks, “[T]he impossible witness would be a real witness, a witness taken hostage by but also telling of whoever or whatever comes right in in disclosure” (26). In contrast to previous researches that put emphasis on the unspeakable side of trauma, Ekman’s contention highlights the witness’ unstoppable recounting and retelling of the horror of traumatic events. This book serves as an important window for this thesis to inspect a testimony and the position of a witness from a different angle.
To enlarge the understanding of North Korean collective memories and different literary methods of representing North Korean traumatic memories, this thesis reviews Kang Chol-Hwan and Pierre Rigoulot’s The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten
Years in the North Korean Gulag (2001) as one of the most influential defection that successfully aroused international attention. Unlike Escape from Camp 14, which is narrated from the third-person perspective and heavy with the co-author’s supplemental comments in each chapter, Kang’s life story is presented in his own Liao 10
voice and rich with literary metaphors. His memoir is worth of reference values not only for its literary qualities, but also for its immediacy and drama of the personal testimony. After the end of the Korean War in 1953, Kang’s family was drawn back from settling in Japan with the hope of a better life in North Korea. Upon arriving at the port of Chongjin, the country's third largest city, Kang’s grandparents witnessed the horror of the post-war North Korea. They describe the city as “the city of the dead” with “a feeling of deep sadness” (25), which is totally opposite to the images that Kim
Il-Sung had projected to the world of a thriving communist lifestyle. The post-war memories of severe poverty and militarism are gradually transferred to Kang by his family through storytelling; and Kang as the second generation of the witness reconstructs them in his book, providing this thesis an even broader understanding of
North Korean defectors’ historical background. Kang and his family are put into
Yodok concentration camp for ten year, facing brutal treatment, inhumane living conditions, and severe malnutrition. However, Kang tends to portray these horrifying ordeals in a relatively reserved way by using literary metaphors, which tendency might result from his well-educated childhood as an elite member of the upper social class. For example, as the book title suggests, the aquariums in Pyongyang refers to the political camps, trapping the golden fish (Kang’s favorite pet of his childhood, and also the embodiment of Kang’s carefree life before being sent in the camp) in a pool of dead water and showcasing them to other citizens as a warning; when the golden fishes dies in the camp due to the lack of food, part of Kang’s unsophisticated self is forever lost in the camp as well. Kang’s metaphorical way of reconstructing gulag memories is thus significantly different from any other defectors’ memoirs, opening more possibilities for the reader to understand gulag trauma.
Kang’s use of literary metaphors suggests the novelization, and the beautification to some degree, of a testimony, and in Barbara Demick’s book Nothing to Envy: Liao 11
Ordinary Lives in North Korea (2010), Demick novelizes his interviews with six
North Korean refugees from Chongjin8, a city which honestly presents the ordinary lives of North Koreans. Their life stories cover the events of the post-war propaganda of Kim's regime, famine of the 1990s, public executions, escaping routes to South
Korea, and 2009 currency reform. Specifically, this book offers a very insightful look at the similarities between North Korean defectors and Holocaust survivors, and even juxtaposes George Orwell’s 1984 with the circumstance of North Korea. Through the contextualization, the repetition of tragic history is underlined; and the unimaginable lives of defectors are solidified to the readers who are already familiar with the event of Holocaust or the novel of 1984. Demick’s book thus proposes a different way to reconstruct and understand the traumatic experiences, and emphasizes that the crisis faced by North Korean defectors is at the same level of Holocaust.
Among many defectors’ published memoirs, female North Korean defectors’ testimonies about mail-order bride, human trafficking, sexual abuse, specialized torture for female inmates in the camps, and other gender-related issues are often singled out. The Girl with Seven Names (2015) by Lee Hyeonseo and David John, and
In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom (2015) by Park Yeonmi are the two memoirs spotlighting these issues and shining a light of hope into the darkest corners in North Korea. Lee’s and Park’s life stories and process of escape echo with each other – they are respectively smuggled across the national border to
China and work there as illegal immigrants for several years before they finally trek to
South Korea; Lee works in China as a low-profile waitress and was constantly threatened by gangsters who were eager to expose her secrets, while Park and her
8 In Barbara Demick’s opinion, the national capital city of Pyongyang presents little information about the typical lives of North Koreans, since the capital is nothing but a Potemkin village (a feigned village, built to impress foreign tourists). Therefore, after he interviewed more than 100 defectors, Demick chose to focus on the stories from Chongjin city. Liao 12
mothe r are betrayed by the smuggler and sold into sexual slavery. Similar to Shin’s hesitation to recall all the details of her traumatic past, Lee and Park both have the moment when they do not feel comfortable enough for revealing the whole truth to the world. The rupture of the past is even more obvious when Park expresses that “I convinced myself that a lot of what I had experienced never happened. I taught myself to forget the rest” (262). Notably, Park and Lee both give public speeches9 on the topic of North Korean human rights, and they have included the responses from their listeners into the books, which offer this thesis a window to peer into the interaction between the witness and the audience.
Aside from testimonies directly written by North Korean defectors, On the
Border: We Wanted to Live as a Human Being (2014) by Lee Hark-Joon, a South
Korean reporter turned filmmaker, is a book of firsthand account of Lee’s experiences about human trafficking (as a extreme way of defection) between North Korea and its neighbor countries, such as Siberia, Vietnam, China, Laos and Thailand (and ultimately to South Korean). Lee witnesses the tragic lives of North Korean defectors who risk everything fleeting from their homeland. From 2007 to 2011, he has spent four years to closely trace North Korean’s harrowing journeys to freedom and takes many vivid photos along to record the odyssey. Lee’s camera symbolizes both the eyes of defectors and bystanders, highlighting the possible overlap between the roles of the witness and the reader of a testimony. Through the lens of his camera, Lee slowly transforms the reader from a cold-hearted onlooker to a sympathetic participant. In the ending chapter, as a reminder for himself and a suggestion to his readers, Lee brings forward the concept of “breaking the national boundaries of the mind” (292), which means only when the onlooker is empathetic to the North Korean
9 Lee Hyeonseo gave a speech “My Escape from North Korea” at a TED conference in Long Beach, California, in 2013. Park Yeonmi told her life story in North Korea in the One Young World Summit 2014 in Dublin, Ireland. Both speeches were uploaded to the web and have received millions of views. Liao 13
victim s can the national boundaries of the mind (the boundaries that cause distrust and discrimination) be broken, and the distinction between “you (the defector)” and “I
(the photographer/the onlooker/the reader)” be blurred.
III. Methodology
This thesis aims to examine the discursive act found in the writing and reading of
North Korean defectors’ testimonies. Accordingly, in the attempt to discuss the influence of trauma on rebuilding North Korean defectors’ memories and the reader’s position in North Korean defectors’ testimonies, the following exploration of methodology will be focused on two distinctive but related aspects: trauma and ethical reading.
The exact definition of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is still in contest, but most theorists have come to the agreement that the associated responses include
“the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviors stemming from the event, along with numbing […], and possibly also increased arousal to (and avoidance of)stimuli recalling the event” (Caruth, Trauma 4). Under the influence of PTSD, trauma theorists put emphasis on the impossibilities of representing the site of atrocity through language to “speak the unspeakable.” The traumatized witness may not know how to reconstruct their past in their state of hallucinating and dreaming, and thus cast the “truth” of their testimonies into doubt.
To “speak the unspeakable” and recover the truth of a traumatic event, in the essay “Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching” (1991), Shoshana
Felman connects testimony to the aspect of the unconscious proposed by Sigmund
Freud. Felman states that “one does not have to possess or own the truth, in order to effectively bear witness to it […] the speaking subject constantly bears witness to a Liao 14
truth that nonetheless continues to escape him, a truth that is, essentially, not available to its own speaker” (15). This statement sheds light on the “unconscious testimony” by which a traumatized survivor of an atrocity can make a valid witness (through the symptoms of PTSD and other non-narrative methods) even without his awareness, and this unconscious testimony has an incomparable heuristic value that exceeds the words.
In addition, as Cathy Caruth suggests in the book Trauma: Explorations in
Memory (1995), a “neurotic distortion” takes place after the witness experienced trauma; and in this case, trauma is not merely considered as a repression or defense but as “a temporal delay that carries the individual beyond the shock of the first moment” (10). The delay of comprehending the traumatic event may result in the failure of reconstructing its related memories correctly in a testimony. To overcome this delay, the witness may experience trauma as a repeated suffering by recalling the event over and over again, and put himself in the state of “continual leaving of [the traumatic] site” (10). The ongoing departure from the site is enclosed in the latency period of the trauma wherein “the effects of the experience are not apparent” (7) and
“[the event] is precisely preserves in its literality” (8). Therefore, this latency (and the incompleteness and obscurity in the literary representation of traumatic experiences caused by this latency) is the key to grasp how the traumatic event is imbedded into the witness’ mind and why it is difficult to be reconstructed, suggesting the possibility to write and read beyond the text of testimony.
Caruth’s concept of continual departure of the site helps this thesis to follow Dori
Laub’s notion of “the collapse of witnessing” (80) in the essay “An Event Without A
Witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival” (1991). “The collapse of witnessing” expounds a paradoxical condition encountered by the witness: a person may witness an atrocity and at the same time not witness it at all. The collapse brings in the Liao 15
realization that one cannot contain, nor fully understand, his own traumatic experiences immediately, let alone fully comprehend the experience of other people since the action of witness is still in question. Laub’s idea of “the collapse of witnessing” is in fact not anti-witnessing at all. Laub assumes, “the loss of the capacity to be a witness to oneself and thus to witness from the inside is perhaps the true meaning of annihilation, for when one’s history is abolished, one’s identity ceases to exist as well” (82). The witness’ testimonies can be seen as a ceaseless struggle against the ultimate elimination. They must bear witness to the atrocity to prove their existence and recover their identities, even if they are trapped in the belatedness of understanding their trauma.
The aforementioned methods to read beyond the textual forms (speaking and writing) of testimony manifest schemes for this thesis to further analyze the reconstructed memories of North Korean defectors. Concluding from Felman, Laub, and Caruth’s explanations of traumatic witnessing, we may find trauma in three different stages: 1) the factual site of the atrocity, 2) the aftermath of the event, and 3) the process of writing a testimony of the event. And these three stages are enclosed with three distinctive levels of witnessing: “the level of being a witness to oneself within the experience; the level of being a witness to the testimonies of others; and the level of being a witness to the process of witnessing itself” (Caruth, Trauma 61).
Specifically, the second level of bearing a witness to the others’ testimonies places the reader as a secondary witness, who bears witness to the witnesses of atrocity.
However, in many North Korean defectors’ situation, their readers often cannot understand and therefore do not believe their life stories, highlighting the questions how can a reader ethically read a testimony? And what is the reader’s responsibility for reading a testimony?
Upon reading a testimony, readers may come to the realization that it is Liao 16
impossible for one to relive the trauma of another by merely witnessing his/her account, but by reading his/her recollection of the disturbing experience, the reader becomes “a guide and an explore, a companion in a journey onto an uncharted land, a journey the survivor cannot traverse or return from alone” (Felman and Laub 59). The reader thus takes on an essential role to both the witness and the testimony, because without an empathic reader, or an “addressable other” in Laub’s term (68), the witness will fall into the abyss of ultimate annihilation and the atrocity cannot be witnessed at all. To read a testimony ethically is to recognize the embodied life behind every presentation. Like Elie Wiesel says in the preface of Night, when the pain and agony results from an atrocity which cannot be expressed by any language, a “trusted silence” that “envelops and transcends words” (x) makes up the deficiency of language, and it is the reader’s responsibility to notice and fill in these silent moments.
Nevertheless, we should also notice that being empathic to a survivor and his/her account is different from identifying with his/her life story. For literary critics such as
Robert Eaglestone, a reader’s identification to a testimony can be considered as an immoral act since this identification will “normalizes” the survivor’s experience by reducing an incomprehensible event into one’s common understanding (98).
Eaglestone’s concern highlights the reader’s paradox of comprehending a traumatic experience. To read a testimony ethically, the reader must not simply compare the witness’ stories to his everyday life occurrences. To read a traumatic life story is much more than merely understanding the facts provided by the survivor, since the reader is immediately engaged in a process of co-experiencing and co-reconstructing the testimony upon reading it.
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IV. Outline of Chapters
In this thesis, I argue that similar to Weisel’s concept of “trusted silence” in the
Holocaust literature, there are many silent moments and invisible wounds yet to be discovered and interpreted in the North Korean defection testimonies; these silent moments becomes an essential site for the reader to witness defectors’ trauma, and only when their trauma is witnessed emphatically can the defectors alleviate their pains and heal the invisible wounds. This thesis could be mainly divided into three chapters.
The first chapter introduces North Korea’s brief history after the Korean War and the common ideologies shared by North Koreans. Since the defectors’ human rights have been “breached to the point that human rights violations were accepted as a natural and insignificant part of their daily lives” (PSCORE 9), before this thesis dives into the defectors’ traumatic memories, it is necessary to take a look into the origins of their living nightmares and their collective memories. The introduction includes the
Kim’s post-war communist propaganda, the famine of the 1990s, and the complicated identities of North Korean defectors, and the gaps between North and South Korea.
In the second chapter, this thesis chooses Escape from Camp 14 to be the main texts to analyze the representation of traumatic memories of North Korean defectors.
Specifically, the use of a second language to reconstruct a local memory in a global context is highlighted. Since Shin’s stories are considered either fake or negligible in
South Korea, to break the language barricade and seek help from the outside, Shin finally decides to collaborate with Harden. To Shin, “[A] book in English would raise world awareness, increase international pressure on North Korea” (Harden 9), and this is exactly what Shin needs if he wants to remember for the living. Furthermore, to locate the invisible wounds in the testimony, the self-doubt of the witness, symptoms Liao 18
of PTSD which occur during the interview between Harden and Shin, and the insufficiency of language is brought into discussion.
As Frederick Hoffman points out, although the literature of violence attempts to find a proper way “to record fact independently of structural subterfuges, . . . violence tends to destroy structures, to isolate experiences, to force them away from containing forms” (qtd. Young 16). That is to say, Harden’s textual representation of violent events, including Shin’s gulag memories, is not enough, because violence tends to destroy structures, and the written language as a form of structure is no exception. The representation of violence falls outside factual representation (Young
16). The words simply cannot fully contain the violence. Therefore, materials such as drawings, satellite images, photos, animation, and scars on defectors’ bodies (human body as the carrier of the memory) are considered as the possible compensation for the deficiency of language. Exceptionally, Shin’s drawings are in the focus of this chapter. The moments of trauma are frozen in Shin’s drawings. Trauma maybe unspeakable, but it is still possible to be communicated “viscerally and emotionally through the alternative cognitive structures of the visual” (Hirsch 1211).
And finally in the third chapter, the discussion of the reader/listener’s role in a testimony is in the focus. In particular, this thesis puts Blaine Harden, the interviewer and author of Escape from Camp 14, in the position of a secondary witness to Shin’s testimony. Throughout the process of Harden and Shin’s interviews, Harden feels that sometimes there is no mutual trust between them: Shin cannot trust Harden, and
Harden does not believe in what Shin has said. The doubts about Shin’s gulag experiences exist not only outside the book but also inside the book. Escape from
Camp 14 can therefore be deemed as a struggle of rebuilding human interrelationship or a form of therapy through the bond between the witness (interviewee) and the listener (interviewer). Harden even compares himself as a dentist in Escape from Liao 19
Camp 14: “. . .Shin seems to dread talking to [Harden]. [Harden often feels] like a dentist drilling without anesthetics. [The drilling goes] on intermittently for more than two years” (9). In this circumstance, Harden plays the roles of not only a journalist and a listener but also a therapist. As he uses the “dentist” metaphor to describe himself, Harden implies that even though the process would be painful for Shin, Shin would eventually get cured by the “drilling.” This role of therapist is extremely important in representing Shin’s memories, for Harden induces Shin to speak out the truth, to correct the hidden memories that Shin did not want to admit.
V. Expected Findings
Since the past decade, North Korean defection testimonies have gradually gained worldwide attention, but few academic researches have been done to untangle the complicated relationship among the witness, the medium, and the reader in reconstructing North Korean traumatic memories. This thesis attempts to unveil the invisible wounds in North Korean testimonies through the analysis of textual representation, drawings, photos, scars on human body, and the paradoxical reader-witness relationship in North Korean testimonies. By the thorough examination in different forms of portrayal of the memories and the reader’s empathetic position in the testimony, this thesis will be one of the first North Korean defection testimony related studies. In the era of witness, horrifying traumatic events and memoirs keep popping up ceaselessly, and they are recorded and collected via different forms of the media. The results of this thesis may serve as a window to a more subtle understanding of North Korean defectors’ struggle, and from an East Asian perspective, as a lens for readers of other testimonies to grasp how to comprehend and what to expect from traumatic events. Liao 20
Chapter One
North Korean Collective Memories
I. The Reshaping of North Korean Memories
By the end of the twentieth century, the fate of Korean Peninsula takes a dramatic turn under the profound influence of the Second World War and the constant interference from China, Japan, the United States, and the Soviet Union. After the end of the Second World War, Japanese military force withdraws from the peninsula
(1945), and Korea as a single political entity no longer exists. The 38th parallel north is therefore established as the boundary between Soviet and American occupation zones, and soon the Korean War (1950) erupts as a side product of the Cold War. The ensuing Korean Armistice Agreement (1953) which aims to stop the bloodshed and hostilities ends up tearing the peninsula into two parts: the northern region has been ruled by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, while the southern section has been governed by the Republic of Korea. This official division of the Korean
Peninsula breaks apart not only a nation but also thousands of family. Despite the relative peace after the wars, tensions always stay high between the two Koreas, and their national border remains the most heavily militarized frontier in the world.
Interestingly, the aforementioned history of Korean Peninsula has a wildly different version in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, commonly known as
North Korea. Based on the recollections of North Korean defectors, the two devastating atomic bombs never land on the territory of Japan, and let alone the bombing is the main cause of Japanese military retreat. Instead, their supreme leader,
Kim Il-Sung, gallantly drives off all the Japanese invaders and ends the war (Kang and Grangereau 170); and to North Korean people, it becomes a common knowledge Liao 21
that the outbreak of the Korean War and the division of Korean Peninsula results from the sly betrayal of South Korea (169) rather than the initial attack from North Korea.
To create a perfect leadership illusion and justify Kim Il-Sung’s regime, North
Korean government rewrites the country’s history at its own will, totally denying its launch of attack in Korean War and demonizing its Japanese and American enemies.
The government’s harsh historical revisionism reshapes its people’s collective memories by feeding them a fairytale-like version of history, and this “fairytale” is amplified by the cult of personality surrounding Kim’s family. Hence, North Korean people deeply believe that without their “heavenly leader” Kim Il-Sung, it would be impossible to put an end to the oppression of the former Japanese rulers and become an independent country. Ironically, the truth is quite the opposite; without the
Japanese invasion, it will be less likely to successfully found Kim’s image as a heroic leader and settle his regime. To North Korean citizens, Kim Il-Sung and his successors, Kim Jong-Il and Kim Jong-Un, are undoubtedly godlike figures; under the guidance of these “heavenly leaders,” North Korea is the last pure land in this corrupted world. As one of the pronounced North Korean defector, Kang Chol-Hwan, notes in his memoir, Kim Il-Sung’s demigod image has been installed into North
Korean children’s minds at a very young age:
To my childish eyes and to those of all my friends, Kim Il-Sung and Kim
Jong-Il were perfect beings, untarnished by any base human function. I was
convinced, as we all were, that neither of them urinated or defecated. Who
could imagine such things of gods? In the portraits of their paternal faces I
found comfort and all that was protecting, kindly, self-assured. (3)
Kang’s impression toward Kims is established through his early education in the grammar school. Similar to many other North Korean defectors’ experience, there is a specific room named Kim Il-Sung Research Institute in every public school, and it is Liao 22
built with the finest materials and remained flawlessly clean in order to honor their great leaders. In young North Korean children’s relatively happy school days, their ultimate learning goal is to memorize all the heroic feats and anecdotes of their great leaders. Noticeably, the content of elementary history classes is particularly “alterable,” young North Korean students are already accustomed to the constant revision of history facts. They are taught to accept that it is agreeable to change history if it is for the purpose of glorifying their great leaders (Lee and John 81-82).
In every typical North Korean household, Kim’s colorful portrait hangs high up on the wall, silently monitoring and judging every movement of his subjects with his unblinking stare. Kim’s image is always linked to all the best and brightest things in
North Korea. In a country that its scenery resembles monotonic ink wash painting,
Kim is the only color comforting his people. Like George Orwell’s depiction of a futuristic dystopia in 1984 where vivid colors can only be found on the government’s propaganda posters and wall arts, North Korea has manipulated the colors for political purposes as well. For instance, red is monopolized by Workers' Party, the foundational communist party of North Korea; only official buildings can use the red paints for decoration. On the propaganda posters, Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il are always the most radiant figures; orange and yellow hues are applied around the leaders’ faces, literally making them glow like the “sun” of the country (Demick 31).
As Brian Reynolds Myers concludes in his book The Cleanest Race, North
Korean public artworks center on specific themes: cult of personality, fighting against foreign enemies, unquestionable devotion to the state, and the glorification of military power; these themes are all dedicated to shaping North Korean collective memories, hypnotizing the people to believe that they are truly living in a heavenly country.
Remarkably, when it comes to the theme of cult of personality, the background settings and the color schemes are prone to display a hint of fantasy. Liao 23
Fig. 1. A wall painting recreates Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il overlooking the crater lake of Mount
Paektu, sacred to Koreans by Yeowatzup on Flickr.
Fig.2. A detailed painting represents the ubiquitous iconography in North Korea: Kim Il-Sung carries
Kim Jong-Il while his wife, Kim Jong-Suk, stands by (The title page of The Cleanest Race, picture 4).
For example, in figure 1, the wall painting portrays Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il standing close to each other and overlooking the sacred lake and accentuates not only the importance of family bond (the cleanse of bloodline and the justification of leadership heritage) but also the fantasy of immortality. To foil this fantasy, the scenery of the painting unrealistically depicts purple mountains, lush pink flowers, and the pure white pebbly ground. The sense of sacredness and eternity implied by the Liao 24
bold color contrast states the demigod characteristic of the two leaders, and further allows North Korean people, who have been long trapped in poverty and hunger, to project their desire to live forever (or at least longer than their relatively short 70-year average life-span) onto their great leaders. While in figure 2, the scene presents Kim
Il-Sung and his family leading Korean People's Army to fight against the Japanese invader in Mount Paektu, the sacred mountain and spiritual home to both North and
South Koreans. Similar to figure 1, the painting portrays the surrounding with fantastical elements, such as the dissipating fog and blooming flowers on the rocky ground covered by snow. This deliberate setting implies that with the guidance and miracle of Kim’s family, North Korean people will conquer the hardship of wars, symbolized by the harsh winter and high altitude in the painting, and move toward a thriving future. This kind of paintings permeate the everyday life of North Korean (as the photographer notes, the painting of fig. 1 is located right outside the public toilet in North Korea) and serves like a window of hope for the citizens, showing them what a wonderful country and affluent life could be accomplished by following these godlike leaders. For most North Korean citizens and defectors, the values indoctrinated through these paintings and posters are deeply embedded in their memories, sustaining them with a beautiful yet dangerous fantasy to indulge.
Kim’s successful cult of personality is credited to the constant using of arts of all sorts. Films, statues, paintings, short novels, and poems all aim to arouse North
Korean’s nationalism and allow them to transfer the fear of omnipresent possible death. Myers specifically highlights that North Korean government’s practice of cult personality should not be confused with the simple tricks of brainwashing. Instead, it should be classified as a psychological transference that originates from North
Korean’s tradition of worshiping pureness, clean race and mythology (99). This specific North Korean tradition also explains the reason why most portraits of Kim Liao 25
Il -Sung and Kim Jong-Il present them with chubby cheeks, pink lips and plump bodies. These child-like and somehow female-like body features highlight not only their absolute wealth and power but also their seemingly “innocence,” the imitated pureness of a newborn infant.
To further elaborate the combination of the cult of personality and psychological transference, Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death provides a specific perspective on the immortality projects. Becker’s premise of the book is based on human civilization qua a defense mechanism against the recognition that all humans will die, and humans exist in both the physical world of objects and the symbolic world of meanings. To fight against the fear of death, human attempts to create eternal objects (or at least something they believe will last forever), including all forms of arts, religion, nations, and so on. Only through connecting to these seemingly eternal artifacts can human find and project the meanings of life; or else, lacking such an object of projection will lead to mental illness and ultimately the biggest terror of mankind – the death without finding the purpose of life (44). Hence, while admiring the propaganda arts of their great leaders, North Korean citizens experience multiple layers of immortality projects. They project their desire to live an immortal life onto arts, onto the fantastical settings of the paintings, onto the great leaders, and finally their nation, which is always described as the greatest, purest, and happiest country in the world by their officials.
II. Arduous March: The Famine of the 1990s
In Becker’s terms, besides immortality projects, the other way for humans to defend against death is to find a vital position in the universe:
The real world is simply too terrible to admit; it tells man that he is a small, Liao 26
trembling animal who will decay and die. Illusion changes all this, makes
man seem important, vital to the universe, immortal in some way . . . The
masses look to the leaders to give them just the untruth that they need; the
leader continues the illusions that triumph over the castration complex and
magnifies them into a truly heroic victory . . . In group behavior anything
goes because the leader okays it— It is like being an omnipotent infant
again, encouraged by the parent to indulge oneself plentifully . . . In the
group each man seems an omnipotent hero who can give full vent to his
appetites under the approving eye of the father. (61)
In North Korean’s case, the urge to serve and obey their leaders provides them the essential position to sustain their “meaningful” lives. Furthermore, when their leaders constantly encourage them to join the military force to unite the whole Korean peninsula, North Korean people find an even greater meaning of life: to make the purest race reunite and become the core of the world at any cost, even their own lives.
With the comforts of knowing they will not perish into nothingness and living a meaningful life under the caring supervision of their great leaders, North Korean people are able to tolerate poverty and famine in order to carry on the fantasy of lasting their great motherland.
Throughout North Korean defectors’ memoirs, the pain of hunger and the struggle for gathering enough food to sustain their families take up most of their
North Korean living experience. The country’s history is always accompanied by severe food shortage, and North Korean government takes the constant famine as an opportunity to assign its people to their “vital position.” In 2012, Kim Jong-Un tells his people that they would “not tighten their belts again and enjoy the wealth and prosperity of socialism” in his debut public speech as North Korea’s leader. By mentioning “tighten [North Korean people’s] belts,” Kim is referring to North Korea’s Liao 27
history of poverty and famine in the 1990s in which hundreds of thousands of people starved to death. Ironically, the famine in the 1990s does not affect Kim’s reign; instead, it reinforces people’s patriotism toward the country and becomes an iconic metaphor for self-sacrifice.
From 1994 to 1998, due to economic mismanagement, the loss of Soviet support, and several floods and droughts, series of economic crisis and famine occurred in
North Korea altogether are metaphorically coded by the official as the “Arduous
March” to provoke people’s patriotism and evoke the memory of their great leader
Kim Il-Sung fighting as an anti-Japanese guerrilla commander in harsh winter in the
1940s. The Korean vocabularies of “famine” and “hunger” are specifically banned in this period, because these words imply the government’s failure to maintain a sustainable economy and agriculture. The North Korean official media even advocates that eating less is part of the citizen’s patriotic duty, and voluntarily having only two meals a day is the best way to serve their country (Demick 69). This event demonstrates North Korea’s typical campaign of telling the crowd to endure short-term hardship for the promise of greater long-term benefits. In other words, if a
North Korean citizen can sacrifice his own share of food and embrace the constant hunger, he will become a hero of the country and ultimately fulfill his vital position in the universe.
“Arduous March” is central to North Korean collective memory for every household has lost at least one life or more in this disaster. Most defectors spend numerous pages in retelling the euphemized tragedy in their memoirs. The pain of enduring the everlasting hunger, the shame of stealing food or selling valuables (even one’s body) to sustain one’s family, the shock of realizing their blind patriotism, and the rage of being mistreated by their own government become the significant elements to reconstruct the memories of North Korea. Liao 28
III. After the Great Escape: Defectors’ Complicated Identities
South Korean Ministry of Unification has revealed that over 27,000 North
Korean defectors have entered the South to seek political asylum since 1953.
Although the population of defectors may appear numerous, there are still many defectors lingering or being held in detention in countries neighboring Korean peninsula due to the fear of repatriation, not enough funds (for traveling expanse, bribing border guards, and human trafficking agency fee) or complicated diplomatic relations between North Korea and its neighbor countries. A North Korean defector has to carry many different identities to complete his journey to freedom.
In 2005, to better incorporate the North Korean defectors who entered the South,
South Korean government has announced the official form of address to the defectors by using the neutral terms “new settlers” or “people of new land” (새터민) instead of the derogatory term “people who fled the North” (탈북자) that usually implies their dishonest betrayal as a traitor and rebellion as a renegade. By readdressing the defectors, South Korean government attempts to blur the negative association with
North Korea. However, the terms “new settlers” and “people of new land” are too ambiguous for international media, reportage and literary works to effectively reconstruct their North Korean experience; hence, the terms “residents who renounced
North Korea” (북한이탈주민) and “North Korean defectors” become the mainstream.
The addressing for North Korean defectors undergoes several changes and further underlines their complicated identities. They can be labeled as traitors, defectors, refugees, immigrants, social vulnerable groups, and the bottom class of South Korean society who relies on government subsidy.
When a North Korean defector is deemed as a former traitor, his identity of a Liao 29
witness to North Korean socialism is highlighted, and he becomes an important role in uniting the Korea peninsula. For example, whenever a defector (especially those who have an interesting story to tell) enters Seoul, South Korean government will call a press conference to restate their belief that the free-market economy in the South is more ideal than the North socialism, and to showcase the defector as the living proof.
To some extent, this kind of press conference is more like a public interrogation rather than a hearing of testimony, since most of the journalists are skeptical to North
Korean defectors’ true intention of telling their life stories. In his memoir The
Aquariums of Pyongyang, Kang Chol-Hwan recounts his first press conference as a displeasingly shocking experience:
[The journalists] began with typical questions about how we made it to
South Korea, life in the camp, and so forth. But then they turned to the
agents to inquire when and how we were found, what instructions we had
been given prior to this interview, and whether we had been guaranteed
freedom of speech. It was a terrible shock. […] Clearly, my address was
unfavorable to the North. Clearly, our testimony about the camps and the
repressiveness of the Pyongyang regime would bolster the South’s claim
that it was the legitimate representative of the Korean nation. But so what?
Did telling the truth necessarily mean giving to oppose the government?
(223)
Kang’s identity as a North Korean traitor makes him an excellent pawn in the battle between Korean nations. His testimony is widely repeated in international newspapers and interviews. He retells it so often that he “occasionally felt [he] was trading [his] experience for a story that was no longer entirely [his] own” (224).
With so many complicated identities, the testimonies of North Korean defectors become more powerful than they have believed. Their testimonies are almost like a Liao 30
double -edged sword that can be easily manipulated by the both side. For instance, in
2012, a North Korean young couple who have “double-defected” returns to
Pyongyang after living six years in the South. Upon their arriving, Pyongyang regime calls a press conference to accuse South Korean government of luring them away by dint of gimmicks and manipulation; and the re-defected couple give their testimony about leading a miserable life in the South, emphasizing how North Koreans are
“snubbed and disdained everywhere they went” (Herman, “Why Do People Keep
‘Re-Defecting’ To North Korea?”).
Nevertheless, when a North Korean defector’s identity is underscored as a refugee, the society will sympathetically see him as a victim persecuted by the world’s most abusive dictatorship and is in urgent need of physical and mental health care.
The identity of being a North Korean refugee further embodies the impassable chasm between the two Korean nations: the divergences in cultures and medical conditions.
Every North Korean defector who safely enters the South will be sent to the House of
Unity, commonly known as Hanawon; it is a government-run resettlement center solely designed for North Korean defectors, teaching them how to survive in the
South’s ultracompetitive capitalist culture since the education in North Korea is utterly useless for life in the South. Hanawon appears to be “a well-funded, security-obsessed mental hospital”, encircled by a high fence and always watched by video cameras and armed guards (Harden 162). In the facility, defectors’ physical and mental health will be closely monitored and evaluated in order to ensure that when the refugees are released into the South Korean society, they will successfully adapt and will not cause extra troubles. In addition to mental trauma, confusion, paranoid, and technophobia, North Korean defectors also suffer from some preventable diseases that are all but nonexistent in South Korea, such as hepatitis B, tuberculosis, chronic gynecological infections and cysts (Harden 165). Liao 31
Notably, Hanawon epitomizes the fear from both North Korean defectors and
South Korean citizens. North Korean defectors are so much in fear of being rejected by the South and losing their hard-fought freedom, while South Koreans also fear their social order and capital value are tumbled by the defectors. The purpose of
Hanawon is to accommodate and assimilate the untrained defectors like a detention for immigrants; it is a special facility that includes the unwanted outsiders by excluding them, limiting them to a remote hillside that is miles away from Seoul.
Hanawon converts North Korean defectors’ identity from helpless refugees to potential immigrants during their three-month stay. When a defector is officially released to be an immigrant, he is expected to stand on his own two feet and lead a sustainable life by receiving “a free apartment, and eight-hundred-dollar-a-month settlement stipend for two years, and as much as eighteen thousand dollars if he stuck with job training or higher education” from the South Korean government (Harden
163). But the training from Hanawon hardly pays up for both North Korean defectors and South Korean government. To South Korea government, these special immigrants cannot create enough financial profits to compensate the spending of Hanawon and other humanitarian rescue programs, since these immigrants “often depend on the
South Korean government to solve their problems, and fail to take personal responsibility for poor work habits or for showing up late on the job” (Harden 167).
To find employers who will accept these North Korean newcomers, the Ministry of
Unification even pays up to 1,800 USD per year if the employers risk hiring a defector (Harden 167).
Sadly, to some defectors, leaving Hanawon is the beginning of another nightmare.
Although they officially obtain the identity as a newly converted South Korean citizen, they will never truly fit in the South Korean society due to constant discrimination and misunderstanding. Bearing the incurable homesick and inability to adapt, the Liao 32
unemp loyment rate of North Korean defectors in the South is four times the national average; their suicide rate is more than two and a half times for South Koreans
(Harden 174).
To the neighboring countries of North Korea like China and Thailand, North
Korean defectors are nothing more than illegal immigrants who cause serious domestic financial problems. In China, hiring North Korean defectors equal to provide low wages since they hardly have any rights to make a bargain with the employers. Chinese officials are afraid that these North Korean illegal immigrants will reduce the working opportunities of local laborers. Consequently, whenever a
North Korean defector is caught in China, he will be treated as an illegal immigrant and immediately repatriated. In spite of the accusation from international humanitarian rescue groups, China firmly states that the repatriation does not violate the U.N. Convention on the Status of Refugees because they label the identity of
North Korean defectors as illegal immigrants, not refugees (Demick 282).
The multiple identities featured by North Korean defectors foreshadow the complexity of reconstructing North Korean defection testimony. The reconstruction must be carried out in an international context due to both the high mobility of North
Korean defectors and the wide broadcasting and circulation of their testimonies across the world. After introducing the common elements of North Korean collective memories which include the country’s heavy historical revisionism, Kim’s cult of personality, and the famine of the 1990s, this chapter facilitates the upcoming discussion on the representation of North Korean defectors’ traumatic memories by providing an insight into the defectors’ cultural and cognitive background.
Liao 33
Chapter Two
The Analysis of North Korean Defectors’ Traumatic Memories Representation
“I am evolving from being an animal,” he said. “But it is going very, very
slowly. Sometimes 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.”
- Shin Dong-Hyuk, Escape from Camp 14 (181)
In 2005, Shin Dong-Hyuk narrowly escapes from Kaechon prison camp, the most notorious North Korean Total Control Zone commonly known as Camp 14.
Though the site of Camp 14 can be clearly recognized from the satellite photos internationally, North Korean government fully denies its existence. Little is known about the inhumane conditions inside the camp until Shin reveals his life stories to the world with Blaine Harden’s help in 2012. Their collaboration leads to the publication of Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to
Freedom in the West, a worldwide hit that endeavors to break the monopoly of North
Korean official history. This book not only turns Shin’s traumatic life stories into a powerful testimony, but also makes Shin one of the strongest voices in the effort to raise awareness of the human rights abuse in North Korea.
Even though being a free man now, Shin is still plagued by various PTSD symptoms, such as unpleasant flashbacks, nightmares, and emotional numbness. His ongoing struggle to face and rebuild the haunting past can be viewed as a slow process of recovering and attempts of breaking free from his ultimate confinement caused by traumas. By baring his North Korean gulag experiences to the world, Shin’s act of retelling his memories as a testimony links his private life to the political and judicial dimension to mobilize the human rights infrastructures, and thus renders his Liao 34
old physical and mental wounds new positive meanings. However, upon reading
Shin’s North Korean life stories, most readers tend to pay close attention to the factual truthfulness of his retelling first. Since Shin is the only person who was born in a
Total Control Zone and later successfully escapes from it, many of Shin’s experiences are unheard and unimaginable. Without proper evidences, people remain skeptical to his testimony, not to mention to realize the connotation of his trauma or to become a secondary witness to his gulag memories. Therefore, the most urgent task for Shin and
Harden is to reconstruct and represent the memories of North Korean gulag in as many effective ways as possible in the hope of giving the book a bigger meaning besides merely providing factual truth. The aim of this chapter is to explore Harden’s strategies of representation of Shin’s traumatic gulag memories in Escape from Camp
14, and further examine Shin’s “unspeakable testimony” that is hinted through his self-doubt and constant refusal to retell his stories accurately.
I. Textual Representation of North Korean Gulag Memories in a Global Context
The publication of Elie Wiesel’s Night and many other Holocaust memoirs has unfolded a new literature genre in the era of witness. Testimony as a new kind of literature brings in the rooted questions on how to reconstruct a valid traumatic testimony despite the survivor’s belated understanding and the neurotic distortion of trauma, and whether the representing medium, such as languages, is able to fulfill the mission of conveying the unspeakable trauma. To explore the genre of testimony,
Judith Herman puts forwards that “in the telling, the trauma story becomes a testimony,” and “[this] testimony has both a private dimension, which is confessional and spiritual, and a public aspect, which is political and judicial” (129). By addressing a life story as a testimony, the individual experience is given a newer and larger Liao 35
dimensi on and immediately linked to the political and social context.
The starting point of the reconstructing North Korean gulag memories is Shin’s published Korean-language memoir, Escape to the Outside World (2007), and the ensuing seven rounds of private interviews between Shin Dong-Hyuk and Blaine
Harden. Ironically, in contrast to the wide circulation of Escape from Camp 14, Shin’s diary-based debut memoir published in 2007 is a big flop that “about five hundred copies [are] sold from a printing of three thousand” in Seoul (Harden 171). South
Korean readers consider Shin’s stories as another cliché survivor testimony that is either exaggerated or negligible. It takes Shin nine months to make up the decision to collaborate with Harden to seek help from the outside and break the language barricade, because “a book in English would raise world awareness, increase international pressure on North Korea” (Harden 9). Speaking out his traumatic memories in a foreign language makes Shin feel ashamed, since he often cannot find the accurate words to describe his experiences and feelings. He also believes that he does not deserve to speak on the behalf of the prisoners still in the camps. But Shin is so desperate to let the world understand what North Korea has tried hard to hide.
Hence, Shin has harnessed his self-doubt and self-loathing to retell his North Korean gulag memories as a testimony. To Shin, recovering the truth is the only way to retaliate against North Korean despotism and to make atonement for his deceased family.
As a well-experienced American PBS journalist, Blaine Harden inevitably renders Escape from Camp 14 a journalistic narrative style. Harden’s identity as both an author and journalist leads to the straightforward representation of Shin’s recollections. Shin’s memories are specifically arranged in chronological order through chapters, and the presentment of each event all relates the facts and avoids too much literary embellishment. This unequivocal and vivid style of retelling the Liao 36
North Korean life stories accentuates not only Harden’s journalist identity but also
Shin’s lack of artistic experience and education. Unlike some well-educated North
Korean defectors, such as Kang Chol-Hwan, who have attended a formal public school and is familiar with North Korean patriotic poems, songs and arts, Shin is doomed to be deprived of the chance to enter a real school and the contact of any form of art due to his tragic birth inside Camp 14. Shin does not know how to describe an abstract feeling in literary metaphors like what Kang has done in his autobiographic memoir The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean
Gulag (2001). The only benefit Shin gets from his birth inside the gulag is a
“complete absence of expectation” (Harden 75), making him never skid into abyss of sheer hopelessness and give up his life. Shin’s life in Kaechon prison camp is about nothing but survival which directly affects his perception of the gulag and later his plain but honest recounting of the memories.
Besides honestly re-establishing Shin’s life stories, Harden also goes beyond merely presenting basic information by adding supplemental comments to each chapter. Those additional comments are for the readers from different cultural contexts to better understand Shin’s experiences. In particular, Harden adopts the techniques of substitution to parallel North Korean gulag experiences with Nazi concentration camp memories. For instance, in the introduction, Harden mentions there is a “convention narrative arc” for concentration camp survival stories and further refers to Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memories (3) in comparison with Shin’s stories.
Furthermore, in Chapter 13 “Deciding not to Snitch,” Shin meets a special senior prisoner Park Yong-Chul, a former higher-class citizen who has lived abroad and fully experienced the beauty and joy of the outside world. Park befriends with Shin and teaches him the existence of other countries, such as China and East Germany. Many Liao 37
of Park’s stories keeps Shin up at night fantasizing about a better life and the stories become “an essential and energizing addiction” to Shin, “changing his expectation about the future and giving him the will to plan for it” (102). Harden comments the relationship between Shin and Park echoes “the bonds of trust and mutual protection that kept prisoners alive and sane in Nazi concentration camps”; and Harden further points out that Shin and Park have formed a “basic unit of survival” in the camp that resembles the bond between Anne Frank and her sister, Margot (107). The comparison continues throughout the last few paragraphs of Chapter 13, indicating Harden’s deliberate evoking of readers’ knowledge of Nazi concentration camps.
Barbie Zelizer suggests that the use of substitution is one of the common elements of Western media’s “cannibalization” of local experiences. The substitution of a local memory takes place when “[the memory] is addressed through adjacent events that do a better job of encapsulating the meanings of the trauma, crisis, or catastrophe that the West wants to invoke” (Zelizer 31). In Zelizer's view, substitution is an unsuitable measure to represent an event, because both events (the local and the adjacent) will lose their significance during the process of mutual addressing; and ultimately, the death and trauma of both events will be forgotten and cannibalized due to the lack of proper representation and remembrance.
However, Harden’s juxtaposition of Holocaust literature with Shin’s gulag memories, paradoxically amplifies the significance of Shin’s gulag experience. By using the references of Elie Wiesel and Anne Frank, Harden stresses on the similarity between the two kinds of camps, and immediately puts the importance of North
Korean gulags on the same level with Nazi concentration camps. Since most Western readers are more familiar with Holocaust literatures, he also takes maximum advantage of recycling these scenes to make the story irresistible to the readers, and gives the readers an easier way to imagine the unimaginable situation faced by the Liao 38
prisoner s of North Korean internment camp.
The juxtaposition also underlines the repetition of tragic history. As Wiesel writes in Night that “the world is not interested in us” (33), these human rights violations have fallen into a repeated pattern that the world tends to ignore. Shin’s stories and conditions are not exactly the same as the ones of Holocaust, but through
Harden’s narratives, there are enough echoes between the two tragedies. The world should be able to see the resemblance and thus take action against it, to fulfill the promise of “never again.”
To a certain degree, Harden’s comparison between North Korean gulag and Nazi concentration camps westernizes and assimilates Shin’s unique North Korean experiences. It is inferable that Harden originally targets his readers in the U.S. and
European countries. The westernization results from both Harden’s professional background knowledge and the locations of the human rights infrastructures. As
Harden says in the Yonsei Journal of International Studies interview, there is a big human rights infrastructure in the Europe and the U.S., and Shin’s story provides the infrastructure a strong motivation to mobilize around.
Interestingly, the subtitle of this book “One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from
North Korea to Freedom in the West” further points out Harden’s aim of westernizing
Shin’s stories. Firstly, the term “odyssey” not only simply means a long and eventful journey but also points back to the Western literary tradition – Homer’s epic poem as the fundamental to the modern Western canon and the second oldest work of Western literature. Secondly, the phrase “freedom in the west” highlights responsibility for bringing back the peace and freedom to North Korean defectors. Indeed, under the help of human rights organizations, such as U.N. and Hanawon (South Korea's
Ministry of Unification), many defectors would choose to live a new life in Western countries. But this does not mean the defectors cannot obtain freedom in Asian Liao 39
countries. For example, South Korea has already accommodated most of the defectors, because of the same language and similar living style, defectors consider South Korea a suitable place to continue their lives, and some of them, though not many in number, choose to immigrate to Japan to reunite with the long lost family since the Korean
War.
Reconstructing the traumatic memories of North Korean defectors must be carried out in a global context, since their multiple identities and complicated political positions have involved the not only the Western countries but also Asian countries in mobilizing the human right movements altogether. Also, thanks to the explosion of media technologies, their testimonies circulate widely through the Internet, social media, movies, or television shows. The memory of North Korean defectors is no longer a local experience but a global life story shared between cultures and nations.
To read Shin’s gulag testimony in a globalized context brings forth the questions of what stances of other Asian countries take on this issue. From the translated titles, there are some subtle hints about how Asian countries view the issue of North Korean defectors. In Korean language, the title “14 호 수용소 탈출: 자유를 찾아
북한에서 서방까지, 한 남자의 놀랍도록 긴 여정” can be literally translated into “escape from concentration camp No. 14: a man’s amazing long journey from
North Korea to the West,” which is almost identical to the English version. However, both in Japanese and traditional Chinese10, the word “West” is edited out. In Japanese, the book title “北朝鮮 14 号管理所からの脱出” is literally translated into “escape from North Korea No.14 prison camp,” without ever mentioning the subtitle; in traditional Chinese version, the title “逃出 14 號勞改營:從人間煉獄到自由世界的脫
10 So far, I cannot find any simple Chinese published version of Escape from Camp 14. All the simple Chinese versions circulated on the Internet are the same as the version published in Taiwan in 2013. The lack of publication may due to the sensitive political and diplomatic relationships between North Korea and China. Liao 40
北者傳奇 ” can be translated as “escape from No.14 forced labor camp: a legendary escape from the purgatory to the free world.”
The differences in the translations of the book title in major Asian countries signify how the publishers try to adapt the book into the societies. In the South
Korean version, it seems that most South Korean agree with the help from the West, since Harden both depicts the collaborative efforts of South Korea and the U.S. on the theme of integrating the defectors into a better life11, such as the introduction of
Hanawon in Chapter 21. Interestingly, the traditional Chinese translation of the title of
Chapter 23 is “美國是天堂嗎? (Is the U.S. heaven?)”, while in the original English version, it is “U.S.A.,” a more neutral chapter title. The question mark in the Chinese title highlights the doubt of whether North Korean defectors can find their sense of belonging in a Western country; and it may also make the Chinese reader wonder that compared to the U.S., what role does other Asian countries besides South Korea and
Japan play in the ongoing battle of the human rights.
II. Reconstructing North Korean Gulag Memories beyond Words
As a counterbalance of words, artists who survive atrocities are using visual representations to inform the world of their traumatic experience. Art, in the form of paintings and film, enables artists to capture and retell a story or event in a much more powerful, emotive way than words. In this case, images can serve as a “voice” for the oppressed. Any form of art can play a critical role in the reconstruction of the knowledge of important historical events by voicing the otherwise voiceless.
Ideally, artists are able to transform the unspeakable emotions into the visual
11 Besides depicting the South Korean government’s efforts to help the North Korean defectors, Harden also spends a chapter (Chapter 22 “South Koreans Are not so Interested”) to denote the indifference of South Korean society toward the defectors. Liao 41
testimony, such as paintings, animations, and photos, to communicate the truth about the experiences of a local individual to the global community. Thus, overcoming the barricade of different languages, visual testimony in all forms become an essential way for the outsider to have a grasp on the inner reality of the witness, and it often becomes a therapeutic means for the witness to vent their frustration and stress amidst external degradation. With relatively less education of writing in their motherland,
North Korean defectors often turn to drawings, a most primitive yet direct method, to confront their own unspeakable trauma and also to reconstruct the unprecedented experiences. These visual texts are easily accessible since it penetrates not only the barrier of the language, but also the barriers of educational, social, and to some extent, cultural backgrounds. Traumatic testimonies presented in the visual artistic forms are an important compensation for the words. Words and visual arts altogether provide an even more rounded representation of the atrocious event.
A. Drawings
Aside from the authenticity of the memories, Escape from Camp 14 also brings forth the difficulty of representing violence. As Frederick Hoffman points out, although the literature of violence attempts to find a proper way “to record fact independently of structural subterfuges”, “violence tends to destroy structures, to isolate experiences, to force them away from containing forms” (qtd. Young 16). That is to say, Harden’s representation of violent events, including Shin’s gulag memories, is somehow insufficient, because violence tends to destroy structures, and the written language as a form of structure is no exception. In short, the representation of violence falls outside factual representation (Young 16). The words simply cannot fully contain the violence. Accordingly, to solve the difficulties of representing Shin’s Liao 42
violent past, Escape from Camp 14 includes six of Shin’s drawings as its appendix.
Shin’s need to depict his Gulag experiences in drawing comes to him in a rather compulsive way. In his early days in Hanawon, Shin’s mental health deteriorates so fast that Hanawon’s medical staff has no choice but to transfer him to the psychiatric ward of a nearby hospital (Harden 166). The counselor there suggests Shin to turn his therapeutic diary into the memoir and offers him the opportunities to learn other languages as a part of his PTSD treatment and a positive distraction. Notably, Shin quickly declines the chance to learn other languages but he is more than willing to acquire some basic drawing skills. In a sense, the drawing becomes Shin’s “new language,” a more natural and comfortable instrument for Shin to convey his thoughts.
Shin’s drawings play an important role to reconstruct the lost scenes. His drawings are crude and comic-like, but altogether they represent the lost scenes of Shin’s memory, and amplify the cruelty and absurdity of North Korean forced labor camp.
Liao 43
Fig.3-8. Drawings From Escape to the Outside World by Shin Dong-Hyuk portraying Shin’s Gulag memories, published by Database Center for North Korean Human Rights
From figure 3 to 8, the readers see the undernourished children wearing ragged clothes under the threat of guards with a pistol, and scavenging for food and “eating rats, insects and undigested kernels of corn they found in cow dung”; readers also are presented with the violent scenes of Shin’s mother being hanged and his brother being shot for planning to escape, and Shin being tortured in the interrogation room and later being cut off a finger as the punishment of dropping a sewing machine. In particular, the North Korean guards of the camp all feature a tall and menacing posture in Shin’s depiction. Their towering figures embody Shin’s childhood fear.
These drawings are worth more than a thousand words, and solidify what overflows the words – the inexpressible shock and horror. Shin describes these lost emption through his own version of “new language.” Drawing as a new vehicle for Shin allows him to freely record and convey his Gulag experience with the world, despite the language barricades and Shin’s shyness with people.
In Shin’s drawings, the moments of trauma are frozen. Trauma may be unspeakable, but it is still possible to be communicated “viscerally and emotionally through the alternative cognitive structures of the visual” (Hirsch 1211). That is to say, though the trauma cannot be reconstructed in a rational way, it can still be transferred to the viewer through the artistic elements, such as the color scheme and brushwork, Liao 44
which reflect the strong feelings of the artist. Furthermore, in her article “Collateral
Damage,” Marianne Hirsch states that “ [the] attention to the visual detail singles out the untranslatable power of visuality and its alternative, nonverbal, structures of meaning” (1211). In a widely translated book, Shin’s drawings, which are his firsthand reconstruction of the gulag memories and will not be altered by the translation, become the most direct and precise representation of his memories. In this sense, Harden’s words are even turned into the “supplement” when juxtaposed with the drawings. In Charlotte Delbo's term of “sense memory,” the memories are restored in human’s five senses and these memories are indestructible (qtd. Bennett 25). Shin’s drawings can be seen as an output of his physical imprints of the gulag memories.
Therefore, even if Shin cannot fully express himself in language and Harden cannot capture every detail of Shin’s experiences, Shin still can present his memories in the drawings. Shin’s eye functions as “a mute witness through which events register as eidetic memory images imprinted with sensation” (Bennett 84).
B. Body and Mental Scars
North Korean government formally denies the existence of forced labor camps, making the fact-checking impossible. And since Shin is the only survivor of Total
Control Zone, no other witnesses can testify whether Shin was telling the truth, especially about the torturing in the interrogation room. Both of these facts lead to the unavoidable limitation on the credibility of the factual details of Shin’s memories.
Aware of these almost unconquerable limitations, Harden turns to a special kind of proof – human body as the carrier of the memory. Specifically in the third-person perspective description, Harden presents his and others’ observations on Shin’s
“scarred body, and the haunted look in his eyes” (Harden 168). More than once, Liao 45
Harden puts the descriptions of Shin’s appearance under the spot light. He inspects that “[Shin’s] body is a road map of hardships of growing up in a labor camp” (2), and he even interviews another North Korean defector, Chul Myeong, and records Chul’s first impression toward Shin. Chul said Shin’s appearance shows him many telltale signs: “[the] avoidance of eye contact and arms bowed by childhood labor” (168).
Harden spends passages to list Shin’s body scars, and chapters to explain the memories of gulag about his scars, turning Shin’s body into the site of memory where memory crystallizes and secretes itself.
It is clear that Shin’s body becomes the carrier of gulag memories. His body contains both the physical and psychological traces. In the physical trace, Shin’s five-feet-six-inches slight stature, the burns on his back and lower legs, punctures on the abdomen, an amputated finger, and the bowed arms are all visible evidences exhibiting and accusing the severe malnutrition and barbarity in the camp, while in the psychological trace, his disturbed mind shows even more than his tortured body.
As Jay Winter highlights that “psychiatric injury is a form of remembrance of a very special kind” (428), Shin’s psychiatric injury is displayed in his broken interpersonal relationship, resulting from his experience of being born and growing up in the gulag.
In order to survive, Shin views all the people as competitors for food, including his own family, so he never associated family with love, and companions with trust.
These ruptured human bonds are not uncommon in the stories of concentration camp survival literature. As depicted in Elie Wiesel’s Night, to survive in the camp almost equals to the abandonment of moral principles, the suppression in feelings, and one’s final transformation into a non-human. The mental trace of Shin is showed in his apathy toward everything – the “dead space” inside him (Harden 179). Shin even compares himself as an animal which is slowly evolving into a human being with his attempts to rebuild human bonds (Harden 181). Both Shin’s mind and body are Liao 46
converted into sites of memory, serving to stop time and to block the work of forgetting. Accordingly, Harden specifies Shin’s every scar and mental disturbance – all Shin’s “living memories” – in order to reconstruct Shin’s indescribable trauma and horror. Liao 47
Chapter Three:
The Reader’s Joint Responsibility for Reconstructing
North Korean Defection Testimony
Responsibility takes place on multiple layers within reconstructing traumatic memories: the witness’s obligation to recover the truth; the medium’s mission to successfully pass on the memory; and finally, the reader’s responsibility to remember and recognize the lived trauma behind every testimony.
Victims of natural and human disasters constantly fall into the void of self-doubt of their own reasoning and memories while reconstructing the past. In the process of memory reconstruction, the horror of their past nightmares is summoned and suffered again; the re-experienced pain makes recovering the truth difficult and even threatens the witness’ mental health. The process of recalling a traumatic event thus becomes a site of rupture where a survivor refuses to face the past and realizes the forever loss of a part of his self. Another site of rupture occurs during the transference of the memory between a listener and a witness of a traumatic event. Receiving a testimonial life story places a listener as a secondary witness, but a listener may also come to the recognition that one can never fully comprehend the other’s pain since no one can actually relive other people’s experiences.
These ruptures echo Dori Laub’s notion of “the collapse of witnessing” (80).
The collapse demonstrates a paradoxical situation confronted by the witness: a person can witness an event and yet at the same time not really witness it at all. Since the memories of a traumatic event are often obstructed by the witness’ belated realization, the event can never be fully understood and mastered in time, and therefore cannot be immediately witnessed. If a witness has trouble witnessing the event even when he is on the tragic site in person, it is almost impossible to transfer his experience to a Liao 48
listener, and let alone for the listener to comprehend the event.
Similarly, as Elie Wiesel expresses in Night, there is an inherent doubt of both his ability to successfully reconstruct and represent the terror of Holocaust and his readers’ capability of fully understanding his attempted representations:
Huger – thirst – fear – transport – selection – fire – chimney: these words all
have intrinsic meaning, but in those times, they meant something else.
Writing in my mother tongue – at that point close to extinction – I would
pause at every sentence, and start over and over again. I would conjure up
other verbs, other images, other silent cries. It still was not right. But what
exactly was “it”? (ix)
Wiesel, having lived through many inhumane incidents of Holocaust, has a strong will to unburden himself of the duty to retell the truth no matter how arduous it is for words to describe his experiences. The realization that words will eventually fail to express his ordeals comes early; in consequence, he “[trusts] the silence that envelops and transcends words. Knowing all the while that any one of the fields of ashes in Birkenau carries more weight than all the testimonies about Birkenau”
(Wiesel x). Besides suspecting the accuracy of words, Wiesel also wonders if the readers are capable of carrying this heavy “weight” of truth, or if they are willing to engage in a discourse which may possibly brings a painful past into their present. The gaps between experience and expression will always perplex the relationship between a witness and a listener.
Despite many ruptures and difficulties, a valid representation of traumatic events hence needs to take both the roles of witness and listener into consideration. Once the truth of an atrocity is reconstructed by the witness and then remembered by the reader/listener, can the victims of the atrocity be comforted and the justice of the world rebuilt. To further examine the importance of the reader’s role in North Korean Liao 49
gula g memories, this chapter is dedicated to clearing up the reader’s ethical responsibility and the transference cycle between the witness and the reader in the traumatic discourse presented in Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable
Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West.
I. The Therapeutic Listener: The “Drilling” Process in Escape from Camp 14
Traumatic memories are piles of overwhelming experiences that need to be combed through and integrated into a comprehensible narrative account. To achieve this, the traumatized victim has to continually revisit the memory and relive the trauma in order to complete the testimony. The outcome may be productive but the process is doomed to be abominable due to the constant strike of PTSD symptoms.
Consequently, traumatic testimony should be understood through a specific way; with the constant interference of trauma, this kind of testimony is often deemed as fallible in its attempt to verbalize or articulate the factual truth. Paradoxically, LaCapra
Dominick argues that “[testimony] is itself both threatened and somehow authenticated or validated insofar as it bears the marks of, while not being utterly consumed and distorted by, the symptomatic effects of trauma” (61). The incompleteness and inaccuracy featured by the traumatic testimony are interestingly the best way to capture the truth of trauma. To comprehend a traumatic testimony, a reader must read outside of the factual truth. The process of reconstructing and representing Shin Dong-Hyuk’s North Korean gulag testimony also encounters the above paradox.
The uniqueness of Escape from Camp 14 lies in both its testimonial values and its genuine capture of the dynamic relationship between a traumatic witness and a therapeutic listener. In contrast with other high-profile North Korean defectors’ Liao 50
biographical memoirs which are often narrated from the first-person perspective,
Escape from Camp 14 is narrated from the third-person point of view with Blaine
Harden’s retouch and supplementary information. In addition to the content of several private interviews between Shin and Harden, the book also includes the process of how Harden induces Shin Dong-Hyuk to explore deeper into his memories and to even correct some mistakes and ambiguities in his previous Korean-language memoir
(Harden 10). With Harden’s omnipresent “revising” throughout the book, Escape from Camp 14 is thus no longer a mere North Korean gulag testimony, but a record of a traumatic victim struggling to re-link himself to the world through reconstructing the truth and interviewing with a “therapeutic listener.”
During their interviews, Harden feels no trust between himself and Shin: Shin cannot trust Harden, and Harden does not totally believe in what Shin has said. The mutual distrust leads to Harden’s continuous and repeated revisiting of Shin’s recollections. Harden expresses in the interview later published by Yonsei Journal of
International Studies that “what [he] did [during their interview] was slowly nibble at the details [Shin] was willing to offer, going back again and again to make the narrative as rich as possible” (150). Harden also compares himself as a dentist in
Escape from Camp 14: “Even as he cooperated, Shin seemed to dread talking to me. I often felt like a dentist drilling without anesthetics. The drilling went on intermittently for more than two years. Some of our sessions were cathartic for him; many other made him depressed” (10).
This dentist metaphor indicates Harden’s self-awareness of his role as not only an interviewer but also a therapist to Shin. Their interviews are rendered a remedial characteristic and the implication that Shin will probably get cured by Harden’s insistent “drilling.” Ironically, upon the “drilling,” Shin’s coerced recollection of his traumatic past, the invisible “cavities” are finally revealed. Shin’s mental trauma as Liao 51
the invisible wounds is finally turned visible through the process of interviewing.
Harden’s multiple identities as a co-author, listener, interviewer and therapist in
Escape from Camp 14 highlights the influence of discursive transference upon the listener/reader as the secondary witness. As Dori Laub defines in “Truth and
Testimony: The Process and the Struggle,” there are three distinctive levels of witnessing when constructing a testimony: “the level of being a witness to oneself within the experience; the level of being witness to the testimonies of others; and the level of being a witness to the process of witnessing itself” (Caruth, Trauma 61).
Notably, the second level of bearing witness to the others’ testimonies places the listener/reader as a secondary witness to a certain event. The secondary witness, or
Harden’s role as an interviewer in the case of Escape from Camp 14, participates “not in the events, but in the account given of them, in [his] role as the interviewer of survivors who give testimony” (62). The most important feature of a secondary witness is his immediacy and directness of receiving a first-hand testimony. While on the last level of witnessing, the process of witness is itself being witnessed; Laub places emphasis on how the witness and the listener together “alternate between moving closer and then retreating from the experience” (62). The temporary retreat from the recollection of the traumatic event is for the witness and the listener to both
“reflect on these memories as they are spoken, so as to reassert the veracity of the past and to build anew its linkage to, and assimilation into, present-day life” (62) Just like encountering an unrealistically abstract painting, the viewers often need to retreat and behold the painting from a distance in order to get the whole picture and then goes back into its details. The last layer of witnessing also demands the same actions, since the witness’ and the listener’s constant retreating from the traumatic experiences allows their belated understanding of the event to arrive and settle in. And through the action of retreating, the listener may be able to maintain a critical distance to the Liao 52
events, and therefore be aware that the horror of the atrocity is so elusive that it no longer resembles any reality.
Specifically, Laub also notes a special relationship between the witness and the
“interviewer-listener.” Laub demonstrates the importance of the interviewer-listener that they “takes on the responsibility for bearing witness that previously the narrator felt he bore alone, and therefore could not carry out” (69). The collaboration between the witness and the listener as an interviewer “is the encounter and the coming together between the survivor and the listener which makes possible something like a repossession of the act of witnessing. This joint responsibility is the source of emerging truth” (69). Hence, different from an average listener who only need to emphatically understand the witness’ trauma, Harden has the responsibility to recover the truth as an interviewer-listener. He needs to become part of the struggle to “to go beyond the event and not to be submerged and lost in it” (62).
During their interviews, Harden keeps questioning himself the truthfulness of
Shin’s stories. By comparing himself to a dentist, Harden indeed goes thoroughly on each of Shin’s possible hidden “cavities,” and tries to go beyond the whole North
Korean gulag experiences; gradually, he no longer views Shin as a rare subject worthy of reporting but an actual human being who desperately needs friends and love.
Although Harden’s befriending with an interviewee, or a “patient,” may seem to trespass the border of critical distance, it is the only way to go beyond the event and to provide Shin with a more tolerate situation to tell the truth. In other words, Harden care not only about Shin’s North Korean gulag memories, but also Shin’s current physical and psychological well-being. And eventually, Shin responds to Harden’s efforts to “go beyond the event” by willingly correcting one of his previous testimonies.
At the end of Chapter 4 “Mother Tries to Escape”, Shin makes a critical revision Liao 53
about the recollecting of his mother’s death, which he always considers shameful and secretive. Shin confesses to Harden:
“It has been a burden to keep this inside. In the beginning, I didn’t think
much of my lie. It was my intent to lie. Now the people around me make me
want to be honest. They make me want to be more moral. In that sense, I
felt like I need to tell the truth. I now have friends who are honest. I have
begun to understand what honesty is. I feel extreme guilt for everything.”
(49)
Responding to the good will of his new friends, Shin makes a shockingly drastic change between Chapter 4 “Mother Tries to Escape” and Chapter 5 “Mother Tries to
Escape, Version Two.” In Chapter 4, Shin’s mother and brother are caught attempting to escape from the camp when Shin is 13 years old, and Shin is hence sent into the interrogation room as a possible accomplice, while in Chapter 5, Shin corrects that his mother and brother are caught planning to escape because of his report to the night guard. But the guard has claimed all the credit for discovering the escaping plan and reports to the superiors without ever mentioning Shin’s information, which explains the reason why Shin is still severely interrogated as an accomplice instead of being treated as an informant. To sum up, to make the night guard promise him more food and less labor work, Shin sells out his family without hesitation.
In the fear of a backlash from people that question him “are you even human”
(Harden 49), Shin has been lying about the true cause of his brother and mother’s death ever since his arrival in South Korea in 2005. In Shin’s case, the reconstruction and representation of North Korean gulag memories is not merely about recovering the evidences to backup his stories; it is more about whether the victim can honestly face his past and let the memories be represented, about whether the survivor can locate his point of departure to accept and then leave his past sufferings behind. Liao 54
Harden, as both Shin’s interviewee and therapist, helps Shin to overcome the fear and turns Shin’s betrayal and his brother and mother’s death into an event with positive meanings: the inhumane North Korean gulag not only violates human rights but also destroys moral values, and therefore it must be stopped.
Shin’s dramatic revision of his memoir brings forward the issue of the witness’ possible departure from his previous self in a testimony. To spot this kind of departure is essential for an ethical listener. To be an ethical listener, Cathy Caruth suggests that a listener should “listen to the crisis of a trauma, that is, is not only to listen for the event, but to hear in the testimony the survivor’s departure from it; the challenge of the therapeutic listener, in other words, is how to listen to departure” (Unclaimed 10).
The departure can be indicated by the survivor’s sudden epiphany of a past experience, a new meaning given to an old memory, or the final acceptance of one’s inconvenient past. Caruth reminds the listener to observe and listen to these unusual but significant moments when the witness departs from his former self in his recounting of the traumatic event. On this specific site of departure, the struggle of the witness is the most intense, and the traumatic event is almost relived, and then relieved, due to these soulful struggles. And only through opening oneself to the witness’ peculiar departure can a listener be qualified as a secondary witness.
The most remarkable moment of Shin’s departure is presented in the Epilogue of the book. In the final part of the book, Shin’s drastic transition throughout the life makes him realizes that he is slowly transforming from a numb “animal” in the camp to a human who is able to feel the emotions:
“I did not know about sympathy or sadness,” he said. “They educated us
from birth so that we were not capable of normal human emotions. Now
that I am out, I am learning to be emotional. I have learned to cry. I feel like
I am becoming human.” But Shin made it clear that he still had a long way Liao 55
to go. “I escaped physically,” he said. “I haven’t escaped psychologically.”
(192)
Shin comes to the above realization during his speech to an audience, six months after his first speech in Southern California. His departure finally makes him able to use his experiences to rally others to become human right activists. Harden is astonished to see Shin’s change; and he further notes that once Shin has accepted his ill-fated past and honestly expresses the late recognition in his speech, the audience can better comprehend the whole North Korean gulag situation:
That evening, his listeners squirmed in their pews, their faces showing
discomfort, disgust, anger and shock. Some faces were stained with tears.
When Shin was finished, when he told the congregation that one man, if he
refuses to be silenced, could help free the tens of thousands who remain in
North Korea’s labor camps, the church exploded in applause. In that speech,
if not yet in his life, Shin had seized control of his past. (193)
By seizing control of his past, Shin finishes the complete cycle between the witness and the listener. The final confrontation of his old self results from his desire to communicate his experience to the other. Without an intended audience, Shin will never make a meaningful testimony. Though often caught in the ambivalence about telling the truth, Shin still wins the seesaw battle between the denial of reality and the acceptance of his own misery. By self-revealing his secretive past, Shin chooses to become the face of the North Korean gulag and open himself to the world. As Judith
Herman repeatedly emphasizes in Trauma and Recovery, the reconstruction of a traumatic past must be conducted within interpersonal relationships, since “the goal of recounting a trauma story is integration, not exorcism” (129). To rescue a victim from his own mental confinement is to include and embrace his trauma into a broader human understanding, instead of cruelly excluding his horrid experience like an Liao 56
exorcist. In other words, a witness must retell his memory, in one way or another, to an intended listener for the purpose of restoring his social connection; and through this act of retelling, a memory becomes a testimony, blurring the boundary between private and public domains (192).
II. Vicarious Trauma: Shin Dong-Hyuk’s Two Speeches in Escape from Camp 14
After discussing the multiple layers of witnessing and several different roles of the receiver of a traumatic testimony, this section attempts to further examine the listener’s vicarious trauma caused by Shin Dong-Hyuk’s two contrasting speeches in
Escape from Camp 14.
As E. Ann Kaplan notes, it is extremely important to understand vicarious trauma in a globalized era when the media project images and stories of atrocities all over the world as they are happening. The term of vicarious trauma is originally adopted in the clinical situation, referring to a social worker being traumatized by the empathic engagement with his clients. But in the highly globalized context, a listener/reader/viewer may encounter trauma vicariously through the media in everyday life. The constant exposure to intense traumatic horrors may leads to the symptoms of secondary trauma (87). The direct contact of a disturbing traumatic experience may leave permanent marks on a receiver’s life.
A famous example of vicarious trauma can be found in Susan Sontag’s description of her life being seemingly divided into two parts : “before [she] saw those photographs [of Bergen Belsen and Dachau concentration camps] (I was twelve) and after, though it was several years before [she] understood fully what they were about” (Sontag 19-20). Sontag is so deeply affected by the intense horror of the photos of Holocaust that “when [she] looked at those photographs, something broke, Liao 57
some limit had been reached, and not only that of horror” (20). To a certain degree, though her shocking realization comes to her in the belatedness (a typical feature of trauma), Sontag’s mind is still irreversibly wounded, numbed and even partially dead due to the shocking vicarious trauma. However, Sontag is not deterred by the vicarious trauma; instead, she insists that “such images cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalization for mass suffering offered by established power” (10).
And as for the reaction of Shin Dong-Hyuk’s listener and reader, Harden remarks an interesting contrast in Chapter 23 “U.S.A.” and the Epilogue of Escape from Camp
14. In Chapter 23, during an early speech of Shin, Shin is unsure about sharing his unique North Korean gulag experience with the audience, because at that time he believes that “the things [he] went through were [his] alone” (179) and no one can understand his experience. Asked about the process of his miraculous escape from the camp by the audience, Shin reluctantly tells “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” (179). This “sterilized” version of Shin’s North Korean traumatic experience does not reach to the audience. His audience remains bored and baffled, completely failing to recognize the uniqueness and importance of Shin’s gulag testimony. In Sontag’s terms, the “invitation” to reflect upon mass sufferings is not delivered to the audience; only through being exposed to the intense images or stories can the audience be aware of the invitation to ponder deeper on the traumatic event.
On the contrary, in the Epilogue as Harden describes, since Shin has finally found the meaning of reconstructing his North Korean traumatic experience, Shin opens himself to the audience in a recent speech, giving them the full version of his experience in details. The result of that speech is phenomenal: his audience is emotionally moved (193) and rallied to fight against North Korean government’s Liao 58
violation of human rights. In this case, though dangerous, vicarious trauma still has its bright side, for it implies that after sharing and understanding each other’s pains, people will be more willingly to provide help; and when vicarious trauma is placed into a larger ethical framework under the issue of witnessing an atrocity, it suggests the public recognition of the atrocious event.
In addition, a reader carrying vicarious trauma can be deemed as an empathetic reader who has the ability to understand other people's feelings and problems by putting oneself in the victim’s shoes. An empathetic reader may come to the act of reading from an ethical stance by respecting both the witness and his testimony, avoiding venturing into the voyeurism of enjoying and objectifying the sufferings of the witness. Vicarious trauma also makes the reader escape from the danger of
“assimilating” and “normalizing” the survivor’s experience, since the reader understands the traumatic experience through a secondary trauma, instead of leveling the traumatic experience to one’s own everyday life experience.
To sum up, vicarious trauma in a global context allows us to adopt a new lens; by understanding and almost sharing the same sufferings of the witness, a listener/reader has better chance to discover the hidden wounds of the witness. And only when the hidden wounds are uncovered and further witnessed by the listener/reader can the healing process begins, the cycle of testimony transference completes.
Liao 59
Conclusion
In the hope of building a better world out of the old materials, Escape from
Camp 14 comes a long way to reconstruct Shin’s North Korean gulag memories.
Shin’s memoir, marred by various traits of trauma and ongoing struggles, is thus given a new meaning. His wounds, both the visible on his body and the invisible in his mind, are finally located and witnessed through him and Harden’s collaborated reconstruction. The “old materials,” the traumatic North Korean gulag memories, which Shin originally wants to abandon and hide from the world, become his only redemption and possible key to his ultimate inner freedom.
In many aspects, Shin and Harden’s efforts to represent and reconstruct North
Korean gulag memories are rewarded. The global impact of this book is extensive and unprecedented. For instance, after the publication of Escape from Camp 14 in 2012,
U.N. investigation of human rights in North Korea becomes more active and even requires an international response to the widespread atrocities12, and Japan consequently announces its support of a UN inquiry into the forced labor camps in
North Korea13. And since Harden simultaneously portrays Shin as a former betrayer of his family and a hero who is unafraid of the potential threat of assassination from
North Korean government, Shin’s testimony becomes less like a forceful propaganda but more like a character-driven adventure story which quickens the reader’s heart beat and increase the desire of continuing reading. Shin’s stories invite readers worldwide to stand up for the human rights. In sum, Escape from Camp 14 is the outcome of Shin and Harden’s painstaking efforts of remembering for the living, for
12 Related references can be found here (The New York Times, September 17, 2013): http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/18/world/europe/un-panel-urges-action-on-north-korean-rights-abuse s.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1390240948-MFc6eSRvBaGQvwfKGD8ORQ 13 Related references can be found here (Human Rights Watch, JANUARY 25, 2013): http://www.hrw.org/news/2013/01/25/north-korea-japan-s-backing-un-inquiry-gives-hope Liao 60
the hope of rescuing the suffering. Shin’s testimony paradoxically combines his painful past with the present and yet enables him a point of departure to a hopeful future.
Although in 2015, after three year since the publication of Escape from Camp14,
Shin suddenly admits that his account of North Korean gulag experiences differs substantially from what he has been telling government officials, human rights activists, and journalists, including Blaine Harden. Shin may have spent most of his life in North Korea at a different prison camp, rather than the Total Control Zone that formed the title of his biographical memoir. His abrupt changes of dates, places and circumstances cause a shocking disturbance, but also push the world to ponder what makes a testimony count besides “truth.”
Even though the Escape from Camp 14 is already an international hit, Shin’s journey of making a testimony never truly ends; he is still struggling to work through his trauma and battling against his past self. In addition to challenging the world’s definition of a valid testimony, the publication of Escape from Camp 14 substantially helps Shin to slowly learn how to be a real human by re-linking him to the world. This book provides lots of chances for Shin to interact with the reader. Through their interaction, Shin and the reader alike finally realize that they cannot embody another’s experience, but they can be empathetic to each other. Due to the unbridgeable gap between experience and representation and between the witness and the reader, the reader can never access the actual trauma of the witness nor relive his painful past. As a secondary witness, the reader is always fighting against the uncertainty and ambiguity brought forth by the traumatic testimony. The reading of a traumatic life story does not end when the reader finishes the book, but rather continues in the reader’s daily life, reminding the reader to be aware of their responsibility of remembrance. Liao 61
To sum up, the wide-ranging discussions on the topics of reconstructing and representing North Korean gulag memories included in this thesis illustrates the possibilities to make a comprehensible accounting through the words, paintings, body scars and even the relationship between the witness and the listener, but the discussion also brings forth the limitations to fully recover the truth under the influence of trauma. To an extent, the most reliable truth in the representation of North Korean gulag memories is the trauma itself. Only by recognizing the presence of the seemingly absent trauma that penetrates every recollection of Shin’s North Korean gulag memories can we understand the ordeals experienced by him.
Liao 62
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