Nine years after his mother’s hanging, Shin squirmed through an electric fence and ran off through the snow. It was 2 January 2005. Before then, no one born in a North Korean political prison camp had ever escaped. As far as can be determined, Shin is still the only one to do so.
The opening line of the book’s Introduction situates the central narrative event of the book. This is to be a story of historical importance. It will also be a story of tragedy and suffering. The imagery of the escape is made all the more intense by the opening clause which connects suffering and triumph together as perhaps an inextricable link.
As contemporaries, Shin and Kim Jong Eun personify the antipodes of privilege and privation in North Korea, a nominally classless society where, in fact, breeding and bloodlines decide everything.
For clarity’s sake, the person that Shin is being compared to is the short, fat leader of the country with the bad haircut whom Donald Trump infamously nicknamed “rocket man” before the two fell in love. This particular quote will likely be a revelation for most people. One does not ordinarily make a connection between breeding and the totalitarian dictatorship that is North Korea.
“He has never been brainwashed.”
Chung becomes something of a mother substitute for Shin who is cannot stop wondering how she can be so good and kind when she knows of what he guiltily considers atrocities he committed. Chung attributes his guilt not to the acts he is ashamed of, but rather to the face that he has such a well-developed conscience. And a conscience is only possible among the people of North Korea who have not “been contaminated by propaganda or the cult of personality that surrounds the Kim dynasty.”
“Kim Jong Il was worse than Hitler. While Hitler attacked his enemies, Shin said, Kim worked his own people to death in places like Camp 14.”
Shin gives a speech before the congregation of a Korean American Pentecostal in Seattle. This assertion is made at the beginning; it is an attempt to capture the attention of the congregation. As a victim of Kim’s cruelty and torture, Shin would know better than most at least half the story here. Hitler, however, still carries the torch as the point of comparison for any act of evil that has been or possibly could be committed. Within the context of that universally accepted perspective, Shin’s words take on a much greater weight.
He is asking readers to consider—to really stop for a moment and thoughtfully consider—that there is legacy of familial tyranny alive and thriving in the 21st century that actually subordinates the personification of evil which is Hitler’s legacy. Such a consideration—if true, of course—is chilling and puts any attempt to negotiate anything with North Korean into much sharper perspective. After all, if the lineage of despots ruling the country would commit such abominations upon their own citizens…just imagine what they would do to foreign enemies.
